The Investment Thesis Behind Agent-Native GTM

Julia Nimchinski:

And with that, we want to welcome Kathleen Estrich. Kathleen is a partner at PRVC. We have an amazing panel. esteemed venture capitalist, and the topic is going to be the investment thesis behind Asian Native GTM. Welcome back, Kathleen. How are you?

Kathleen Estreich:

I’m good, thanks! Great to see you!

Julia Nimchinski:

Great to see you! Matt, Kyle, how are you doing?

Kyle Duffy:

Hey, Julia, doing good.

Matt Hersh:

Pretty well. Pretty well. There we are.

Julia Nimchinski:

Amazing. Kathleen. Take it away.

Kathleen Estreich:

Awesome. Well, great to see you all, excited for the conversation. So, we’re gonna cover, kind of, the investment thesis behind AI, or agent-native go-to-market.

And so, I know we had a little bit of back and forth on, some email threads prior to this, so excited to kind of kick off What would be maybe a good way to start would be for each of you to introduce yourselves very quickly, just so we have a sense of, kind of, who folks are.

Be very short, so we can dive into the details, but maybe a little bit more about, kind of your role within your firms, and, and then we can, go through, the definitions of kind of how you define Agent, native go-to-market, as part of your intro. Kyle, why don’t you start?

Kyle Duffy:

All right, Kyle Duffy. I’m an operating partner at Gradium Ventures. I’ve been here about 6 years, so the core of my role is really around helping our portfolio companies from a go-to-market perspective, although kind of a… that’s brought into a lot of every kind of support.

I do sit on a lot of our company boards, and I also do a lot of our internal operations at Gradient. You know, from an agentic GTM standpoint, I think I look at it two ways. I look at companies that are using AI and agents to kind of ride sidecar and, you know, be alongside their sellers to make the selling process more efficient.

And then I look at, you know, largely what’s the future of Agentic GTM, which is actually an agent selling to another agent.

Kathleen Estreich:

Cool. Matt, do you want to give an intro?

Matt Hersh:

Let’s do it. Hi everyone, I’m Matt. I hold the same title as Kyle. In fact, Kyle and I went to undergrad together. Oh, no way!

Kyle Duffy:

We did.

Kathleen Estreich:

small.

Matt Hersh:

Now we work it. esteemed… Investment firms, and we actually live really close to each other, too.

Kyle Duffy:

And live a mile from one another, yeah.

Matt Hersh:

Exactly.

Kathleen Estreich:

Parallel lives!

Kyle Duffy:

Yeah, can’t avoid this guy, yeah.

Matt Hersh:

Exactly, seriously. But, like Kyle, I’m an op partner at Fika Ventures. We’re a B2B firm that’s based in Los Angeles, with about half a billion in AUM. We’ve invested in 100 companies over the past 10 years.

I’ve been here since the beginning, was a long-time operator, was as a player and a coach, in sales prior to coming to FICA at 3 companies, all of which were acquired. Or went public, actually. And yeah, I typically work with our companies when we first write a seed stage check of up to $8 million, on their zero to one, right?

Oftentimes, they’ll be… They’ll have zero revenue, and so we’ll have to change that, so I get in the trenches with them on that. And then I play an abbreviated role after they’ve got their training wheels off, right? So kind of in the 1 to 10 range.

And then if I’m doing my job correctly, I roll off the company once they pass $10 million in revenue, because I’m a, you know, one person, and I haven’t yet been able to figure out how to make the MAT agent, although it’s a work in progress. But yeah, I think from a… from a sort of a definition of what, Agentic go-to-market means now, I mean.

it really means that you’re not assuming that a human is doing most of the work, right? Or 80% of the work, right? There’s a bunch of articles out there on this framework, but there’s sort of… the augmented… go-to-market, there’s the autonomous go-to-market, and then sort of in the middle, you know, there’s sort of the assisted go-to-market.

I think most companies fall in the assisted, where the AI that they’re using acts as a partner, Either prior to the calls, or on the calls, or in the post-call world. But, you know, I’m excited about the future and the ability to help more companies get to the autonomous Place, you know, we’re just not quite there yet.

Kathleen Estreich:

Awesome, thanks. Jason, you want to introduce yourself?

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Of course, yeah, thanks so much for having me. I’m Jason, I’m the operating partner at Primary, an early-stage fund on the East Coast in New York.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): I spend most of my time with companies that we’ve already invested in, working on early, like, founder-led sales, bringing a product to market for the first time, so very similar to what Matt described, and then helping them with scaling motions as they start to build an early commercial team.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): And then prior to that, I spent about 15 years across a bunch of different startups doing lots of, revenue-focused work at software companies. Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): And I actually really liked Kyle and Matt’s articulation of what agent-native means, so I will defer to both of those.

I think what’s kind of interesting is you’ve got, like, your internal operations.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): you’ve got how your customer experiences your company, all of these things are changing in real time in more and more agendic ways, but I would agree with the idea that, like, you clearly have not crossed the chasm, and we’re not, like, there yet, but there’s a lot to explore on this topic, so excited to talk to y’all today.

Kathleen Estreich:

Awesome! Thanks so much, all of you, for joining. I’m really excited to learn from all of you. I guess maybe one… since you work across a portfolio, I think one of the benefits of working in venture is you can see across a portfolio at various stages.

You know, we have… if you’re working at a company, you have one data point of, you know, what internally you’re doing, but for… for those of us who work at firms, you get to see across a portfolio and learn what different folks are doing and what’s working and what’s not working.

I would love to hear from each of you, like, what do you think is the single biggest… biggest shift that you’ve seen in the last 12 months? around, kind of, how your companies are building their go-to-market teams and their go-to-market motions.

Like, what, you know, what’s working, what tools they’re using, what is the makeup of some of these teams, like, what is the biggest shifts that you’re seeing, kind of, in the last 6 to 12 months, across the portfolio? Jason, go for it!

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Alright, let’s have fun. Alright, so I’ll share a couple things. First, Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): I work with a bunch of companies that are very young, pre-seed, seed, maybe Series A.

I work with a bunch of companies that are kind of in that scaling motion in Series B and C, and then even with some companies that have been around a very long time and are scaled. And so I get to see across all of that, plus across lots of industries, founder personas, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): I think the things that I’ve seen that have Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): really struck me as, like, very profound are, one, we have some very early-stage companies where the way they are building the company Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): is just unlike anything I’ve seen before, and I’ve stopped in my tracks a couple times in the past 6 to 9 months and said, like, a lot of what I learned in the 20 years of work before this role, like, not all of it will change, but, like, some of the fundamental things are irrelevant out the window, and… Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): there’s clearly going to be a very new way of working in the future, and I could describe some of that in a second.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): The second thing I would say is I’ve been really blown away by people in our portfolio that are not technical, have no technical background, and are building some wildly impressive things.

Like, I understand that engineers will naturally be able to take Claude and all these other tools and build Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Custom apps, but it’s actually the people who aren’t technical, and what you see is sort of like, Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): I don’t know, if we have 100 non-technical commercial operators in the portfolio, there’s a few salespeople who are starting to get, like, really, really advanced.

There’s a few RevOps people, there’s a few marketers. Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): And it’s not everybody, but you see that, there is not a technical hurdle to clear to start to actually, like, transform your work and your workflow with AI.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): And the third thing I would say is, Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): for some of the larger legacy companies that I work with, there is such a disparity between companies that have talent profiles Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): that, like, let me say it like this, every executive team, every boardroom, you know, it’s like, okay, let’s modernize, we’re gonna be AI-forward, yeah, we’re all on the same team here, let’s do it.

And then the question is, which companies can successfully make incremental gains and sort of, like, do this go-to-market transformation, and which ones can’t? And… Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): It is so dependent on the talent profiles that you have in the company.

These, like, you know, GTM architects, GTM engineers, Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): certain engineering profiles that sort of are fluent in business and commercial stuff, you need these profiles. And there’s companies where there’s executives.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): who know the work that they need to do, but they don’t know how to start the work or execute the work, and they’re two steps away.

They need to bring talent into the organization first, and then they need that talent to execute the transformation project, and the sort of haves versus have-nots there is, like, the gap is just widening. So those are just three quick observations.

Kathleen Estreich:

Just one quick follow-up there. What is the thing of the current companies or newer companies that are building today and kind of starting fresh in this AI-native world? You mentioned things that are irrelevant or that from, you know, 20 years’ experience. Maybe give us, like, one nugget there of something specific.

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): I think the CEO sets the tone for the organization in AI just like everything else, and some early-stage founders that are… Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): have not just a philosophy of our product’s gonna be AI-centric and our company, but they are building, like, any roadblock they hit, they’re just… Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): finding solutions with AI for it, to a degree that, like, I didn’t think was possible.

We have some companies that have built their own CRM, built their own outbound tools, built their own marketing assistants, built, like, just things where you’re like, oh, no, of course you wouldn’t do that. They’re doing it now.

And, Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Where it shows up is there are some companies that very clearly will take a 2- or 3-person core commercial team.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): and scale all the way past $10 million with that group, because what they are building with co-pilots and some customer-facing engagements, it’s just… the volume has scaled beyond what you could do with a 10-person team. It’s just night and day. It looks very, very different to me.

Kathleen Estreich:

Yeah, great examples. Matt or Kyle, do one of you want to talk about the biggest shifts you’re seeing?

Kyle Duffy:

I’ll jump in and very much agree with a lot of what Jason shared. I think, especially our younger founders, you know, PLG has been a thing for a long time, but I think it’s, like, PLG to another level now, and I think.

Kathleen Estreich:

Buyers.

Kyle Duffy:

are now expecting with AI products that they’re going to get their hands on something, you know, before they engage an account exec.

So, I think companies are very much building with that notion in mind, in terms of, like, how do I… how do I either have, like, an open source solution, or something that’s gonna allow the buyer to get their hands on the product. So that becomes more of, like, the true lead gen. And then when it comes to actual selling.

I’ve definitely seen founders… so our early-stage companies, I see founders hold on to founder-led sales longer, and I generally see that they’re doing, you know, more with less people, and specifically.

Yeah, I think there are more catch-all roles right now, in terms of, you know, you can have someone that’s kind of like a full-stack marketing and salesperson, because they’re so enabled with AI, and I think, you know, hiring people who have not just, like, specific sales experience. Like, I sold into enterprise buyers.

No, it’s actually, like, I even see, founders their first salesperson is a consult… came from, like, the consultant world, or came from being, like, an SE or something like that, where they have the ability to wear a lot of hats, like, they are… You know, everything from, like, early, like, building out marketing plays, to playing, you know, sales engineer, to, you know, running the process, to… onboarding them.

So, I mean, I think it’s one person that wears a lot of hats.

And then the last thing I’ll talk about is kind of the use of data, and specifically, and we can get into this around, like, the context of data, specifically the go-to-market engineering role, I think is a really interesting one, and this also plays on, like, it’s a lot of… it’s people who wear kind of multiple hats, but it’s leveraging data, really to the advantage of the entire Sale, marketing, and sales cycle in a new and unique way.

Kathleen Estreich:

Nice.

I, I agree with the, the more generalist, kind of, profile, and my hot take is I think that it always should have been that way, but it wasn’t, because, like, the weird tooling… you know, arbitrarily had, you know, marketing, sales, customer success, you know, using different tools and different skill sets, but now that, you know, it doesn’t actually matter, because all these tools are integrated and orchestration across them is possible, those have always sort of… always should have been maybe the same team, but we created artificial, lines around them because of the tools that they had to have mastery over, but, we’ll see.

Matt, would love to hear what you’re seeing across your portfolio over the last 12 months, the big shifts.

Matt Hersh:

Yeah, I mean, I was reflecting on this, like, you know, doing this for a decade now, you know, my question to founders used to be, like, how are you generating pipeline when we invest? I think it’s shifted in over the past 12 months to more around which parts of your sales motion require a human, and which ones don’t, right?

fundamentally, that answer to that question helps define what the org should look like. Like, what type of persona you would need in the seat.

I think… so, too many companies, you know, will have tool proliferation, where they, you know, have all the… they basically spend… 70-80% of their time, like, evaluating sales tech technology and bringing it in-house, and there’s, like, this, like, tool saturation component versus… you know, you have to operationalize the tools that you bring in and build the workflows around them to improve and get more agentic in your workflows.

And I think that, you know, a lot of founders, which, you know, we’re trying to coach founders to become leaders. A lot of them will be first-time founders and really aren’t a leader, and it’s, you know, how do you operationalize?

How do you… how do you put a playbook in place such that the team is using The tooling that you’ve built, but there’s… it’s implemented correctly, and the workflows are running properly, and the data’s accurate. So, I think the shift has really been, like, you know. how do you push your reps further downstream in the sales funnel, right?

Like, if you think about a lot of time spent, especially top of funnel, it’s… sort of the SDR or the BDR workflows, and it’s been… and, you know, that’s the first place that AI has… has… has solved for, right?

The research, the first touch and outreach, the, you know, the CRM hygiene, the CRM updates, right, which… are the bane of most people’s existence, right? All that can be handled through, sort of, AI-native tooling now. And then you push your more expensive human workers, like.

on the middle of the funnel, or even better, at the bottom of the funnel, with, like, contract negotiations. Really, the places that require more, like, judgment and, And the relationship component. I think, you know, you asked Jason the question on some core examples, like, we basically have two companies that came to mind.

The first is Orbital, which is Apollo or ZoomInfo, but for small business data. The reps there, I mean, obviously they have the small business data, and so they’re able to dog food the product.

Kathleen Estreich:

That’s how.

Matt Hersh:

12. But, yeah, but they don’t build lists. Like, there’s no list building, right? They just activate on warm, agent-identified accounts, you know, where they get signal, which is really interesting. And then Ciro, you know, which is a New York company of ours, it’s effectively like Gong or Chorus for field sales.

you know, also does this really well. Like, the reps no longer have to log their calls and take notes and send follow-ups, right? The AI will do that for them and, coach them in real time on things they can do to improve in their field sales conversations.

And so, you know, I think, There’s just… there’s a… there’s… there’s a shift… like, the shift should be down funnel. Your people should be spending time in the middle and bottom of the funnel to push pipeline.

Use the AI at the top of the funnel, from a lead gen perspective, and that’s… and that’s where we’re really… that’s where I focus most of my time, like, as we… after we invest.

Kathleen Estreich:

I’m curious if any of you have a portfolio company that’s maybe more established, you know, a couple years old. kind of having to adapt to this, and like, what have they… maybe any examples of companies that have done this well, or where their struggle points have been?

Because I agree with you, like, a lot of the top-of-funnel stuff can be automated, but then what do you do if you already have a 20, 30-person SDR team? Are they… Getting rid of those teams, re… reorienting them on other areas? Like, what do teams do that have, kind of, this traditional go-to-market team. in place doing?

Are they shifting the resources? Are they totally, you know, trying to build it from scratch? Has anyone successfully done, you know, made that migration? Any examples?

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Yeah, I could share one. So, I work with a number of companies that are pretty established. One of them in particular, I’ve been spending 2 to 3 days a week with for the last, like, 4 months, and the nature of that work is a big go-to-market transformation project.

And… Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): they… I would describe them as they know, sort of, they want to get from point A to point B, but they don’t know exactly how to get there. And part of what I was coming in to do was, one, kind of assess, like. Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): how ready they are to do that transformation.

They have a lot of legacy systems and data, like you’d imagine a lot of old companies do. Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): people, workflows, like, really get a baseline map.

And the second thing is, they’re the type of organization I was alluding to before that doesn’t have an internal resource that is Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): you know, there’s a tricky resource for commercial teams right now to find.

It’s like this experienced RevOps person who knows all the previous SaaS systems and the SaaS workflows and the interconnectivity and all the gotchas there, and has spent a lot of time in the new LLMs and all the other agentic tools.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): And so, like, there’s a lot of young people who spend a lot of time in the new world, but they don’t necessarily understand how to fix or connect the old world. And then you have a lot of these, like, traditional RevOps people who are excellent at the old world, but maybe have not spent time in the new world.

And so, what I’m looking for in a company like that is a really specific talent profile that can connect the two, and so I brought somebody like that in, and what we’ve been doing is effectively, like.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): cleaning up a lot of their old data systems, deduplicating things, and getting them ready so that we can introduce new AI systems and workflows. And… Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): It’s been a fascinating experience.

I love the opportunity to do this, because I get to stay in the game and, like, really feel what it’s like to try to, like, move an organization through the change curve. Some parts of it have worked really, really well. Like, we’ve increased a lot of their funnel velocity, their funnel conversion rates.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): and improved a lot of automation and agentic internal tooling to co-pilot for salespeople. Other parts of it have been less successful.

It’s not a technology-forward organization, they need a lot of help, and so, like, these are, Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Getting inside one of these organizations and trying to, like, move them forward is a fascinating experience right now, and everyone sort of can articulate where they want to get to, and then you try to do the work, and of course, it’s… Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): a lot of people, a lot of teams, a lot of legacy stuff, and you have to kind of navigate your way through it.

So it’s been a great experience, but if this organization can make meaningful strides, most can, but you need these talent profiles inside the company to do it.

Kathleen Estreich:

Where did you find that person? Like, what was the, you know, how did you find them? Because I think that’s a tough profile. It’s the right profile, but it’s a tough profile, so how did you go about finding someone like that?

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): So a year ago, I started to feel, this coming. A lot of our founders were asking about this. We hired somebody and started a go-to-market engineering practice inside of primary, so we have somebody that is embedded with lots of our portfolio companies doing this kind of work.

When this company reached out to ask. Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Our internal resource was fully booked up, and we couldn’t unlock his time.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): and this company wanted a full-time person, and so I basically went Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): And canvassed the market, and met 25 people, and picked the best one.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): who was the exact profile I was looking for that was consulting, and I’ve led a lot of RevOps teams of different shapes and sizes, and I’m kind of, like, a perfect, in the middle.

I’m somewhat technically fluent, but enough to find the person who is the person to work on these kind of projects, and so I was able to find them that way.

Kathleen Estreich:

Feels like someone should start a, recruiting firm focused on that role, and they’d probably do pretty well in the next 6 to 12 months. Awesome. Well, I guess, kind of, switching gears a little bit, like, what do you… what do your… do you think, kind of, the new… go-to-market teams will look like.

Like, I… at your company, is there maybe Seeds, Series A? What are the… you meant… I think a few of you mentioned, like, some of the roles, but, like, what is that… team look like?

It sounds like they’re gonna be smaller, they’re gonna be more, generalist, but are there specific characteristics that you think are important as these founders are hiring for these teams, in the next, kind of, 6 to 12 months?

Kyle Duffy:

I think… I think generally flatter orgs are gonna be… gonna be more in favor. Like, I… I’m… I don’t want to hire anybody into a role that, like.

can’t do a demo, can’t go and, like, do outreach themselves, like, I think everybody in the org, including the head of sales, or the manager, VP, Whatever it might be, that person should be able to be Hands-on doing the role as well.

And I think with the Flatter Org, you know, as I was talking about earlier, it does come to, you know, people who… Can do multiple functions, would layer on to that, making sure that you’ve got, kind of, this person that Jason is talking about, you know, generally I’m calling it a go-to-market engineer, but you could call it different things, making sure that the systems are in place, and I like to call it, like, the AI factory for the sales team, so that they’ve got the right, you know, infrastructure, they’re all kind of working off the same set of data that’s up-to-date.

and accurate, and they’ve got some repository of, kind of, skills or agents that they can pull from, that’s kind of been vetted by the organization, and I think this one core central role of go-to-market engineer basically, like, goes and enables the rest of the sales org.

Kathleen Estreich:

Are you seeing teams try and build more of these tools themselves, and have them be, like, very custom-focused, or are they buying, kind of, these new AI… you know, agentic go-to-market tooling? Like, what are you seeing, or a mix of both? And how do you sort of advise the companies?

Should they just try and build these things themselves on Claude, or should they, you know, buy something that’s, you know, purpose-built for what they’re trying to do?

Kyle Duffy:

I mean, I think it’s been still a mix of both, and, you know, say what you want about the… let’s take CRM being the, you know, core tool for kind of all sales teams, like, I still think it’s… it’s difficult to replicate. you know, all the CRM functionality that can be built. And I’ve seen a few companies certainly try.

This is funny, this was not one of our companies, and it was not, you know, a full company. It was a founder who went and built a CRM himself, did not… didn’t hook up the database right, and none of the data was saved.

So, like, you know, it’s just one of those things, like, you gotta actually, like, think about, like, the full end-to-end, you know, what you need to accomplish, and, you know, what’s out there versus what you… what makes sense to build.

Kathleen Estreich:

So there’s hope for Salesforce yet.

Kyle Duffy:

Maybe.

Kathleen Estreich:

Not go anywhere. What about you, Matt? What are you seeing?

Matt Hersh:

I mean, if you trust McKinsey, they put out a report that was… said that, like, 8 in 10 organizations see no meaningful bottom line impact from AI, and AI tooling specifically. And it’s not because the technology doesn’t work. I mean, it looks great, right?

Most of the AI tech… AI sales tech is built by… salespeople, so, who are good sales… salesmen and saleswomen, and therefore, you know, and they do good marketing, you know, there’s a number of tools out there, from Clay to Unity to, you know, a whole bunch of them, right? But, you know.

typically, I think people want to buy something with the hope that it will drive more meaningful ROI, and, you know, so the measure of success of any of this tooling is basically revenue.

But oftentimes, we know… we all know that revenue, you know, isn’t driven by what tools you purchase, it’s, like, how you’re able to close and do pilots and, you know, increase conversion rates, and the workflow, you know, stuff that I… I discussed earlier. You know, I think that, The RevOps role that Jason mentioned is the critical one.

It’s sort of like the equivalent of the forward deploy engineer on engineering’s side, or for the go-to-market team, and, you know, if I were… like, a young whippersnapper and just getting started, you know, I’d probably be trying to spend more time to learn more about, like, RevOps as a category.

As Jason said, it used to be primarily the conduit between the CRO and the CFO, and ensuring that, like, forecasts and data and reporting was… was accurate and believable, but now they’re being deployed, Right in the go-to-market stack, and right in, you know, everything from top of funnel to the bottom of the funnel.

So, it’s kind of like, you know, How do you… And… what I’m not sure of, and I’d love others’ take on this, is that RevOps person, like, their OKRs and what they’re measured on, from my perspective, should actually be, you know, are they driving… are they helping the account execs Or if it’s founder-led sales, like, spend more time in conversations, in qualified, in sort of SQLs, right, or MQLs, right?

Not necessarily, like. you know, are they good at deduping or cleaning up data or doing reporting?

Like, because the real measure is… of all of this is time, and it’s the most valuable resource that any of us have, and… you know, the most well-run go-to-market orgs within the FICA portfolio are those that were, you know, you look at the AE’s calendar, and it’s chock-block full of you know, of discos, or of second or third calls, or demos, or, you know, whatever it is.

It’s not them… having to block their time to do reporting, or CRM updates, or lead gen, or any of the other stuff. So that’s, like, you know, I think as an industry, like, we sh… you know. the RevOps lead is the equivalent of, like, SDR and BDR, right? Which is, if you think back 10 years, like, SDR, BDR didn’t even exist, right?

It was just the account exec. So, it’s a bit of an evolution in the go-to-market stack, but it does require the buy-in from the executive team. The CEO and founder has to basically implement something like this, they have to spend money on it to get that butt in seat.

And, that person has to be measured on their ability to push more pipe, and push more deals through, and that’s what’s gonna win.

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Yeah, one quick note, Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): on something Matt said about the ROI, like, I think we’re living in a very interesting time, and we’re kind of in the messy middle of, like, figuring out, like, I think we all know where this goes in a few years.

Leaner teams, you know, full funnel people, athletes, spending all their time with customers, like, we can sort of see the future. We’re clearly not there yet, and this ROI question’s very interesting.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Part of my guess at this is that Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): like, every company is sort of, like, spending a material amount of time inventing and doing creative things with LLMs.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): But if you are really AI optimized, but you are not great storytellers, you haven’t built your brand in the market, you’re not building great relationships with potential customers and partners in your industry, like, all that stuff matters a ton, too, still, obviously, and you could sort of, like.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): be an early-stage company that is so AI-pilled, but doesn’t, like, tell their story well or provide a lot of value to the market, but God is our AI tight, you know, and obviously that doesn’t matter.

And so, I think part of the ROI issue is, like, a lot of companies are spinning a ton of wheels Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): trying to figure out what the AI strategy or the workflows or the things should be, but they’re not… which takes your eye off the ball of, like, how do we serve customers better and generate revenue better?

And those two things are not always in concert with each other.

Kathleen Estreich:

I think that’s an interesting point, in that a lot of our early-stage companies, their biggest lead source is just going to conferences, and meeting people in person, instead of… because all these channels are just getting flooded because of all the AI optimizations, where I think outbound is a challenge right now, because it’s so noisy.

So I agree with that. I think it is somewhat… there’s one part of it that, you know, AI is really good at, and then there’s the other part of it that it’s actually not great at, and I think that’s why the… you kind of need two sides of…

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Think about, like, how many companies have said, aha, here’s what I can do with AI. Hey, Matt Hirsch, you’ve had 18 years in your career across these three specific companies, and you wrote this post on LinkedIn, and here’s two things I know about you.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): that no one cares about that email, because everyone’s getting the same, like, so, like, you could spend all your time doing this AI thing for outbound, it’s the least compelling way to use AI right now, so that is a good articulation.

Kyle Duffy:

Yeah, and some of it goes back to the question you asked, Kathleen, about our companies, you know, buying or building these AI apps?

You know, and I’d rather, instead of a… especially an early-stage company with limited resources, instead of going to build some AI app, I’d rather have them spend their time figuring out who truly their ICP is, and how to articulate their value prop.

Matt Hersh:

Well, and… if you go to GitHub, and you search, like, Claude Skills, or ChatGPT… GPTs. There have… there’s repositories out there to do just that.

Kyle Duffy:

Yeah.

Matt Hersh:

Right? I mean, everything from, like. defining… helping you define your ICP.

You basically create, you know, assuming you’re in Claude, and you’re trying to, like, get some leverage there, like, it helps you define your… it helps you do your SWOT, it helps you do your value prop, it helps you define your ICP, your… comes up with a 90-day plan for you, like, what are your beachhead segments, like… you know, customer… I mean, it even does customer interviews, like, primary research, right?

It’s crazy, and competitive analysis, obviously, so it’s like… and you don’t have to build an agent to go do that, they’re off the shelf, they’re sitting there waiting for you to get used, and they’re open source under the MIT license. So, like… Go do that.

Kathleen Estreich:

Here’s a question to you then, Matt. You have a founder who, you know, they’re starting to build out their early, you know, they have a product, they have a handful of customers, they’re trying to figure out how to scale. What do you… you’re sitting down with them to give them the playbook of how to do this. What do you tell them?

What do they do, specifically?

Matt Hersh:

We’ll have to take inventory, obviously, as we’ve talked about, figure out what they have. You know… first step is blocking their calendar, right? Because we’re talking about founder-led sales, and oftentimes founders get pulled in a flurry of different directions, and… The number one thing is giving themselves time to think about this.

We provide GPTs, FICA GPTs, we provide the FICA skill repository around go-to-market. These are all things they just have to install in their cloud and then start talking to them, talking to co-work, and it basically helps them to define it. In fact, some companies where they need a little more help will do it for them, right?

We’re creating the playbook with the, you know, the playbook used to be a 30-page doc that the CRO So… you know, had someone on his team create, and then he or she blessed. Now, it’s… skills and its GPTs, and it’s really trying to devise what your organizational plan is. Typically it’s ICP, one or more, right? I like to start with one ICP.

Then it’s list building, right? Again, ideally, you have an agent to do that. We have agents that you can use to go build your lists. Then it’s network mapping, right? We have agents that map that list to the people that we know in the field.

Kathleen Estreich:

We built FICA agents for all this. Correct. That they just plug into.

Matt Hersh:

I mean, they’re, like, rebranded from, like, off-the-shelf skills or agents, right?

It’s not… I’m not… and yes, we have built some where there aren’t off-the-shelf ones, but we’re small teams also, like, you know, all three of us, like, we don’t… we’re… we have to eat what we kill as well, and the only way we can get leverage from our own work is to go out and find, you know, interesting tooling that’s been built where we don’t have to license a piece of software, right?

And that just exists now. That exists as native extensions and connectors in the foundational models now. What doesn’t exist is, you know, you can’t do lead enrichment unless you have a license to Orbital or Apollo, or ZoomInfo or other databases to actually get the data, but there’s free tools, you can get emails and phone numbers.

You know, again, conference databases are critical. You gotta go to trade shows, you gotta show up, you gotta host small, intimate dinners with your ICP, and you have to invite one of your customers to that dinner, right? So we basically help teams organize those in-person events.

We ensure that any conference they go to They have the list from the conference, either they buy it, they steal it, I don’t care where they get it from, they gotta get the list of the people attending the conference, they set up meetings with people beforehand.

You do not show up to the show floor and walk around the show floor and hope you’re gonna run into somebody that you want to talk to, because it just doesn’t happen. And then you do that hand-to-hand combat, and then the one area that I think Our founders struggle with is oftentimes they… it’s the follow-up. Right?

I encourage them to log everything either themselves, if they don’t have an AI CRM, or, and, like, require it that their teams have to log all the activities, because what I see is that people run, and people, meaning AEs and people on the sales team, they run so fast trying to have so many conversations, even at events or virtually.

That they just don’t do a good job of following up and keeping engagement high with their prospects, and that makes my blood boil. Because those are people that basically want to continue to build a relationship with you, and you’re just being lazy by not responding.

And so… and a lot of founders, like, don’t feel comfortable, you know, telling their teams to, like, do all this follow-up, or criticizing them for not doing it, and… And I take it… I take it personally, because, like, you know, we’re an extension of their management team.

We’re… we are their partner on go-to-market, all three of us on this call, and we have to hold them accountable and their teams accountable. And so, you know, it’s really… it comes down to, like. ensuring that the full cycle sales is happening, and if it’s not happening, why is it not happening, and how can we fix it?

And if we can do it with AI and agents and custom-built stuff that we have, or off-the-shelf stuff that exists out there today, great. If it needs a consultant, we’ll bring in a consultant, but it has… things have to change in orgs where the go-to-market is broken, and… and again, this is new… territory for a lot of these founders.

They just don’t know what they’re doing, and so it’s… but the responsibility is on our shoulders in order to help them. Sorry.

Kathleen Estreich:

No, it’s okay, I’m getting PTSD from, like, events where founders are like, oh, this event didn’t work, and I’m like, well, what did you do before and after? The event is just a blip on the radar.

Matt Hersh:

Well, but Joe.

Kyle Duffy:

What again?

Matt Hersh:

People think they’re gonna show up to an event and, like, golden eggs are gonna be laid in their bags. As they walk around the show floor. It doesn’t happen. It may have happened years ago or decades ago. Now it’s getting the list, prospecting against the list.

meeting people, ideally being able to cover a few people at a time, bringing a customer… I mean, customer evangelists, if you’ve looked at, like, the bowtie type of framework, right, they… the center is, like, bring a customer to your prospect conversations.

You’ve got to get that validation from existing customers in order to move the needle, and but yeah…

Kathleen Estreich:

On that front, there’s some, new, go-to-market products out there that are trying to do that, you know, for companies at scale. I’m curious if any of you have looked at them, and if there’s any… do you think there’s value in, like, a… Tooling around some of that stuff.

Matt Hersh:

I mean, I haven’t seen anything… I’m referring to… to the Winning by Design group, which is a big consultancy firm that works with massive companies, and is sort of trademarked the bowtie. But, you know, their biggest thing is to just make sure that, like. your customers are selling for you.

Like, your customers are references, they’re obviously quoted on your website, and any product marketing materials, and then, you know, in person as needed. But… If there’s software that can automate, you know, a lot of that, I’m all ears for it, because it does take a lot of money and a lot of work.

Kyle Duffy:

Yeah, I mean, I think events is actually a perfect example when you look at, like, AI helping go to market. You know, you still… sales is still largely about coming across as a human, and you do at an event. However, the areas around that… so, the showing up as a human, the being at the event, that’s a high-value activity, the shaking of the hand.

And then around it, you can enable a lot of AI tooling. Certainly to, you know, put that list together, to do outreach ahead of time, and then to follow up. I mean, I’ve got some founders that wear, like, an AI pin at the conference, so they’re recording every conversation, and it makes follow-up easier. And then it’s, you know…

Matt Hersh:

creepy.

Kyle Duffy:

what automated follow-up? Creepy, yes.

Kathleen Estreich:

I assume you’re always being recorded these days, because you are. Yeah.

Kyle Duffy:

I know, I mean, it’s a whole different discussion of, like, how much is creepy, you know, and how much creepy is okay.

Matt Hersh:

That’s funny. You know, there’s something that… That stuck with me about the narrative and the storytelling component. Which, you know, was talked about earlier.

Kathleen Estreich:

Yeah, Jason brought that up.

Matt Hersh:

Yeah, I mean, and I… and, you know, I know the future of this agent-to-agent, your agent talks to my agent, and we work out a deal, and there’s purchasing that happens.

I mean, that’s, like, happening in the fintech world, and everybody’s hot and bothered by it from a commerce perspective, but, like, we’re talking about enterprise and B2B sales here, like, the… the thought of agent-to-agent, I mean, even, like, agent to human, or human to agent right now is a little bit nascent, but… My worry about if we do get to a full autonomous world of the go-to-market is that you really lose the narrative, and you lose the storytelling.

I think… you know, the reason why the three of us are sitting here is because we’ve built and operated at big companies prior to coming here, and so we’re sort of that ideal RevOps-type person, for our companies, but what happens in 10 years when, like, you’ve automated away all of your go-to-market efforts?

Like, how do you actually know what this narrative is and what the storytelling is? Like, how do you… How do you, like… Get that information, so when you show up and you shake somebody’s hand at that conference, You actually come off… knowing what you’re talking about, right?

Like, that’s part of the reason for building sales material and collateral, and why I always required my AEs to do that, was because they’d learn it, it would force it down their throat, right?

But I worry that, like, that’s gonna be disintermediated away through a lot of this AI tooling, and so I do kind of worry that we’re going to have a… I mean, it’s a larger question around AI and, like, its impact.

Kathleen Estreich:

Yeah, well, what are… I think it’s a larger question around, like, what’s even investable if, like, all the… the cost of building products is so low, and the really… the go-to-market or, like, brand… Matters a lot in terms of why someone would buy you over someone else. Is that a moat? Is it not a moat over time?

If, you know, then the product… products all kind of look the same, or can be very quick, you know, fast follow in terms of what it takes to build, then what does it actually mean for go-to-market? To your point, Matt, does, like, the branding and storytelling matter more or less if it’s agent-to-agent buying? Or does none of this actually matter?

And all these companies are just dead in the water because you can replicate what their functionality is anyways. So, it’s kind of an existential moment, or in the next few years, we’ll see how this all plays out, but .

Matt Hersh:

Well, look, the reality is that I think a lot of the bigger purchasing decisions, like if I put my buyer’s hat on, have historically been based on trust. Right?

Especially when you’re a small company trying to sell into a big company, like… there’s no reason why a seed stage company should close a 7-figure deal, but, you know, with a Fortune 500 company, but if they are able to do it. Somebody’s neck… the buyer’s neck is putting their neck on the line, right?

Because there’s a huge risk that that startup is not going to be around in a couple years, that their VCs aren’t going to come back to the table if it doesn’t… if numbers don’t look good. And so there is this kind of trust equation, and, you know, I don’t think trust is going to change. I think people still want to buy from people.

Buyers are getting smarter, right? If we talk about all the stuff that we and our companies are doing from a go-to-market and a sales perspective, think about… how the buyer and what the buyer is doing now to do their research, right?

They have more tools and data and insights than they’ve ever had before to actually make better buying decisions, right? So, like… you know, but at the end of the day, like, looking somebody in the eye and shaking their hand and being able to build that trust is really hard, agentically.

And until AI can, like, sign contracts and make decisions for the CFO, like. You know, you still have to build a great… relationship and rapport with the teams you’re selling into, and there has to be that trust equation. I just don’t see how you can do that agentically.

Kyle Duffy:

Right, I agree. I mean, I think if it’s kind of a single-player tool, and we’re seeing this today, so it’s a dev tool, you know, one dev is going to buy something, then, you know, their agent could technically buy it and transact, and I think that’s okay.

It’s much different when a technology hits on many different teams, a lot of different data at a company, and there’s operational change that needs to happen. Like, I think getting an agent to it’s effectively, like, the herding of cats, you know, as complex enterprises.

Like, I don’t know if we’re gonna have a herding of cats agent anyway in the near future. I mean, I’m sure, like, all this will change, like, in some time period, but I think right now, I think there’s definitely a human element involved just to… just to navigate the political dynamics of an organization.

I mean, that’s effectively what enterprise selling really becomes.

Kathleen Estreich:

Yeah, the change management and, like, integration, you still need a human who’s gonna help, like, implement, versus if it’s a PLG product, single player, yeah, PLG motion works quite well. Jason, you had mentioned that Primary is kind of changing their thinking around, kind of, investments in the go-to-market stack.

Would love to hear, kind of, how you all are thinking about that.

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Yeah, of course. So, you know. Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Cassie Young is a GP here. She’s really well known in the, like, broader go-to-market community.

Kathleen Estreich:

She’s amazing. I love Cassie.

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): And so we have a fairly, like, well-known, you know, commercial leader as a GP of our firm, and I also have a lot of history in sort of go-to-market tech and tooling and all this stuff.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): So we’ve spent a lot of time in the go-to-market, technology category over the last 4 years that I’ve been here and 6 that she’s been here, and there’s really two things for us right now that led us to deprioritize investing in go-to-market tech.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): One is that we made two investments in, sort of, like, future of, you know, AI GTM tech. One is a company called OneMind, where a human avatar speaks to you, you know, this is a human speaking to AI robots or avatars. Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): as part of their buying experience.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): That company has a very wide ambition to sort of be, like, the agent’s buyer experience across a lot of things. And, or sorry, the buyer’s agentic experience across a lot of things. Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): So that, that sort of covers a lot of ground.

And then the other company is an AI-native CRM, that we’re really excited about, too. And that company has a very wide ambition, again, to, like. Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): break down a lot of the barriers that we talked about. And so, one issue is outside of those, two things that have wide ambitions, like, well, what’s left?

You know, there’s some competitive things there. The broader thing, though, is that all the themes we’ve talked about, like leaner teams, breaking down barriers between functions.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): if you kind of, like, push all this stuff to its, like, very, very logical conclusion, you… you start to realize, like, GTM as a tech category feels, like, maybe a little small and not ambitious enough, and, Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): it is very possible that there’s gonna be sort of, like, one mission control center that enterprise companies run on, with everyone else empowered to sort of, like, grab information and build little micro-apps and all that.

And so as we think about, like.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): where is the largest, ROI opportunities for us to spend our time, Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): The go-to-market tech just feels a little too limiting for us right now, and we already have two companies that feel like covering the swath of ambition that we’re excited about.

Kathleen Estreich:

I’m a huge fan of Amanda. I actually invested in OneMind with you guys prior to joining Pear, through my fund that I had, and she’s amazing. Talk about, she’s… I think she’s part of this event as well, but yeah, huge fan of her and what she’s building.

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Katie leads sales at OneMind. Hey, Katie, look at that timing.

Katie Nocerino:

Hi! How’s it going?

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): I literally…

Katie Nocerino:

Come on.

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): in, like, 30 seconds. Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Help.

Katie Nocerino:

Wow.

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Thank you for that.

Katie Nocerino:

My ears were burning. There we go.

Kathleen Estreich:

I think I saw you next on the agenda, so, I’m sure everyone will be excited to hear more from you.

Katie Nocerino:

Oh, I hope so. I’m trying to figure out how to get Nigel on my call. He’s my ride-along superhuman, and there’s a lot to set up. So, yeah, it’ll be a jam-packed 15 minutes.

Kathleen Estreich:

Nice. Awesome. Well, I guess, what is sort of the… I guess for the… for Kyle, Matt, and Jason, like, what do you think are the bear case? You kind of touched on this, Jason, where it’s, like, a bunch of micro-apps, but curious, Kyle and Matt.

What do you think is a bear case against agent-native go-to-market that folks are sort of underpricing, and where do you think people are getting way too excited from an investment perspective, where maybe it’s… It’s not quite gonna play out the way folks think. BC’s life.

Kyle Duffy:

And it goes to work.

Kathleen Estreich:

Pontificate, so…

Kyle Duffy:

Right, it kind of goes to what I was saying earlier.

I really think there’s got to be humans involved when it becomes a much more complex deal that touches on many different teams and changes operations at a company, because, I mean, generally, it is a decision by consensus, and, you know, anyone who’s done enterprise sales know that if you have 12 people influencing that purchase, you know, you will have your blockers, you will have your champions, and kind of everything in between, and you know, right now, kind of human is needed to go, like… actually, you know, when I did enterprise sales, I would, like, literally go to my prospect’s office and sit there for the day and try to get coffee with everyone I possibly could, because I needed to have a good understanding of the entire organization, not just… not just what’s on paper and what’s out there publicly, but what people care about, what sits in their brain, and what’s really motivating them.

Kathleen Estreich:

Matt, any hot takes here?

Matt Hersh:

Well, I think on the bear case, and I think… I mean… all this… there’s the concept of alerts, if we all know what… we all know what alerts is. We get alerts through our texts and through Slack and everything.

Like, there’s alert fatigue, both on buyers and sellers, so, you know, I think… that’s one downside of AI, is that it kind of… you’re constantly being interrupted with alerts, and you know, that can basically create… a highly inefficient organization, in person, for that matter.

One signal, you know, you just… get distracted from what you’re working on.

I think the bull case, I’ll share a little bit of inside baseball, but a couple of our companies, like, AI-native companies now, are doing what Kyle… Suggested, but they’re… Actually, flying out and scheduling a 2- or 3-day meeting with their prospect, And… first day is, like… you know, what it would equivalent of a discovery call would be, but it’s like, you know, a couple hours on-site with the respective, folks.

That night, because, you know, it’s AI technology and they can configure it, they’re basically doing the forward deployment, like, in their hotel room that night. show up back in the off… in some… in some cases, they’ve pulled all-nighters, right?

But they’re basically, while they’re there, they’re getting access to the data, and the systems, and the people, and the signing the NDAs, you know, by hand, which is… mind-boggling. But… And then they show up the next day with the product, you know, like, the demo, but it’s like a live, big demo using the prospect’s information and data.

And… and then, you know. ideally, like, in some cases, they’ve walked away with the signed contract, like, at the end of the day. Sometimes they have to stay an extra day to fix some stuff, but, like, if you think about, kind of, the… in-person plus the discovery, like, they’re just compressing.

Like, I’m sitting here as I scroll… as I do, like, doom scroll of LinkedIn, and I’m like, wow, that company got to $100 million in revenue in 3 months, like… like, first of all, I call bullshit on that, because it’s not real revenue most of the time, unless you’re a foundational model company.

It’s likely pilot revenue, and it’s likely not annualized, and there’s likely screwed-up indemnity and limit.

Kathleen Estreich:

Revenue run rate, car!

Matt Hersh:

Yeah, it’s a hot mess, right? But I have seen the light. I have seen that when solutions are built in an extensible. prescriptive way that buyers, can move quickly, even when they’re 6- and 7-figure contracts.

So, the bull case is… you know, getting closer to the customer, proving that, like, what you’re building is not, you know, snake oil, and that it can work and drive outcomes, and being able to build that ROI story, sort of in session versus over a multi-month enterprise sales process, which is kind of what I grew up with as well, as Kyle, and But it’s, it’s… it’s… it’s an amazing time to be alive, it’s an amazing time to see all this come together, and… and actually happen before our eyes.

Kathleen Estreich:

Awesome. Well, let’s… I want to end with a quick lightning round, so I’m gonna… I’m looking for fast takes, so one or two sentences, not… not, you know, thesis, well thought out, but kind of what comes to mind first.

I’ve got five questions, so maybe I’ll… We’ll go Kyle, Matt, Jason, in that order, so Kyle… or for the first one, then I’ll change the order. What’s the most overrated AI native startup category right now, Kyle?

Kyle Duffy:

Mmm… Probably something in vertical AI, which pains me to say, because I had a vertical AI company, but I think, you know, coding agents, they’ve lowered the bar to… Produce something that’s super customized for… For a specific business.

Matt Hersh:

I’d say the AI SDR tools that are automated email, Email open rates are, like, less than half of a percent nowadays. So why you’d go out and buy an AI SDR tool or email sequencing tool is beyond me.

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): I, I’m open-minded, but maybe struggling a little with the, like, I’m a sales rep, I’m talking to a customer, but some AI coach in real time is, like, telling me what to say. That feels like a little bit of a strange experience.

I would rather just hand it off to one mind and let Nigel just talk to the customer instead.

Katie Nocerino:

You saw me come off mute.

Kathleen Estreich:

Good, portfolio, repping here, Jason. Plus 5 for you. Okay, next question, Jason, you go first. The one enterprise workflow agents will automate within 24 months that people are still skeptical about?

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): I think, complex implementation is one that I started from a place of heavy skepticism, and I’m now… I think what implementation is, and how you sort of met, like, ongoing implementation of these tools.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): I think is going to be a really ripe area for complete reinvention, and I’ve been sort of pilled on that one.

Kathleen Estreich:

Matt?

Matt Hersh:

Live in… in-session contract review. Contract or proposal review. Our company, Ivo, is the leading contract review software for Meta, Uber, IBM, you know, typically now it’s done, you get the contract and you review it.

I think parties… meet and do… the AI drives the proposal from the buyer and the seller, and the parties agree to let the AI handle contract negotiations.

Kathleen Estreich:

Kyle?

Kyle Duffy:

It sounds like, kind of, I’m going against what I said earlier about, you know, procurement, you know, not being able to be, automized, but I think there is a lot of opportunity in procurement, and we do have a company that’s doing this well, and I’m gonna… like, from what I said earlier, it’s actually, like, a piece of procurement.

It’s more like the initial kind of tip of the spear of procurement, you know, not kind of the herding of cats, but I think there’s a lot that agents will do to kind of help, kick off procurement processes.

Kathleen Estreich:

Alright, the startup that doesn’t exist yet, that you wish you could fund, Matt.

Matt Hersh:

Oh, jeez. That’s a tough one. I mean, I’m… I’m… I believe that if I do my job well, I’m gonna automate myself out of a job.

And so I guess part of me wishes that I had, like, my own AI persona that could, like, feel an increasing majority of my questions as it gets to know me a little bit better, but a company that builds, like, that human persona-driven sort of AI agent, would probably be it.

Kathleen Estreich:

Jason?

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): In the GTM world, sort of, like, the one big app to rule them all, I think, like, you still cannot run your go-to-market team in motion with, like, one centralized app, even though it seems to be heading that way. In practice, it’s not even close.

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): In my general world, I am very excited for these Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Sort of, like, mass market, medical screen technologies that feel like they’re close to being Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): great, but maybe not quite there yet, but I want that.

I want my kids to grow up in a world where, like, all the preventative screening and medical stuff is just widely available and highly effective.

Kathleen Estreich:

Kyle?

Kyle Duffy:

We’ll stick to the theme of agentic GTM in terms of what we’re talking about. I think there’s still some software layer that needs if we are going to get to true agent-to-agent buying.

there’s still software, and probably some of this exists, and I don’t know it, but especially around, like, the transacting, and the trust around the transacting, and And verification, and, you know, the kind of know your agent space.

Kathleen Estreich:

All right, we only had time for 3, but that was super interesting. Thank you all, I learned a lot from all of you, so thank you for your candid, insights today, and, looking forward to hearing how you automate your jobs even more, over the next few years, by keeping that human touch that we all love so much.

Julia Nimchinski:

Such a phenomenal panel. Thank you so much, Kathleen. Thank you, everyone. Can we just do one minute of shameless plugs, all of you? Kathling.

Kathleen Estreich:

Oh, I guess I’m always curious to hear what, what, one of the top questions I get from founders is, like, what are peop… what’s the early tech stack that folks are using from a go-to-market perspective, if anything? So if you have things that are actually working, that would be helpful that I can pass along to portfolio companies.

Kyle Duffy:

Can I put in a shameless plug for Clarify? They’re our AI native CRM that’s in our portfolio. I think they’re doing a really good job of not just creating the CRM layer, but, you know, the agents and, you know, Lead Finder, kind of, like, all in one, all-in-one go-to-market agents on top.

Matt Hersh:

I’m glad Kyle said that, because we’re also investors in Clarify.

Kyle Duffy:

That is as well.

Kathleen Estreich:

A two-for-one!

Matt Hersh:

I know.

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): we’ll do a. Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): it’s higher.

Matt Hersh:

Go ahead.

Unknown:

Speaker 1 (Primary Venture Partners): Me too. I’ve unfortunately got to jump, someone’s gotta come in here, but thank you so much for having me.

Julia Nimchinski:

Thank you so much.

Matt Hersh:

sourced.

Julia Nimchinski:

Thanks again. Yeah.

Matt Hersh:

Oh, I was gonna say, our company with Orbital, if you’re selling into SMB, you need that product for the data… SMB data side, not Apollo or ZoomInfo, so it’s a much better solution, so…

Julia Nimchinski:

Thank you so much.

Matt Hersh:

Thank you.

Kathleen Estreich:

Thanks, Julia!

Matt Hersh:

Hi, everybody.

Kyle Duffy:

leading, Kathleen.