Beyond SeatMaxxing: The Economics of the Agent Era

Julia Nimchinski:

Welcome back to Day 2 of the Agent to Agent GTM Summit. Your next customer may not be human. And we are kicking off Day 2 with a big, agentic bang. Welcome to the show, Minnie Medina and Amos Barr-Joseph. Couldn’t be more excited for this. How are you doing?

Manny Medina:

Sorry, I’m amazing. I have no idea where this conversation’s gonna go. It could go awesome, it could end up in a fistfight, or anything in between. I’m gonna go ahead and steal Amos’ secrets. That’s what I’m gonna do. I don’t know what Amos is gonna do.

Julia Nimchinski:

Those are the best ones. We’re still waiting for Amos.

Manny Medina:

Yeah, he runs, like, a three-person company, so I’m sure he’s busy doing one of the thousand things that he does.

Julia Nimchinski:

They doubled seats, so they have 6 persons. Okay.

Manny Medina:

Technically. There you go. There you go. So now he has to clock at $60 million, because he’s on the target that we mailed $10 million for an employee, so… The number keeps going up every time somebody shows up through the door that is not an AI agent.

Julia Nimchinski:

And here he is! Well, welcome back!

Amos Bar Joseph:

Just a second… Can you hear me, guys?

Julia Nimchinski:

Yep.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Amazing! It’s great to be here!

Manny Medina:

What’s up, handsome?

Amos Bar Joseph:

Oh, Manny, I missed you!

Manny Medina:

I miss you too! What you got going, man?

Amos Bar Joseph:

Oof, so many things, you’re not gonna believe it.

Manny Medina:

Dude, I’ve been… I’ve been tracking your posts, your stuff is fire. I think that you’re getting more and more dialed by the day.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah, that’s how we grow. You know, there’s a lot of… with responsibility comes a lot of pressure. That’s the main growth channel, so every post I put out there, I feel like the company’s gonna explode or die by the, you know, by the hook. But it’s definitely an amazing growth lever.

Manny Medina:

Alright, let’s check on a couple things. Are you still on the target to $10 million per employee? Is that still your long-term goal?

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah, it is.

Manny Medina:

And then Julie just spilled the beans, so you got 6 people in the company, so 60 million or die is a ride now, right?

Amos Bar Joseph:

Exactly, exactly, and every hire means that, you know, we’re committed to 10 million more, so, it’s gonna be super hard. 60 is the goal today. I think that maybe eventually we’re gonna land on, like, 10 and try to get to 100. That’s like the, you know, I feel like a 10-person, $100 million ARR startup sounds like, like a great goal.

Manny Medina:

Alright, so this is perfect. Because last time I talked to you, it was, like, you, two other people, and a dog. And you promise me you’ll never hire anybody in, like, this, you know, that this is the size of the company that’s gonna stay. you know, fast forward 6 months later, you got your 6 people strong, so what’s the trade… so A, what change?

And B, what’s the trade-off between, you know, hiring and building an agent, and what do you hire for? Like, what’s the mix now?

Amos Bar Joseph:

Amazing, love it. So, I feel like the first thing that changed is that, you know, we realized that there… it’s not like there’s a ceiling on the capacity that you can scale a person, but when you actually have people working together, you can increase their capacity as well.

So, our initial thought was like, okay, how can we scale the business with intelligence, not with headcount, to connect, like, the folks that weren’t with us in the previous conversations? Manny? So, guys, we’re building an autonomous business, that’s one.

It’s a business that is designed from the ground up to scale with intelligence, not with headcount. 2025, we were three founders. We didn’t hire anyone. We scaled to over 200 customers across 5 continents, 7 figures ARR.

And our goal, Manny, back then, was said, okay, we’re gonna turn me into the 100X seller, Ito, my co-founder, into the 100X product, and Niamh, the engineer, into the 100X engineer. And then. What we realized is that there is a glass ceiling on how much you can scale a person with AI if they don’t have the right humans on their side, basically.

And what we realized is that our rule of.

Manny Medina:

Are you calling it glass because you didn’t see it, or are you calling it glass because they don’t see it? Or it’s just, in general, hard to say?

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah, I would say maybe it’s not even, like, like a glass ceiling, but it’s like a hard ceiling, right?

Manny Medina:

Like, just good old-style wood.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Concrete, like.

Manny Medina:

I would say, congrats.

Amos Bar Joseph:

you bash your head and you get, like, you get hurt. So, I would say, like, our rule of thumb today, when we want to hire, so if we have a scaling challenge, that doesn’t mean we need to hire. We can use AI agents for that, but if we’re lacking two of the, like, one of the following two things, that’s when we hire.

when we need certain competency in the team, okay?

If no one knows, so we had a problem with, evals, like evaluations and kind of, you know, research methodologies for using AI, and we want to really, kind of, like, level up our game, and we realized that, you know, if we don’t gain, like, real evaluation competency in the team, we’re not gonna build an amazing AI agent.

It’s just not gonna happen, okay? And so that prompted us to say, we just… we need that skill in-house. We can’t really give the AI to help us there, because that’s not how you master and build an amazing AI agent.

So competency, if you lack a specific competency, that is, you feel like it’s core, core to the IP that you’re building, you need to get that in-house. That’s one. The second is ownership, which is interesting.

What we realized is that If there’s a critical process within the business, and there’s no one going to sleep at night thinking about that process, and thinking about how to improve it, and where it’s failing, and where, you know, where the friction is, if we don’t have a person that goes to sleep at night thinking about it, we’re gonna lose in that process.

And so, we need to have the right ownership structure in the company. And so, a good place to actually look at it is, like, our first hire, was actually, Jeremy, the, our VP of Autonomous GTM, okay? We gave him a made-up title, because everything… we don’t really have titles in the company, and it’s like a flat organization.

Manny Medina:

You know, I thought it was gonna be for deployment. I like this trend. Like, you heard it… alright, so for the audience out there, you heard it here first. If your title doesn’t have autonomous in it. You’re not playing the right game right now.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Excellent.

Manny Medina:

You have to have autonomous, otherwise you’re so 2025.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Exactly. It’s the new branding. But the logic there was, besides of just making it sexy and a made-up title, we said, like, what, VP of what? Like, this guy came, and he, like, spent, you know, 15 years, a traditional, you know, sales playbook. He was a customer of Swan, by the way, fell in love with the product, and… said he wanted to join, right?

He’s, like, a perfect example of our vision, a VP sales that is also an individual contributor, like a real builder, that can use AI agents and kind of, like, send them to do a lot of work on his behalf. And we said, look, you’re not going to manage sellers here, so what, you’re, like, VP sales? Like, what’s that?

VP sales that is not… doesn’t have any hiring plans, and doesn’t have any AEs or reps or anything, so what is that, right? So we said, yeah, you’re going to lead the autonomous GTM vision of the company, basically. And what that… what happened immediately?

Manny Medina:

Where did he go… where did he… what was his background? Was his background, like, a people leader? Like, a first-line manager? Like a…

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah, so he was, in DataRama that was acquired by Salesforce, like a, you know, regional, of, you know, vice president, like, managing.

Manny Medina:

Alright, so he wasn’t, like, a regular run-of-the-mill, like, sales leader.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Exactly, that’s…

Manny Medina:

not into the, you know, the manager of the Agentic fleet. Those are two vastly different jobs.

Amos Bar Joseph:

amazing. And that’s his story, by the way. I’m a storyteller, and you know, I love telling stories, Manny, and when I built his, kind of, together, we built, like, the story behind Jeremy, we felt like, yeah, that’s what Jeremy brings to the world, is, like, this promise of, you know, if you did… you went through that path.

of, you know, building the traditional playbook, and really been doing it extremely well, and you’re a very, you know, process-oriented person, you’re disciplined, and you kind of have all these amazing qualities of a great salesperson that climbed up the hills and the ranks. If you just roll up your sleeves.

and you just dive deep into this amazing technology, which is… eventually, it’s intuitive. You just talk to it. You don’t need to learn where the buttons are, even, right?

Manny Medina:

Good.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Dive into it, starting from scratch, like a 5-year-old. then you can actually become this hybrid old guard versus, like, with this AI-native mentality, and what I’m trying to say to, like, our customers and to, like, GTM leaders by and large is, like. You know, the foundations are still the foundation.

If you don’t nail your ICP, you will never get a product-market fit. If you don’t understand your pipeline good enough. then you won’t be able to improve it. And so, like, the foundations are still the foundations, but the way that you execute on top of them has changed.

And so you get, like, this, VP sales from the old guard that just said, you know what, I’m gonna strip away everything that I learned, like, somehow, or, like, almost everything, I’m gonna roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty. And it worked!

Manny Medina:

It worked. How deep are you into this new VP of Sales Hire?

Amos Bar Joseph:

So… over, like, It’s, like, around 60 days at the job.

Manny Medina:

Oh, you’re honeymooning. Oh, you’re honeymooning.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Honeymooning?

Manny Medina:

Yeah, honeymoon, you’re not… you’re not there yet, but let’s… Not there yet. It’s still been nine months, but it’s good, but it’s good.

So, what I was… the way I was thinking you did it is that I need to hire my customer to sell to my customers, because you’re selling to traditional sales organizations that need to take the plunge, you see what I mean? So, if you, like, bring in a comfort and be like, look, I was you.

before I became, you know, AI-pilled, and like, look at all I can do, look at how much pipeline I drive, you want to be me. And everybody’s gonna say, yeah, hell yeah, let’s go.

Amos Bar Joseph:

You nailed it. That’s basically… that’s basically.

Manny Medina:

That’s hilarious.

Amos Bar Joseph:

So Jeremy’s, like, the embodiment of our vision, and it’s accessible. And our mission is to make GTM engineering accessible to everyone. We want to say, like, you know what? You can become this AI-native salesperson, and all you need is just, you know, just take the plunge, basically.

Manny Medina:

So, but what was the… what was the trigger? You were doing a killer job, you know, doing this yourself. Sometimes you’re a little scary and a little intense, but, you know, that… You got… you got there by yourself, you know what I mean? So, like, what was the… the forcing fact… the forcing faction? Like, what was the forcing function to…

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah.

Manny Medina:

I can just be a new person.

Amos Bar Joseph:

ownership, and that’s why, kind of like, that was the transition, ownership. So what happened is that I went to sleep at night thinking about growth.

I didn’t want to think about our pipeline, and how can we improve our sales cycle, and how can we, you know, zone in on the right enablement materials during the sales cycle, and how we should improve our outreach processes, and how should we create, like, POC scoping questionnaires. It’s not what I thought. I was thinking about LinkedIn posts.

That’s what I was thinking, right? I was thinking about stories to tell. I was thinking about how can we go on crazy billboards in Times Square, and how do we, you know, reach, kind of like this Tier 1 level brand, basically.

Manny Medina:

But why? Like, what happened? Like, did you, like, did your play become more of a fool? Did something drop? Or after a serious day, now that you’re flushing cash, you’ll be like, alright, let’s go hire some people? Like, what was the triggering point? Because you were like that before, you know what I mean?

When I talked to you 6 months ago, you were still doing that, and the sales cycle job.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah.

Manny Medina:

You know what I mean.

Amos Bar Joseph:

So what was the trigger? I think what I realized is that the, potential Like, the, like the, you know, the dollars on the floor. Are, like, so big that if we can, like, divide ownership here, there’s… there’s, like, enough… weight here, so we can divide ownership and we won’t lose anything in that sense, right?

It’s not like I’m just adding headcount. I’m just… I see that if I just put person here, and we divide the ownership, 1 plus 1 creates 10. That’s the thing about thinking about ownership, not in terms of capacity.

And what happened is 60 days, already in charge of, like, 50% of the revenue of the company, and kind of closed a lot of deals, and super fast ramp time, because everything was fit, not only the story of a customer selling to a customer, but also the fact that we waited until we… we had, like, seven figures ARR, super high velocity, we’re a three-person team, and then comes, like, a seller into that machine where everything is, like, ready for it, and now just take the ownership.

Everything is ready for you. And so it was… super successful ramp-up, and we didn’t feel like we’re losing the, you know, the ARR per FTE goal. We’re actually saying, yeah, we’re getting faster towards that metric.

Manny Medina:

Yeah. Do you feel like a bottleneck? Or are you… was it… was it, like, the feeling of, like, shit, I can’t get to all these dollars on the ground, I need to do something about it? Or was just, like…

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah, I think that… but I think it’s not what triggered me, necessarily. I feel like our constant state at the company is that everyone has significantly more on their plate than what they could possibly do, okay?

And that’s, like, that’s the state, and that’s how I like the fact that every employee at the company has… feels for them that there’s, like, 10x more things to do out there that they could actually do, and they need to work in, like, a vicious, rigorous process of prioritization constantly, like, every minute of their time.

They need to carefully decide what they do, and then I… and I see the people in the company, they’re like. sometimes they’re like, should I enter this room, or should I go to the bathroom now? Like, what do I do with this 3 minutes that I have right now?

Manny Medina:

And I hold it for 15 more minutes to get this out.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Exactly. It’s like, it’s that… that’s the level of ruthless prioritization when you get there, and when you actually… you’re not… when you add someone, you’re not starting to say, hmm, we want to get to this ARR threshold, so we’re gonna add another person. No.

There’s, like, this… Huge burning fire with gazillion stuff to do, and no one is going to sleep. At night, thinking about it. That’s, like, how we feel is the right place to actually add someone without compromising on the ARR per FTE goal.

Manny Medina:

Got it. Alright, just to finish the swing, you’re saying there was three things. So, one is skill and capability, the other one is ownership. What’s the third?

Amos Bar Joseph:

I said two things.

Manny Medina:

Okay, perfect, two things. That’s fine. Two things are great. Better than two. And it’s funny, because you just made this pose that an easy way to tell that was AI-generated is that it’s always three things.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Exactly.

Manny Medina:

You’re doing it like that, and you’re like, it’s not AI, Amos, it’s me, Amos, and it’s two things, not three things.

Amos Bar Joseph:

You know, I actually, I’ve heard, like, a really inspiring quote from, like, a musician, actually, because, you know, AI is disrupting music more than it is disrupting GTA.

Manny Medina:

Hold it out.

Amos Bar Joseph:

And he said, the most human thing to do in an AI-native world is to be unpredictable. In a world where the machines are designed to predict the next token.

Manny Medina:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Amos Bar Joseph:

The most human thing to do is to be unpredictable and saying, here are three things, but actually saying two things.

Manny Medina:

Skip, I’m guessing!

Amos Bar Joseph:

Exactly, exactly.

Manny Medina:

All right, all right, so this is a… this is a GTM… this is a GTM podcast, and it’s… and it’s children available, so we have to… you have to keep it moving. So, what is the makeup? So, what do you look for in an organic… when you’re qualifying. when your new guy is qualifying.

What are you looking for in an organization that is ready to make that jump? That is ready.

Amos Bar Joseph:

I didn’t make that joke.

Manny Medina:

from human-led to AI-led. Like, what are the qualifiers?

Amos Bar Joseph:

Hot question, great question, I love that. And it’s a very hot topic today, and kind of like, first of all, being honest, I don’t feel like we have the right answer to it. We have hypotheses, okay?

Manny Medina:

Gotcha, yeah.

Amos Bar Joseph:

It’s important.

Manny Medina:

I want to know what your hypothesis was before and what it is now, so tell me what it is now.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Okay.

Manny Medina:

How’s it migrated from, like, a few months ago?

Amos Bar Joseph:

I’m gonna do the unpredictable, I’m gonna start with it before, and then I’m gonna tell you what.

Manny Medina:

Oh, hell yeah, let’s go!

Amos Bar Joseph:

Okay.

Manny Medina:

Let’s go! You gotta do something else.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Exactly, exactly. So… Because I feel like the before was, like, a little bit more obvious, and I feel like the, the latter is actually, maybe a little bit more unpredictable. So, before we said, okay, let’s just hit, Series B, AI-native tech startups that are using Cloud Code, and we’re gonna tell them, look, you’re using… Cloud Code.

It’s hard to use that, really, in an environment of a team. It’s not a team player game. You’re running it local in your company, etc. Let’s use… Swan is like Cloud Code for GDM, right? That’s, like, our initial thesis. And we have a lot of our ICP, like, a percentage of our customers are really within that range of identity, basically.

What we’re kind of, like, shifting towards is… Actually, non-AI native companies.

Manny Medina:

Hmm.

Amos Bar Joseph:

that there’s a mandate to become AI native. And, And as you can see, this type of identity is less, first of all, described in the more specifics. It’s still a little bit vague to us. What does that mean? But it points to a contrast here. We’re not looking for the AI cloud code pill companies.

There’s actually, you know, folks that are one step behind in the transformation, okay? and they’re not pilled yet, but there’s a mandate, and there’s a lot of motivation internally. And what that creates, actually.

Manny Medina:

Wait, wait, and the mandate is, like, CO mandate, board mandate, boss mandate? Like, where is it, like, do you.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah.

Manny Medina:

scope for that? Like, how do you look for it?

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah, so my opening slide at the, you know, the deck, the sales deck, is, the mandate today is scale the pipeline without scaling headcount. Okay? That’s the mandate. You can tell it’s coming from the CEO, it’s coming from the CRO, it’s coming from the board, it’s like, it’s coming from the market, coming from everywhere.

You need to scale pipeline without scaling at headcount.

Manny Medina:

What reaction? So, okay, so on that slide, what reaction are you looking for? You present a slide, you give your pitch, and then you pause. What a reaction? Are you looking for nods, or are you looking for, like, what is he talking about?

Amos Bar Joseph:

No, I’m looking for nods, and everybody’s, like, everybody’s nodding, because I feel like there isn’t any, like…

Manny Medina:

But if everybody’s on it, then it’s a little bit too, like, applehood and apple pie, right? Like, it’s always like, yeah, of course everybody’s fucking trying to scale.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Exactly, yeah, and then, right?

Manny Medina:

All right, all right, all right, all right, all right.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Then it comes the next, the next slide, the unpredictable.

Manny Medina:

Unexpected.

Amos Bar Joseph:

perspective, which says, The bottleneck isn’t, you know, AI can do everything today. It can write, research, you know, score, qualify, update serums, so why aren’t you there? Okay? Yeah. And I said, GTM engineering Is your bottleneck to get there.

Manny Medina:

Hot!

Amos Bar Joseph:

Nothing!

Manny Medina:

Hot take, hot take! You heard it here first, GTM engineering is THE bottleneck. It was a solution two years ago, it became the bottleneck.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Exactly. And now, and the reason why is because your tech stack is preventing you from actually going through this AI transformation.

They promise you AI features, but they don’t share with you the hidden engineering tax that comes with all these features, and to really start to become AI native, you need to spend so much time in actually configuring and optimizing, connecting workflows, etc, and you need to scale pipeline without scaling headcount, and then… They promise you that, but you spend all your time on the systems and actually building stuff that don’t move the needle, because you don’t know exactly what to build, and these features are, like, half-baked, because these are, like, SaaS platforms that have tried to disguise themselves as AI-native solutions, and, like, nothing really works.

And then, the ICP feels like, whoa, this guy gets me. That’s what I feel. That’s what I want right now.

Manny Medina:

So, so, or, I thought that where you were going is that if the ICP gets scared by that slide, then you, boom, that’s a DQ, that’s an easy DQ. Whereas if there is somebody in the room who’s like, yeah, hell yeah, you’d be… I’ve been thinking this all along, let’s go. Then you got, you got a champion, you know what I’m like?

Is that how you… how are you using this slide?

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah, I actually, I don’t like fear-driven narratives.

I feel like, our main differentiation as a company from an emotional perspective is that we’re the only ones who are advocating for hope, positivity, human-centric narratives, and we’re not trying to say, like, AI replacement, and you’re… or if you don’t go through, you know, hop on the train, someone who knows how to do that will replace you.

Everybody’s talking about replacement, and displacement, and, like, fear, etc. And we actually came and said, you know what? AI is a shitty seller. AI is a shitty marketeer. What AI is good at is engineering. AI is really good at writing code and working with systems, and it’s not gonna replace anyone!

But what… but imagine if every person on your team would have a GTM engineer in their pocket. What would happen there to your pipeline velocity? And I feel like that’s a vision that people can relate to it, and they can run through this change management process with the carrot, not with the stick.

Manny Medina:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, having a GTM engineering in your pocket, that’s powerful. What’s the promise? I mean, it feels like it also sort of, like, circumscribes the people that you’re selling to, to tech companies, right? Like, that’s where the majority of this GTM engineering pill has gone, but, like.

as you grow, and you try to sell to non-tech companies, to the ones that are a little, like, behind that you want to move them forward, like, how do you… is it the same framing? Like, you know, what is it… what is.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah.

Manny Medina:

at universal.

Amos Bar Joseph:

It’s the same framing, because what happens there, I think the difference is, when you come to, like, a super AI-native tech startup, you tell them a GTM engineer, actually, for them, it’s a little bit of a replacement narrative, because they’re trying to hire a GTM engineer, maybe they have one super lack of capacity for everything they throw on that person, or maybe they’re trying to hire it, they’re, like, a little bit more, you know, fluent, or, like, in this type of narrative, basically.

When we come to these non-AI native companies. they actually feel like, wow, yeah, I’m… we already know that AI is good at engineering and coding, yeah, what? I can see what does that mean to apply that to, you know, all of my reps, and to my rev ops, and to my marketeers, and a CRO could just ask.

an engineer to do whatever they need, to build dashboards for them, or to build a workflow, and an alert, or whatever. It really empowers them to feel like, whoa, that’s the transition, that’s the AI transformation. I don’t need to rearrange my organization around AI sellers that sell to humans and things like that.

We can actually just build whatever we need in a second.

Manny Medina:

Yeah. What’s the next slide? So, after you made that promise, then what happens?

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah, I appreciate, many of you walking through the audience through a demo of Swan, so thank you for that.

Manny Medina:

No, no, I just think it’s fascinating, because, like, every… I… they’re like, I come from go-to-market, right? Like, I sold this stuff just like you are.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah, yeah.

Manny Medina:

And I feel like… you know, everyone is finding a niche that did not exist before, you see what I mean? Like, I talk to companies like Rox, you know, we talk to OneMind, we talk to you guys, we talk to… and everybody, like, the story’s not the same.

So what I love about this, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, is that, unlike the world that I came from, where everybody fucking said the same thing. You’re not coalescing around the same thing, you’re coalescing around your own unique message. And what that does is that it makes people opt in or not.

Like, if you like this narrative, if you like this narrative of having a companion that is a GTM engineer, is the most cracked GTM engineer because he can work 24-7, that he can do all the things that you wish you had on a GTM engineer, then that’s one kind of people.

The people who don’t opt for that, and say, no, I got my engineering engineer now, I’m looking for something else, then that’s great!

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah,

Manny Medina:

It’s a very forking thing, which is exactly what you want in a tight shop.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah, I agree 100%, you nailed it, and I feel like, just to say, like, what… So, you gotta lean into something you believe in. Like, I feel like when everybody can build anything. Yeah. And it’s not a feature war. It’s basically… it’s a vision war. It’s like, how do you feel?

Like, you’re betting on a future that you think that that future will hold water, and that future will win, and you’re saying the future that they’re going towards is not going to be the right future for you, for the customer that I’m talking to, specifically right now.

And what… and actually creates kind of like natural selection, you’re true, because if you’re not leaning into my story, basically what you want, and the customers that don’t really want to buy Swan based off of this story, are the ones that just want AI to solve their problems. They just want to give me an AI SDR that could generate me pipeline.

And then they say, yeah, you know what? I don’t want… I don’t want an engineer. I just want someone to just, you know, like, I just want to pay money, and I want to see meetings booked on the calendar. Right? And I feel like that’s the narrative of the other folks.

They’re trying to say, AI agents that work 24-7 for you and book meetings, and like, you know, AI SDRs that can, you know, blast your market and do things, and they’re, you know, selling a lot, right? Because some of the market are looking for that.

But I believe… that, you know, at the end of the AI fiasco, and at the end of the bubble, basically, when the bubble’s gonna burst, there’s gonna be one winners, one type of winners, and just one type of losers. There’s not gonna be two.

And the winners are the one that really tried to build their GTM, and the losers will be the ones that will try to buy their GTM.

Manny Medina:

Interesting. So when somebody tells you, I’m just looking for an AI SCR, do you try to turn them around into your narrative? Do you say, I got one of those in my fleet of agents, and you say, you know what, we’re not a good fit?

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah, I’m telling them… I’m telling them we’re not a good fit just because that’s the best thing that you can tell a customer to buy our product, to make them buy our product, when you actually try to tell them, look, I think you’re…

Manny Medina:

It’s not you, it’s me.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah.

Manny Medina:

Exactly.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Exactly, exactly. You’re not a good fit, because you are thinking about GTM in a way that doesn’t align with our values, basically. And then I tell them, we actually think that quality should beat quantity in the long run. In an AI slop world, just having more won’t move the needle for you.

Buying and outsourcing your GTM to just AI that blasts your market won’t allow you to win in the long term. What allows you to win in the long term is understanding your market, have fast feedback loops that you can kind of, like, iterate on your GTM motion and become more savvy and more sophisticated.

If you can increase that feedback loop speed by 10x. then that’s what will bring you to be a winner. Not just sending more messages, but having a high quality, that the quality just improves itself constantly.

Manny Medina:

Yeah. Are you… do you think that then the clay budget is then forked a little bit to you? Like, you see what I mean? Because… and the good news on this is that you actually have a budget, you know what I mean? That budget is established. You see what I mean? So you can say, just give me a piece of that budget, and I’ll show you what I can do.

Yeah, I mean, you’re already spending X much on clay or Apollo, whatever, you know, so you’re already bought into this view that there needs to be an engineer, so what if I just give all your, you know, everyone in the market an engineer, and then just, let me prove it out, and then just buy over time and consume more?

Amos Bar Joseph:

Exactly. So, we are leaning towards, a lot of, like, what you call the data enrichment orchestration layer, where you buy, like, Apollos and ZoomInfos and Clays, and basically, Swan can kind of, like, create all this top-of-the-funnel motion for you, orchestrate it, and replace a lot of the SaaS applications, but we positioned it as a build.

Not buy, because when, you know, customers today, how they say, I’m gonna build it my own. What do they mean? They’re not gonna use wood and rock to build it.

Manny Medina:

I’m going to.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Claude, right? So I’m gonna say, yeah, just build it on my platform.

Manny Medina:

Oh, interesting. So, like, you… you’re diverting that energy of people saying, hey, I’m gonna build it anyway, you might as well just build it on… on Swan, if you’re gonna build it. Exactly.

Amos Bar Joseph:

engineering.

Manny Medina:

the right, the right type of tools. Parting thoughts. next year. what are you doing next year? How big is one? What has changed in this perception? Like, even 6 months ago, you were not here. So, like, what’s happening a year from now?

Amos Bar Joseph:

Yeah, so I would say, you know, from just raw numbers, we’re 8 figures ARR, and .

Manny Medina:

No, I’m not a VC, dude. Like, tell me what the team looks like, how are you selling differently, what else is in the bag?

Amos Bar Joseph:

Okay.

Manny Medina:

there is.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Great, I have something… I will zone in on one thing, because we don’t have time to say everything, but I think the most interesting part for, you know, if we’re talking to a GTM audience as well, is that we’re not going to have a CS motion, that’s why we decided, that’s a bet we’re taking.

We’re not going to have a CS motion, because when you’re selling an AI product, the, you know, the contract value could just infinitely grow with an account, just the more value you bring, because a GTM engineer could just build more. More and more and more.

Manny Medina:

Your product is a CS.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Right. My product is a CS, my product is an FDE as well, right? So what we’re trying to create here is a motion where the seller becomes the CS and the FDE as well.

So it kind of takes the form of all these three positions, and tries to constantly think about change management, and about the product implementation, and because it’s a seller that sells to sellers, it’s GTM folks.

Give us understands the work deeply, and we’re trying to create a moat around an organization that can’t really be copied in a way, because our seller uses Swan. to actually create this motion of a FDE CS seller that can constantly work with accounts from first touchpoint to CS and upsell and cross-sell to grow the account basically forever.

And so we’re trying to prove that, and in 12 more months, more months, we want to show that when the world is going towards hiring expensive FDEs that doesn’t make sense from a unit economics perspective.

We’re the only ones who thought about this in advance and merged it into a seller that can deliver the same work, but generate, like, unprecedented quotas, basically.

Manny Medina:

That’s amazing. I literally just talked to a very, very famous growth investor, like, one of the top, you know, 1% tier, and she was like, this whole… delivery of… via FDEs is gonna blow up, because the economics are just not gonna work out. Like, if the product cannot just do it by itself, then it’s just… like, we were barking up the wrong tree.

All right, with that. Julia’s here to shut us off, even though we’re just getting started. Exactly. That was the most fun 30 minutes of my day. Julia’s taking away the punch bowl, the party’s over there.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Thank you.

Julia Nimchinski:

Thank you so much. Man, it was the best part of our chat in a while. Thank you so much. We need to bring it back for round two and focus on paid. Many. What’s up with paid? What’s new?

Manny Medina:

Yeah, we’re still the main monetization platform for anyone launching AI agents. We are not serving SaaS customers, moving to AI agents. We’re serving AI-native customers who want to get paid. We serve the trinity of pricing. value delivered to your customer, and cost, so you can see it all in one platform.

So go get paid, and that’s how we’re here to help.

Julia Nimchinski:

Awesome. Amos? What’s the best next step?

Amos Bar Joseph:

I would say if you’re building agents and you don’t know how to monetize them, then you should go to paid.ai immediately.

Manny Medina:

Thank you so much again. And if you want some more, get some swan. Alright, Team, good to see you all.

Julia Nimchinski:

Awesome. With that.

Manny Medina:

Love you, brother. Talk to you soon.

Amos Bar Joseph:

Bye, Manny.