The Agentic Dilemma: Earning the Right to Scale

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Julia Nimchinski: and we are honored to feature Mark Roberts. Welcome to the show

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Julia Nimchinski: to those of you who are not familiar with Mark mark is an Md. At State capital. The author of the sales acceleration formula.

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Julia Nimchinski: true legend, who scaled Hubspot from 0 to 100 million.

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Julia Nimchinski: and he is releasing a new book.

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Julia Nimchinski: Mark welcome to the show.

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Mark Roberge: Long time. No, see, it was nice to see some old friends in the last panel, too. I didn’t get to say hello, but looks like you are ending a really great conversation.

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Julia Nimchinski: Definitely. We’re really excited to dive in into scaling in a gentic age. But before we do that I just have to ask you a question. Probably you get quite often.

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Julia Nimchinski: If you were to build Hubspot

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Julia Nimchinski: in age of AI in the engent age, what would you do? Differently?

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Julia Nimchinski: Respective tech.

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Mark Roberge: I was the same.

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Mark Roberge: Oh, my gosh!

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Mark Roberge: There’s like been 3 generations since then, Julia, I mean, like all we had when we started, Hubspot was salesforce. That’s it. That was the only option I remember. Like

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Mark Roberge: in the 1st quarter.

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Mark Roberge: Literally like, I remember, I was like, Okay, I mean, you gotta go back, Julia. For a second

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Mark Roberge: people were shocked that we were even closing sales without meeting people in person like, that’s how far back it was, and like everyone, was like worried about Crm adoption. Crm, adoption. We can’t get our field reps to do Crm adoption, and I was going to be worried about it, but because we were operating inside, it was never an issue, and all of a sudden, like that was a changed like moment that, like the Crm. Had migrated from

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Mark Roberge: like this, this pest that my manager kept asking me to fill out. That slowed me down

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Mark Roberge: to like really thinking about how it can speed us up. And it really, I think some of like our early work and my peers across the industry helped like, set the stage for this last phase of sales tech, you know, Rev. Ops and sales tech enablement.

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Mark Roberge: I mean, like just 2 examples. I remember, I was like, Okay, I want to track how many calls and like the results and the emails. And it was like 17 clicks in salesforce out of the box to just log a call log an email and set a task for the next follow up.

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Mark Roberge: And I hired a consultant for 50 K to make that 2 clicks which is essentially like sales, loft and outreach. Now you know what I mean so like literally, that, like kind of, you know in my peers doing the same things. And then another example was, you know, we now could record calls

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Mark Roberge: that was like like mind blowing for people in, you know, like the the you know, 15 years ago, or whatever, and the call recordings were too big to play on my phone, so I literally would have to buckle into a seatbelt my laptop

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Mark Roberge: with a Bluetooth speaker on my drive to and from work to listen to calls, and of course, that led into, like, you know, gone. And all these other things. So so gosh! We are like a generation behind. But now, Julia.

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Mark Roberge: we’re in the early innings of the next phase.

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Mark Roberge: and it’s it’s kind of a cool story, because

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Mark Roberge: hopefully, there is another or a number of

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Mark Roberge: late 20 year old. 1st time sales leaders that are tech forward

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Mark Roberge: that are going to write the book on

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Mark Roberge: this next phase, and really inspire the next set of applications that dominate, which I don’t even know are invented. Yet, to be honest, I mean, we’re starting to see some signs with some of these agentic 1st ones. I’m not sure if they’re it or not, but

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Mark Roberge: history says they’re not. But like we just don’t know

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Mark Roberge: And so, like, just from the ground up, I would basically

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Mark Roberge: create like a sort of a mini use case or job to be done, or however, whatever terminology you want to make through the entire sequence of a customer journey.

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Mark Roberge: And then I would start thinking about what the easiest ones are to make and to identify, or whatever, and that is a balance between effort and value.

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Mark Roberge: and that will probably be a multi-year journey.

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Mark Roberge: And even when we have a solution, there’s a large large percentage that it will be replaced in the next year or so by something that is even better.

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Mark Roberge: So that’s a very abstract, you know, piece, Julia. But I mean, we can get into specifics. I think. Obviously, we’re seeing just tremendous like last year. I feel like it was the age of the agent. On the engineering side we saw tremendous step functions in the productivity of engineering teams with cursor and Claude in some other tools.

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Mark Roberge: We were aggressively looking for any example in the portfolio in our Lp. Base, outside of our Lp. Base. Anything around go to market, and they were hard to come by, and I know we’ve started to see. We’re hoping that this year is going to be the year.

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Mark Roberge: but I do think the lowest hanging fruit obviously is in some of the prospecting arenas of like Icp identification, identification of contacts, creation of personalized outreach. Perhaps the orchestration of that outreach, and I like, I’m hoping that we’re going to see more on the actual sales like belly to belly sales

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Mark Roberge: piece, too, like in the in A, you know, having seen, like 700 of these agent, go to market agents in the last year as we evaluate them for investments, I do think like

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Mark Roberge: the path is probably like

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Mark Roberge: you have to create, like real but safe sandboxes. So let me give you an example of like if the aspiration is to have an agent manage the call.

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Mark Roberge: Then we can basically hire that agent 1st to like

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Mark Roberge: sit on the call as a sales engineer.

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Mark Roberge: Right. That’s pretty low risk. I’m a rep, and I’m running a call. Maybe I’m a newer rep.

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Mark Roberge: and maybe the customer asks me a question about like, do we have a case study in this area? Or does the product do this? Or a question that I normally wouldn’t know? I’d have to note it and then go talk to a Pm. Or something that would be a great role for an agentic engineer that could be live on the call. And in that situation

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Mark Roberge: if hallucinations were to occur. I have a human there to like stop it right, and it’s a very safe, pretty, safe place for them to get at bats. If you want to go even safer, you can do it on internal training. So it’s not even customer facing. But then, once that happens, and many larger companies have so many at bats that happen quickly.

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Mark Roberge: You could get comfortable enough that they switch roles where the agent is running the call, and the human is the engineer.

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Mark Roberge: half playing customer, facing sales engineer and half playing like human in a loop, making sure the agent’s performing well, and they could be like, you know.

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Mark Roberge: you know, logging optimizations that can be then embedded into the learning module and the algorithm to make it better and better. A quarter or 2 go by, and suddenly you might be comfortable. Let the agent do it on its own. So that’s just an example of how we can get creative around an aspirational goal and a path to get there in a safe way that allows us to train them with human loop and to mitigate risks around customer facing Situations.

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Julia Nimchinski: So fascinating. Thank you. Mark a huge concept in your new methodology. I don’t know if it’s even new, but the latest.

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Julia Nimchinski: and I believe the premise of your new book.

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Julia Nimchinski: The signs of scaling is timing so.

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Mark Roberge: I’m just.

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Julia Nimchinski: Bill, and how fast?

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Julia Nimchinski: What are your thoughts on the new Gtm. Motion, when scale is sort of the starting point, and not the progression.

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Mark Roberge: Yeah.

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Mark Roberge: that’s actually a profound question. I haven’t had that much with Julia, and I’m glad you asked it, because it’s a very important question, and you forced me to

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Mark Roberge: reflect and think a lot about that as we kind of as this date approached.

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Mark Roberge: 1st off, let me just like give a little background around the work so that the audience can kind of like have that foundation, and then we can potificate on what changes I’d love any. If you have any ideas, Julia, and then people can send me linkedins or or notes, and if they have ideas too, because it’s a new

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Mark Roberge: we’re in the early ideations process. So the background on the science of scaling. And and just remember, like, I never aspire to write a book. I never do.

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Mark Roberge: It’s more than like

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Mark Roberge: I kind of like. Feel like I have to. I’ve always looked at like my work as like serving the ecosystem. I get so many requests like this, and happy to do like a certain, you know, serve the ecosystem and help the ecosystem.

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Mark Roberge: and when I left Hubspot I joined the fact that Harvard Business School full time to build their sales courses, which, again, that was an amazing opportunity of service, and I also would get a lot of inbound requests from the Vcs that backed Hubspot like Sequoia and general catalyst and matrix saying, Mark, you know, like we just did this series, a investment. Can you help them build their sales team?

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Mark Roberge: And I would do that as an independent board member, as an advisor, and I’d go like a day a week to these companies and like hire like interview people. It was like really a lot of fun, and I did it for like 5 years. Some went public. Some sold for a billion. Some went bankrupt, like, you know, the game.

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Mark Roberge: And

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Mark Roberge: it was. It was a fun time for me, because I wasn’t 80 HA week on one Startup and Company I was spread across so many.

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Mark Roberge: and I started to try to pattern, recognize on the rocket ships versus the bankruptcies, and so many of those reflections came back to when the company at the board level decided to scale revenue, and how fast

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Mark Roberge: and I felt like.

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Mark Roberge: The approach to those questions was not rigorous.

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Mark Roberge: especially for how important those questions were.

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Mark Roberge: and a lot of times they would just say, Hey, listen!

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Mark Roberge: I was an early investor in Snowflake, or Hubspot, or workday, and this is what they did in year 1, 2, and 3. So that’s what you should do, too.

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Mark Roberge: and I know that kind of derives from the venture capital expectation for irr and return.

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Mark Roberge: But, like not, all companies are ready for that. In fact, very few are.

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Mark Roberge: and some of them are, and they take off, and they become data bricks. But most of them are not, and unfortunately, really good businesses, really good founding teams and really good products are ruined

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Mark Roberge: because of forcing that that very siloed approach.

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Mark Roberge: And I’m not saying like they should go slower.

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Mark Roberge: I’m not saying they shouldn’t try to be a hundred 1 billion dollar company. It’s just that, like very few just go like that like they have off quarters, and they?

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Mark Roberge: They have to be able to recognize that. So that’s really what the science of scaling

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Mark Roberge: is intended to do. Is it creates a quantitative framework for boards and founders to calculate using their data

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Mark Roberge: when they are ready to scale. And how fast? Okay? And so just to double, click and do like a handful of the principles. So then, we can address your question, Julie, of like, how does the post AI era

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Mark Roberge: like change that?

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Mark Roberge: And so the principles of the science of scaling are.

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Mark Roberge: 1st off, you have to find product market fit, which is like very obvious, but, like

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Mark Roberge: it, it provides a much more rigorous definition of product market fit, where I think most a lot of founders associate product market fit with revenue and customer acquisition. And I think that’s really bad.

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Mark Roberge: I think, like it’s easy to sell like ice to Eskimos, but it doesn’t mean that ice has product market fit with Eskimos. It just means, you know, how to sell.

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Mark Roberge: and a lot of teams have gotten into trouble with that mindset. So I do think that you have to correlate product market fit more with customer success and retention, and you have to think about defining a leading indicator of retention based on the customer’s extracted value or usage behaviors in the 1st month that would correlate with. So that’s like point number one is like, you got to find product market fit, and you got to define it around your data and customer value creation.

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Mark Roberge: The second point is, you got to then find go to market fit, which is like, Okay, great.

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Mark Roberge: You have product market fit. If we sign up 10 customers this quarter, most of them are going to be successful on your product.

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Mark Roberge: But can you do that profitably?

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Mark Roberge: Does the Cac. Math work does it? Is the Ltv. To Cac. Good is the payback good? Is your burn ratio good? How much are you paying your reps? What’s the Acv. Those are questions we shouldn’t worry about during the product market fit journey, because we’re just trying to make the product work with the customer.

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Mark Roberge: But now we we can’t scale until we have that worked out.

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Mark Roberge: So we’re going to go into this like process. Building and business model definition stage could take a month could take 6 months. Who knows but we know what we’re playing?

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Mark Roberge: And then we’re going into the growth stage, and instead of doing what most people do, which is, they hire like 20 reps right at the beginning of the year

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Mark Roberge: we’re going to establish a pacing

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Mark Roberge: of salespeople and monitor the product marketing go to market fit indicators to see if we are successfully absorbing that pacing and accelerate the pacing. If we are so, we might hire 2 reps a quarter for 3 quarters, and then 4 reps a quarter for 3 quarters, and then 8 reps a quarter for 3 quarters, and that’s a very

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Mark Roberge: systematic way to create a unicorn. Right? So those are the basic principles. Now.

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Mark Roberge: what is the agentic? What does the AI era do to change that?

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Mark Roberge: I don’t think it changes the premise.

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Mark Roberge: That product market fit should be based on the success of your customers.

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Mark Roberge: whether that’s success or is enabled by an agent or not so, I think that’s

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Mark Roberge: and I don’t think it changes the premise that you must find. Go to market fit, which means you have to build a profitable business where the math works.

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Mark Roberge: I do think it could challenge the necessary sequencing.

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Mark Roberge: like, I really encourage people not to work on the

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Mark Roberge: you know the sales math and the compensation plan and the pricing model before you have product market fit.

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Mark Roberge: because you might be optimizing all those things on the wrong product market combination.

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Mark Roberge: But because all this work is

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Mark Roberge: less of the work is done by humans.

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Mark Roberge: there might be more opportunities to like parallel process. Those you know, to some degree.

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Mark Roberge: I also wonder if, like.

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Mark Roberge: there’s been an a rise of

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Mark Roberge: what’s the I’m I’m I’m having a a

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Mark Roberge: a brain freeze here on synthetic data

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Mark Roberge: which basically challenges the principle that, like those companies that have access to really valuable proprietary data will be able to build a better algorithm and have a defensive moat.

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Mark Roberge: But people have had success with engineering their own data, synthetic data in order to

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Mark Roberge: build similar models, even if they don’t have the proprietary data access.

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Mark Roberge: So you could almost like think that

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Mark Roberge: people could get more clever around

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Mark Roberge: getting closer to their true product market fit and go to market fit formula without the like weeks and months of like human driven at bats with customers

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Mark Roberge: by using AI to evaluate like market signals. Okay, so that could be a potential. And then I would say, like

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Mark Roberge: the biggest change I see is in the growth phase, the the time horizon to accelerate.

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Mark Roberge: because, like, I always like, challenge. My students, I’m like, Okay, cool, like, you’re right at scale.

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Mark Roberge: You want to get from like whatever 1 million to 5 million. You’re going to hire these reps? Well, how long do you think it’s gonna take you? You decide to hire 3 reps right now, how long do you think that’s gonna take

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Mark Roberge: not a day. Maybe if you’re cooking a month, remember, they have to quit. Give 2 weeks notice.

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Mark Roberge: Then they have to ramp.

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Mark Roberge: So they have to learn your product. All this stuff. How long is that going to take like

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Mark Roberge: 3 months for a transactional business? 6 to 9 months, for then they have to build a pipeline.

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Mark Roberge: Right? So it’s like, there’s this, it’s almost like a year.

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Mark Roberge: and with an agentic driven model that changes a lot no more hiring, no more ramp.

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Mark Roberge: and that’s going to completely change the growth formula, expectation.

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Mark Roberge: So I don’t know. Like those are some of the things I was thinking is literally Julia. You you kind of forced me to think hard about this

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Mark Roberge: this week. For the 1st time I was still like.

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Mark Roberge: I guess it’s a little weird to come out with a book that isn’t like AI first, st right now, but I’m only doing it because

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Mark Roberge: it just it was something that people kept asking me to come, do speeches on and like, Wow! That was like the top performing speech, and, like Stanford Business School, said, Can we publish this. And then, while he called the it was just all like happened. And also I’m like giving all the proceeds to Mclean Hospital for Mental health, which is like probably one of the biggest motivators for me.

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Mark Roberge: So, but I do. I did have like. I did have confidence that similar to sales acceleration form, and you pointed that out in your nice note last week. I do think these are timeless principles, and some of the underlying mechanics may adjust a little bit or a bit with AI. Did you have other thoughts, Julia, as you like, were

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Mark Roberge: thinking about it? I don’t know.

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Julia Nimchinski: Yeah, I had a very different experience reading your book, I think, 5 years ago. And now.

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Mark Roberge: Yeah. And just to be clear, that was the sales acceleration formula, right? Which is more of like an autobiography of how I use a day jump. So, but yeah, cool. Feel free to chime in on that.

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Julia Nimchinski: I don’t want to dominate

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Julia Nimchinski: 9 min we have here. But yeah, I’m

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Julia Nimchinski: 1st of all really fascinating to hear your growth formula in the engentic age.

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Julia Nimchinski: If you have a minute and can do some sequel

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Julia Nimchinski: on the book, or I don’t know Linkedin Post more events that would be really great. And Mark, I would love to address the ethics of scaling.

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Julia Nimchinski: I know you’re mentioning some.

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Mark Roberge: Oh, yeah.

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Julia Nimchinski: Yes, as of late thinking. Actually, zoom info.

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Julia Nimchinski: They have James Roth here.

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Julia Nimchinski: And yeah, we have a lot of

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Julia Nimchinski: I don’t know, like really wild news in the industry with 11 x and others.

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Julia Nimchinski: So you mentioned that, you know Gdm will be always based on customer success and obviously retention adoption. So with this comes generally like the challenge of what’s the ethics of scaling

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Julia Nimchinski: cost.

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Mark Roberge: That’s great. Yeah, there’s

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Mark Roberge: So I can’t say that I’m an a plus

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01:21:06.580 –> 01:21:34.959
Mark Roberge: student of both the deal and the 11 x situations, like some people know, a listener know more. Some people probably know less. My understanding is with Deal. They’re accused by rippling of paying someone to get a job at rippling so that they had insider viewpoints, insider information on like, how the data and the Crm and how they’re going against it. And there’s there’s countersuits and all that kind of stuff. And

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Mark Roberge: I mean, that’s just like, you know, spying right? I’ll let the courts decide what that is. I think there’s a particular legislation they’re trying to point to. It does sound very sketchy to me, and does sound very unethical. If the claims are true. I mean, you know there are. There are shorter. There are smaller versions of that that many people do which some people are ethically, you know. Think it’s okay, and some people not which is the secret shopper thing, you know. I know there is a lot of people. A lot of our competitors

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01:22:04.810 –> 01:22:18.010
Mark Roberge: had friends take Demos from Hubspot to see how we pitched, and purposely asked, What do you think about X Company to see how they position us against that? That’s a common practice, and I don’t.

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01:22:18.480 –> 01:22:38.220
Mark Roberge: I think people are different on the different ethical bounds. But, like, you know, I think that’s my perception on deal, and then 11 XI think that one was more about misrepresentations of data. I did look at the 11 X deal, and it was certainly stated to me very differently than what I’ve been reading in the press, and what their actual numbers were with churn and revenue.

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01:22:38.744 –> 01:22:43.600
Mark Roberge: That does sound very fishy to me, you know. Of course, like

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01:22:44.420 –> 01:22:51.569
Mark Roberge: it’s the job of the founder to sell the company right and to like, you know. But

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01:22:51.750 –> 01:22:58.559
Mark Roberge: there’s a line right like you can. You can show a certain level of optimism even at the street level with the public markets. There

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Mark Roberge: they need to create an accurate one, but they also should be. Oftentimes they’re optimistic about things they’re pursuing.

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01:23:06.740 –> 01:23:11.369
Mark Roberge: But like when you tell someone that revenue is X, and it’s y

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Mark Roberge: like, there’s a line, and I’ll let the courts decide. We’ve had some rulings in the past now, with the aspects of scale.

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01:23:20.830 –> 01:23:31.380
Mark Roberge: you know, there’s probably there’s there’s examples of like how you know, you never want to have a business that’s going to destroy society with pollution and stuff. And that’s why I think a lot of technicians, including myself, have been

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01:23:31.560 –> 01:23:38.699
Mark Roberge: pontificating about the economic and societal impacts of AI, because we don’t want to be bringing that to market. If if we’re not

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01:23:38.970 –> 01:23:40.879
Mark Roberge: feeling good about the impact.

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Mark Roberge: And I think that’s a very separate conversation, and one that I think I’m still understanding myself.

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01:23:48.050 –> 01:23:50.800
Mark Roberge: But with regard to scale.

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01:23:51.570 –> 01:23:56.149
Mark Roberge: I do broach the ethical subject with my students.

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Mark Roberge: because when we teach the founder selling class, we do root some of the concepts in behavioral psychology principles

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01:24:05.280 –> 01:24:09.020
Mark Roberge: that you know, I would say, like

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01:24:09.480 –> 01:24:13.260
Mark Roberge: this is my. This is my basic framework of how

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01:24:13.560 –> 01:24:19.439
Mark Roberge: personal selling works. And it’s not like 5. I can’t say it in 5 words. This is as simple as I could say it.

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01:24:20.930 –> 01:24:27.290
Mark Roberge: the way that sales works, and they’re coming in thinking that it’s about persuasive presentations, right? So they’re like way off, right?

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01:24:27.480 –> 01:24:33.289
Mark Roberge: The way that sales works is step number one. It’s about developing quick trust

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01:24:33.460 –> 01:24:41.180
Mark Roberge: with the prospects so that you could ask open-ended questions about their perspective, their priorities.

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01:24:41.290 –> 01:24:45.040
Mark Roberge: the opportunities they’re pursuing, the challenges they’re trying to address.

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01:24:45.370 –> 01:24:50.719
Mark Roberge: And through that dialogue you can navigate the conversation toward the area that you solved

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01:24:50.990 –> 01:24:56.630
Mark Roberge: in order to explore whether or not they think that’s important and how they think they’re going to solve it.

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01:24:57.290 –> 01:25:00.760
Mark Roberge: If they think the problem you solve is critical.

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01:25:00.890 –> 01:25:03.260
Mark Roberge: and they are looking for a solution.

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01:25:03.640 –> 01:25:08.119
Mark Roberge: they looking to solve it in the same way that you solve it. Great

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01:25:08.810 –> 01:25:17.620
Mark Roberge: tailor, the presentation to their context, so they can really connect with it and spend a lot of time with that deal, because you’re going to close a lot of those

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01:25:18.860 –> 01:25:31.310
Mark Roberge: if they are not in that bucket if they are prioritizing the problem, but have a different solution in mind, a different way to solve it. Or they’re prioritizing other problems and not yours.

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01:25:31.720 –> 01:25:34.550
Mark Roberge: Then you have to ask yourself a question.

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01:25:34.850 –> 01:25:36.549
Mark Roberge: and this is the ethical part.

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01:25:37.230 –> 01:25:41.500
Mark Roberge: If I quit my job as my salesperson and took over their role?

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01:25:42.330 –> 01:25:44.279
Mark Roberge: Do I agree with their perspective.

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01:25:45.100 –> 01:25:47.830
Mark Roberge: knowing what I know about their company and their role?

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01:25:47.960 –> 01:25:49.940
Mark Roberge: Do they have their priorities right?

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01:25:50.240 –> 01:25:51.920
Mark Roberge: And is their strategy right?

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01:25:52.720 –> 01:25:58.609
Mark Roberge: And if it is, do not sell that deal like that’s a disservice like.

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01:25:58.850 –> 01:26:02.729
Mark Roberge: recommend something that you know and ask for a referral to someone else.

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01:26:03.990 –> 01:26:13.269
Mark Roberge: But if you’re if you think they’re wrong, and oftentimes we’re working for our company as a salesperson for a reason, because we really believe in the mission. So oftentimes we do think they’re wrong.

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Mark Roberge: then attempt to reframe their perspective

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01:26:17.270 –> 01:26:22.229
Mark Roberge: so that they are prioritizing the problem you solve, and they want to solve it in the way that you’ve envisioned.

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01:26:22.700 –> 01:26:38.830
Mark Roberge: and that I’m struggling with a very rigorous framework on that. I do know that the best people I know on reframing, are therapists. I’m a big therapy believer, and I can go into some therapy sessions very sad.

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Mark Roberge: and I walk out very happy, and all my therapist did was ask me 6 questions. That is beautiful reframing.

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Mark Roberge: So maybe we can like

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01:26:49.320 –> 01:26:56.530
Mark Roberge: obsessed over the lore of that area. But hopefully that that explains the ethical element of

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01:26:57.110 –> 01:27:06.989
Mark Roberge: like sales and scaling. And when you want to like, really reframe, someone’s perspective, and when you want to let them just do what’s right for them and their business.

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01:27:08.270 –> 01:27:18.969
Julia Nimchinski: This is great reminds me of your hiring formula, mark, we have only 1 min here, and the last question love to address is your role at stage 2.

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Julia Nimchinski: How do you? What’s your investment? Thesis in the age of AI. I don’t want to sound cheesy, but I mean, obviously, we are seeing a shift from headcounts to gpus.

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01:27:30.500 –> 01:27:30.820
Mark Roberge: Yes.

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Julia Nimchinski: So, yeah.

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01:27:32.220 –> 01:27:32.950
Mark Roberge: Yeah.

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01:27:33.030 –> 01:27:42.659
Mark Roberge: so yeah, just really quick. Stage 2 capital again, like something that was presented to me and was like, Wow, that is what I meant to do.

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01:27:42.710 –> 01:28:02.509
Mark Roberge: It’s like the late Steve Jobs. You can only connect the dots. Looking backwards, we are the 1st Vc. Firm exclusively run and backed by go to market leaders, the Cros, the Cmos, the Ccos, the Revops, leaders of the best tech companies out there. We have 850 of them in the network of many of the brands that you know.

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01:28:02.540 –> 01:28:20.160
Mark Roberge: and we just believe that there is a important missing narrative at the board level and the cap table level of revenue expertise revenue is critical, the lifeblood of every organization. And we want to bring stronger expertise to make more of these startups successful.

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01:28:20.585 –> 01:28:30.379
Mark Roberge: So we are a seed fund. We invest. When companies are between half a million one and a half. We lead those rounds. We think that’s an important time to

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01:28:30.520 –> 01:28:34.510
Mark Roberge: impact folks. With regard to AI.

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01:28:36.970 –> 01:28:41.279
Mark Roberge: We just feel like we’ve been very. We have some investments in there.

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01:28:42.510 –> 01:28:46.720
Mark Roberge: We’ve been very careful because we still feel like we’re in signs of the hype cycle.

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01:28:46.960 –> 01:28:50.929
Mark Roberge: where people just don’t know what a sustainable business is.

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01:28:51.120 –> 01:29:01.589
Mark Roberge: We still kind of feel most of these businesses will not be able to defend themselves against either the foundational models, the large incumbents, or future AI attackers.

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01:29:02.300 –> 01:29:21.139
Mark Roberge: So we have to be very crystal clear around what the sustainable Mo is. As foundational models put pressure on integrating up into their application use case, and as the incumbents get more aggressive around building it into their platforms. So we’re very rigorous around that.

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01:29:22.870 –> 01:29:25.210
Mark Roberge: The tricky thing with that is

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01:29:25.310 –> 01:29:28.980
Mark Roberge: oftentimes the vision behind that moat.

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01:29:29.440 –> 01:29:31.900
Mark Roberge: the tech and the market’s not ready for it.

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01:29:32.160 –> 01:29:37.230
Mark Roberge: I think the classic example is Amazon. Back in the Internet days Bezos

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01:29:37.540 –> 01:29:43.209
Mark Roberge: set out to sell everything online but didn’t start there because we weren’t ready.

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01:29:43.580 –> 01:29:52.849
Mark Roberge: He started with books because people were ready for that, and that allowed him to build his moat of a decentralized warehousing and delivery mechanism.

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01:29:53.120 –> 01:30:07.709
Mark Roberge: So that it’s those types of like really precise entrepreneurial vision and execution where you can print money and acquire customers today, while at the same time building your sustainable moat of the future.

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01:30:07.910 –> 01:30:19.610
Mark Roberge: And we’re over by a minute. You can. You can Google. I wrote some articles about that about what some of those sustainable moats are. They’re on my linkedin. That I think are new in the AI era.

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01:30:20.900 –> 01:30:23.940
Julia Nimchinski: Thank you so much, Mark. Huge honor hosting you.

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01:30:24.040 –> 01:30:28.999
Julia Nimchinski: And I guess the really last question is, when’s the pre-order of your book? Gonna be up.

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01:30:30.290 –> 01:30:31.300
Mark Roberge: I don’t know.

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01:30:31.750 –> 01:30:41.323
Mark Roberge: I’m supposed to deliver it in June, and then we have to go through the whole editing thing. I think the goal is, try to get it for Q. 4, so we can like take advantage of the holiday season. So

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01:30:42.030 –> 01:30:45.400
Mark Roberge: busting my hump to try to hit that, so we’ll see.

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01:30:46.300 –> 01:30:54.349
Julia Nimchinski: Awesome. Keep us posted happy to spread in the community, and we are transitioning to our next session.