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Salesforce renamed Commerce Cloud to Agentforce Commerce and calls this its biggest release in years. Rebrand, or substance? Nitin Mangtani makes the case.Every enterprise vendor is bolting "agentic" onto its roadmap this year. Salesforce went further and renamed the whole product. Nitin Mangtani, who runs Commerce and Retail Cloud, came on to defend the release line by line.We get into Storefront Next, the new storefront meant to serve both the merchant who wants clicks and prompts out of the box and the developer writing code with AI-native tools. The agentic layer: a search engine built on shopper intent instead of keywords, native chat, a ChatGPT catalog integration going live in June, and a shopper agent that's supposed to behave like the associate you'd get in a good store. The B2B story the B2C headlines tend to bury, including round-trip quoting, multicart, and a buying flow that runs on WhatsApp. And modern POS, where the bet is that systems nobody has rethought in twenty years are finally worth rebuilding.Nitin came in through the PredictSpring acquisition two years ago and ran Google's shopping team back in the early 2000s, so he's watched the discovery layer move before. His line throughout: technology for its own sake is worthless. Tie it to ROI and a better customer experience, or don't ship it.So I pushed on the question every merchant on the platform is actually asking. Hear Agentforce Commerce, Storefront Next, and a ChatGPT integration in the same week, and what changes for you, and how soon? Listen and decide whether the rebrand earns the airtime.The Watson Weekly interview is sponsored by Avalara - the agentic AI platform automating global tax and compliance for leading eCommerce brands. For more details: https://avalaratax.watsonweekly.com.
WBSRocks: Business Growth with ERP and Digital Transformation
Send us Fan MailThis week's enterprise software developments further demonstrate how rapidly vendors are embedding agentic AI, governed automation, and composable data architectures into core enterprise workflows. Rootstock Software strengthened its manufacturing and warehouse execution strategy through the acquisition of Ascent Solutions, while Anaplan expanded its AI planning portfolio with CoModeler, Custom Analyst, and Agent Studio to accelerate enterprise planning automation. In the go-to-market space, Apollo.io acquired Pocus to build a more agentic revenue operations stack, and Zapier partnered with Rillet to connect general ledger workflows with thousands of operational applications. Meanwhile, Databricks introduced Lakewatch as an open, agentic SIEM platform built on the lakehouse architecture, and Oracle launched Fusion Agentic Applications designed to place coordinated AI agents directly inside ERP workflows. Governance and enterprise trust also emerged as central themes, with Relyance AI unveiling Lyo to monitor how AI agents interact with enterprise data, while Salesforce introduced AI Foundry to operationalize research into enterprise-ready AI models. Finally, Spade raised significant funding to transform messy transaction strings into finance-grade AI data, reinforcing how semantic normalization and governed enterprise context are becoming foundational to the next generation of AI-native enterprise systems.In today's episode, we invited a panel of industry analysts for a live discussion on LinkedIn to analyze current enterprise software stories. We covered many grounds including the direction and roadmaps of each enterprise software vendors. Finally, we analyzed future trends and how they might shape the enterprise software industry.Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hekHpEgI0zMQuestions for Panelists?
This video is sponsored by Salesforce. This week on The Modern Customer Podcast: Amber Armstrong, CMO of Agentforce Applications at Salesforce, joins me for a conversation recorded live at Salesforce Connections. Everyone is talking about AI agents. But according to Amber, the biggest question customers are asking is surprisingly simple: "Where do I start?" We discuss what's separating companies seeing real results from those still stuck in experimentation, why data readiness matters more than most people realize, and how AI agents are helping marketers engage customers, generate pipeline, and focus more on strategic work. As Amber explains, the future isn't about replacing marketers. It's about giving them the tools to do more of what humans do best. #SalesforcePartner Blake Morgan was called "The Queen of CX" by Meta. She is a customer experience futurist and author of three books on customer experience. Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here. Learn more at www.blakemichellemorgan.com
Today, I'm joined by Travis Hahler, founder of The Neurological Nomad, strategy and transformation leader at Salesforce, and author of Rethink Resistance. Travis brings together neuroscience, psychology, and business leadership to help organizations better understand how people respond to change and how leaders can communicate more effectively through transformation. In this episode, Travis and I explore why people naturally resist change, how neuroscience influences the way messages are received, and what leaders can do to communicate in ways that build trust instead of triggering fear and uncertainty. Whether you're leading organizational change, managing a team, or simply looking to become a more effective communicator, this conversation offers practical insights you can put to work immediately. Let's dive in. Additional Resources: ► Follow Communispond on LinkedIn for more communication skills tips: https://www.linkedin.com/company/communispond ► Connect with Scott D'Amico on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottdamico/ ► Connect with Travis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travisdhahler/ ► Purchase Travis's book here: https://linktr.ee/theneurologicalnomad ► Learn more about The Neurological Nomad: https://travishahler.com/ ► Subscribe to Communicast: https://communicast.simplecast.com/ ► Learn more about Communispond: https://www.communispond.com
In der heutigen Folge sprechen die Finanzjournalisten Philipp Vetter und Holger Zschäpitz über das SpaceX-Wunder, Nvidias billigen Finanztrick und die überkaufteste Aktie der US-Börsengeschichte. Außerdem geht es um Western Digital, Morgan Stanley, SanDisk, Fox, Roku, Salesforce, Rheinmetall, Hensoldt, Leonardo, Deutsche Telekom, RWE, E.on, AT&S, AMD, Commerzbank, UniCredit, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, Cheniere, Redcare Pharmacy, Jefferies, DocMorris, Amazon. Wir freuen uns an Feedback über aaa@welt.de. Noch mehr "Alles auf Aktien" findet Ihr bei WELTplus und Apple Podcasts – inklusive aller Artikel der Hosts. Hier bei WELT: https://www.welt.de/podcasts/alles-auf-aktien/plus247399208/Boersen-Podcast-AAA-Bonus-Folgen-Jede-Woche-noch-mehr-Antworten-auf-Eure-Boersen-Fragen.html. Hier könnt ihr den AAA-Newsletter abonnieren: https://www.welt.de/newsletter/article232797673/Alles-auf-Aktien-Der-taegliche-Boersen-Newsletter-fuer-WELTplus-Abonnenten.html Und - ganz neu: AAA gibt es jetzt auch auf Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alles_auf_aktien/ Disclaimer: Die im Podcast besprochenen Aktien und Fonds stellen keine spezifischen Kauf- oder Anlage-Empfehlungen dar. Die Moderatoren und der Verlag haften nicht für etwaige Verluste, die aufgrund der Umsetzung der Gedanken oder Ideen entstehen. Hörtipps: Für alle, die noch mehr wissen wollen: Holger Zschäpitz können Sie jede Woche im Finanz- und Wirtschaftspodcast "Deffner&Zschäpitz" hören. +++ Werbung +++ Du möchtest mehr über unsere Werbepartner erfahren? Hier findest du alle Infos & Rabatte! https://linktr.ee/alles_auf_aktien Impressum: https://www.welt.de/services/article7893735/Impressum.html Datenschutz: https://www.welt.de/services/article157550705/Datenschutzerklaerung-WELT-DIGITAL.html
AI will not fix a business that does not understand itself.In this episode, John sits down with Julie Averill, founder of Gold Thread and former CIO of lululemon, to talk about real transformation, AI adoption, technology leadership, and what companies need to understand before they rush into the next big platform shift. Julie also shares lessons from her time leading technology through major growth at lululemon, digital transformation at Nordstrom, and the early signals that told her when a system problem was really a culture problem.If you are leading sales, technology, enablement, or go-to-market strategy, this episode gives you a practical look at why AI has to serve the business, why trust still drives innovation, and why the companies that win will understand what makes them truly different before the market decides for them.Want to build the kind of team and operating model that can keep up with where business is heading next? Visit www.jbarrows.com and learn how you can Make It Happen.What You'll LearnWhy AI strategy needs to start with business strategy, not technology experimentsHow the dot-com shift mirrors what companies are experiencing with AI todayWhy AI is changing how customers discover, compare, and choose brandsWhat a 20-hour website outage revealed about culture, ownership, and escalationWhy innovation depends on trust, candor, and teams that can take risks togetherWhy AI reveals organizational dysfunction instead of magically fixing itWhy real transformation requires human intelligence, not just artificial intelligenceJulie Averill is the founder of Gold Thread and former Chief Information Officer of lululemon, where she led the technology transformation that helped scale the company from $2 billion to over $10 billion in revenue. Prior to lululemon, she led omni-channel and digital transformations at Nordstrom and REI. Today, she advises boards, CEOs, and founders at the intersection of AI capability and organizational readiness, and her book Chief Impact Officer comes out June 16.Connect with Julie Averill:Website: https://goldthreadllc.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julieaverill/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julie_averill_/Grab Julie's new book Chief Impact Officer, out June 16 — connect with her on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/julieaverill) or visit goldthreadllc.comJohn Barrows is a sales trainer, speaker, and founder of JB Sales with over 25 years of experience in the industry. He has made hundreds of cold calls a week, led startups to acquisition, and trained high-performing teams at companies like Salesforce, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Okta. Through JB Sales, John focuses on practical sales execution—helping reps fill pipeline, close deals, and build trust with buyers in today's AI-driven sales environment.Connect with John Barrows:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbarrows/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnmbarrows/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@johnmbarrowsCheck out John's Membership: https://learn.jbarrows.com/pages/individual-packages?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=podcastJoin John's Newsletter: https://www.jbarrows.com/newsletter
Take charge of your future. Our next group proram starts in September and is limited to 10 people. The Very Early Registration discount (45%) ends on June 21. Learn more here. — Dan Pontefract spent two decades building leadership, culture, and engagement inside high-tech and telecom organizations, and never once thought seriously about age. Then, in his early fifties, he had a wake-up call. It sent him to look under a rock he'd never lifted, where he found “an absolute cavern of issues.” The result is his sixth book, The Future is Grey: The Untapped Value of Age in the Workforce. Dan lays out the coming “bell to bulb” demographic inversion and the risks for organizations ignoring it. For individuals, he reframes the whole arc of a working life, from the language of generations (which he rejects as an ageist cognitive bias) to three universal career eras: Rivers, Rocks, and Rubies. That demographic inversion means experience will become more scarce and valuable. The through-line is don’t retire, rewire instead. He shares stories of people who kept working or returned to work in a different way, which brings his concept of the “experience dividend” to life. ________________________ Bio Dan Pontefract is a renowned leadership and culture strategist, author, and keynote speaker with over two decades of experience in senior executive roles at companies such as SAP, TELUS, and Business Objects. Since then, he has worked with organizations globally, including Salesforce, Amgen, State of Tennessee, Nestlé, Canada Post, Autodesk, BMO, Government of Canada, Manulife, Nutrien, UBC, McGill University, Virgin Media O2, City of Toronto, among others. Dan has firsthand experience in turning leaders and corporate cultures into a competitive advantage. In addition to The Future of Work Is Grey, Dan has written five other books: WORK-LIFE BLOOM, LEAD. CARE. WIN., OPEN TO THINK, THE PURPOSE EFFECT, and FLAT ARMY garnering multiple awards including the Thinkers50 Top New Management Book and the Axiom Business Book Awards Gold Medal. Dan has also written for Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Leader to Leader, The Globe and Mail, Inc., among other outlets. Dan is a renowned keynote speaker who has presented at four TED events and delivered over 600 keynotes. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria and has received over 25 personal awards. Dan’s career is interwoven with corporate and academic experience, coupled with an MBA, B.Ed, and multiple distinctions. Notably, Dan is listed on the Thinkers50 Radar, HR Weekly’s 100 Most Influential People in HR, PeopleHum’s Top 200 Thought Leaders to Follow, and Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers. ___________________________ The Future is Grey: The Untapped Value of Age in the Workforce Website ___________________________ Other Retirement Podcast Conversations You’ll Love The Second Curve of Life – Arthur C. Brooks Design a Phased Retirement – Anna Rappaport Rewirement – Helen Dennis ___________________________ Wise Quotes On Wisdom “Wisdom is to the experience dividend what oxygen is to fire.” On Retiring Retirement “Instead of using the word retire, I very much encourage people to use the word rewire.” On Demographic Shifts “We're shifting from a bell-shaped society to a bulb-shaped society, and it's going to change the talent makeup of your organization very, very soon.” ___________________________ About The Retirement Wisdom Podcast There are many podcasts on retirement, often hosted by financial advisors with their own financial motives, that cover the money side of the street. This podcast is different. You'll get smarter about the investment decisions you'll make about the most important asset you'll have in retirement: your time. About Retirement Wisdom I help people who are retiring, but aren't quite done yet, discover what's next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn't just happen by accident. Schedule a call today to discuss how the Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one — on your own terms. About Your Podcast Host Joe Casey is an executive coach who helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a 26-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Joe has earned Master's degrees from the University of Southern California in Gerontology (at age 60), the University of Pennsylvania, and Middlesex University (UK), a BA in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his coaching certification from Columbia University. In addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, ranked in the top 1% globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 2 million downloads. Business Insider recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He's the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.
Since 2023, illicit financial activity has surged by $1.3 trillion, reaching an estimated $4.4 trillion globally. The reason isn't a mystery: bad actors have AI now too.In this episode of One Vision Podcast, Theodora Lau sits down with Tyler Allen, CEO of Unit21, to unpack what's happening on the front lines of AI-powered fraud. Tyler was Unit21's founding software engineer and he is now leading the company through a moment he calls "have your cake and eat it too": AI is finally cheaper than the human labor it could replace, and unlike humans, it doesn't get alert fatigue.The conversation goes deeper on:• The fundamental asymmetry between attackers and defenders — and why AI made it worse• Why majority of AI pilots fail (hint: it's almost never the technology) • Why AI makes sense for financial crime prevention and detection • What he asks potential buyers, from ownership and goals, to risk tolerance and more • What every FI should be demanding from their AI vendorsA conversation about the new physics of fraud — and the human consequences of getting it wrong.
In this episode of Run the Numbers, CJ sits down with Dan Bettes, CFO of SoundCloud, at the New York Stock Exchange. Dan breaks down how SoundCloud operates as a two-sided music marketplace, how he thinks about liquidity between fans and creators, and why great finance leaders need to make forecasting feel owned by the business—SPONSORS:Aleph is a modern FP&A platform built for teams that want more than another planning tool. By connecting your ERP, CRM, and other systems into one trusted data layer with AI workflows, Aleph helps you move faster with real-time insights. Get a personalized demo at https://www.getaleph.com/runRightRev is an automated revenue recognition platform that lets your product team ship new pricing without asking finance for permission, and your sales team close deals without creating downstream chaos. Check out their free tool at calculator.rightrev.com It scores your rev rec process, shows what's exposing you to risk, and tells you exactly where to focus before it bites you in the rear end. Check it out at https://calculator.rightrev.comRillet is an AI-native ERP built for modern finance teams that want to replace NetSuite and close faster. With revenue recognition, close management, multi-entity support, and native Stripe and Salesforce integrations, Rillet helps scaling companies run their finance stack in one place. Hundreds of teams, including Windsurf and Mercor, use Rillet to make the zero-day close real. Book a demo at https://www.rillet.com/cjEY has been part of Silicon Valley since it was just a valley, helping the most successful names in tech go from startup to exit to megacap. With teams across strategy, tax, audit, and transactions, EY helps you get your financials right early, long before your investors start asking for it. You build the next big thing, and EY will help you build it right. Learn more at https://www.ey.com/techstartupsSpendHound cuts your SaaS and AI spend by up to 30% using real pricing benchmarks across 10,000 vendors, so you always know what fair pricing looks like before your next renewal. Rated #1 on G2 in SaaS spend management, it's free forever for teams up to 1,000 employees. Sign up by June 12th and get $500 just for getting started. Go to https://www.spendhound.com/cjBrex is an intelligent finance platform with AI-powered agents that capture expenses automatically, enforce policy before the spend happens, and close your books in minutes instead of weeks. 35,000+ companies like OpenAI, Coinbase, Anthropic, and DoorDash already run on Brex. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at https://www.brex.com/metrics—LINKS: Mostly Talent: https://mostlymetrics.typeform.com/to/cLTxtAsNGuest: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielbettes/Company: https://soundcloud.com/CJ: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cj-gustafson-13140948/Mostly metrics: https://www.mostlymetrics.com—TIMESTAMPS:0:00 Preview and Intro2:17 First stock: a Vanguard index fund3:13 Most memorable IPO: Groupon4:54 Benefits of going public have changed5:47 SoundCloud and the music industry7:21 Three eras: physical, streaming, creator platform8:49 Streaming unbundled the album10:03 Artists don't need labels anymore11:40 Sponsors — Aleph | RightRev | Rillet15:00 SoundCloud's two-sided business model16:23 Touring replaced the album17:17 First metric every morning: net adds18:31 DAU vs. MAU: it's a funnel19:14 Viral moments and exogenous pops20:10 LTV and the subscription funnel21:38 Sponsors — EY | SpendHound | Brex24:35 Tops-down vs. bottoms-up: reconcile both26:21 Revenue is an output27:45 Handling forecast deviation29:24 How often to reforecast30:23 The final boss: indirect cash flow statement33:09 Cash vs. EBITDA fluency35:04 Plain English and the power of reps36:52 Tailor the message to the audience37:45 Lightning round37:45 Screwed up: miscounted corn at a banquet38:41 Lean into discomfort39:55 Craziest expense: a post-flight massage40:17 Credits
In this solo episode of the CPQ Podcast, Frank Sohn discusses why many organizations are reassessing their Salesforce CPQ roadmap, what the shift toward Salesforce's newer Revenue Cloud and Agentforce Revenue Management direction may mean, and why customers should evaluate their next step through a practical lens: CPQ fit, technical debt, ERP integration, lifecycle requirements, administrative capacity, and total cost. Frank also discusses four possible paths Salesforce CPQ customers may consider: maintaining the current Salesforce CPQ environment, rebuilding in the newer Salesforce revenue architecture, evaluating adjacent CPQ solutions, or pursuing a hybrid CRM/ERP-connected approach. Frank is also running a LinkedIn poll to better understand how Salesforce CPQ customers, partners, and the broader CPQ community are responding to the End-of-Sale announcement. The goal is to reach at least 150 responses, with input from existing Salesforce CPQ customers especially valuable. Please participate in the poll here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/franksohn_cpq-salesforcecpq-revops-ugcPost-7467355151666851842-TPBl/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAAU2i0BWKhaM_S5HnJZQ0umyO26waCmOM8
Dan Newman heads FP&A at RingCentral, a $2.5B public SaaS company (a platform for business phone, SMS, contact center, workforce engagement management, video collaboration, and messaging) , where he has overseen a period of 10X growth. Discussing a career comprising consulting, being a financial analyst at Salesforce, private-equity-backed startups, Dan discusses building financial models towards a sale, navigating the shift from 30% growth to efficiency, and AI processes. In this episode Building the FP&A team at SchoolMessenger and pivoting to a sale Joining RingCentral at a $250m run rate and a six-person FP&A team towards $2.5billion Why revenue is rarely as simple as it looks Business partnering in an age of efficiency in SaaS
One company now has more AI agents deployed in its organization than it has human employees. Slack's CMO Ryan Gavin dropped that stat into a conversation with Craig Smith, and then immediately identified the secondary problem it creates: when your digital workforce outnumbers your human one, how do employees know which agent to call for which task? That orchestration problem, and the conversational interface that solves it, is what this episode is really about. Gavin describes Slack bot's transformation from a notification tool into what he calls the ChatGPT moment for the enterprise, an AI that doesn't just understand the internet, but understands your business, your team, your customers, and your company's entire conversational history, all the way back to day one. The conversation covers the full arc of what this shift means in practice: a Salesforce executive walking into an unfamiliar meeting and being praised for their questions, because Slack bot had prepared them in minutes using the team's full history; a marketer who built his own data scientist agent over a weekend and is now completely unshackled from the bottleneck that was slowing him down; and Gavin's most honest admission, that he's been saying for years that AI won't replace jobs, but this is the first time he actually believes it, because the soul-crushing "work of work" is finally shrinking, and what's left is the kind of creative, high-energy output that people actually want to do. The inbox, he says, is a deathtrap in the AI era. The companies that figure out how to move beyond it will outperform their competitors by multiples. Subscribe to Eye on A.I. for weekly conversations with the people building and deploying the future of AI.
In this Marketing Over Coffee: Changing how healthcare is delivered, going all int on Data 360, AI, and more!! Direct Link to File Starting out on the medical path toward doctor The bubble popping Neilson Netratings Database marketing led to running the frequent flyer program Over to UPS His 6th Salesforce implementation The culmination of […] The post UChicago Medicine CMO Andrew Chang at Salesforce Connections! appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.
Patrick Van Deven: The Frontier Firm Has a Data Problem In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VanderLinden sits down with Patrick Van Deven to unpack one of the biggest hidden blockers to becoming a true AI-native enterprise: legacy data infrastructure. As organizations rush toward the “Frontier Firm” vision championed by Microsoft — intelligence on tap, human-agent collaboration, and AI-powered workflows — Patrick argues that most regulated industries are still running on fragmented data pipelines built decades ago. Beneath the excitement around agentic AI lies a critical operational reality: data remains horizontally distributed across systems such as SAP, Salesforce, Guidewire, and legacy warehouses, stitched together by opaque code that no one fully understands anymore. Patrick explains why the future of AI in regulated industries depends less on flashy copilots and more on deterministic, governed, audit-ready data transformation. Drawing from his 35 years in enterprise software and his leadership at Volspeed, he outlines how AI is now reshaping data engineering itself — automating the “plumbing” layer while generating the metadata and lineage AI systems need to operate responsibly. Together, Sabine and Patrick explore why re-architecting does not require a dangerous core system replacement, how organizations can solve tractable business problems in months rather than years, and why the next generation of enterprise leaders must bridge business expertise and data intelligence. This conversation is a practical roadmap for any executive navigating AI transformation inside complex, regulated environments. KEY TAKEAWAYS What stood out most to me in this conversation with Patrick was the reality that the “Frontier Firm” conversation is no longer about experimentation. It is about operational readiness. Every organization I speak to wants intelligence on tap, agentic workflows, and AI-enabled productivity, yet many are still constrained by fragmented legacy systems and undocumented data logic buried deep inside their infrastructure. Patrick made it very clear: if we do not solve the data foundation problem, we simply accelerate complexity and risk. One insight that resonated deeply was the idea that data engineering is entering the same transformation that software engineering experienced with generative AI. The real opportunity is not just automation, but abstraction — enabling smaller teams to solve historically impossible integration problems while creating governed, machine-readable metadata that AI systems can actually trust and consume responsibly. I was also struck by Patrick's perspective on talent. Rather than replacing expertise, AI elevates the importance of subject matter experts who understand the business context behind the data. The future belongs to professionals who can bridge operational understanding with technical fluency and collaborate effectively with AI-enabled systems. Most importantly, this conversation reinforced that becoming a Frontier Firm does not require ripping out every core system overnight. The no-regret move is to start solving tractable, high-value data problems now — especially those tied to governance, lineage, regulatory reporting, and customer intelligence. Organizations that modernize their deterministic data layer today will be the ones capable of building scalable, trustworthy AI tomorrow. BEST MOMENTS “You can bolt all the AI you want on top of that. It will not make you a frontier firm. It will just make your regulatory problems arrive faster.” — Sabine VanderLinden “AI is coming to data engineering just like it came to software engineering.” — Patrick Van Deven “The board looks at AI at the end of the value chain of data. But how did that data come to be?” — Patrick Van Deven “There is no world where a company would run on one system.” — Patrick Van Deven “Treat the AI agent like an employee. Onboard it, brief it, give it a personality.” — Sabine VanderLinden “The dragon in the basement has finally reached the boardroom.” — Patrick Van Deven “No data lineage. No agent bosses. No governed transformation. No intelligence on tap.” — Sabine VanderLinden “This is a new era for subject matter experts.” — Patrick Van Deven ABOUT THE GUEST Patrick Van Deven is the CEO of Vaultspeed and a veteran enterprise software leader with more than 35 years of experience in software engineering, predictive analytics, data infrastructure, and venture investing. Patrick began his career as a software engineer, building and selling his first commercial application at just 22 years old. He later spent 15 years at SAS Institute, where he helped build data and predictive analytics applications for enterprise environments. He then transitioned into venture capital as an Operating Partner and General Partner at Fortino Capital, investing in software and AI startups across Europe. In 2025, Patrick stepped back into an operational leadership role as CEO of Vaultspeed, driven by his belief that automating deterministic, governed data transformation is one of the most critical “no-regret moves” organizations can make in the age of AI. Today, Vaultspeed works with major global enterprises, including organizations operating across highly regulated industries such as insurance, banking, and financial services. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you're interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures
How does a modern CEO lead a global, hybrid workforce while staying connected to every employee? I recently sat down with Kevin Akeroyd, CEO of Sovos, a tax and compliance specialist for Fortune 500 companies. Kevin shared practical, clear insights on leadership, growth, and retention. Here are five that stood out:
In this episode of Run the Numbers, CJ breaks down Bending Spoons' F-1 filing and the acquisition machine behind AOL, Evernote, Vimeo, Eventbrite, and more. He unpacks the company's playbook: buy under-optimized digital businesses, transform operations, raise prices, reinvest earnings, and repeat — while asking the core question: how much was built, and how much was bought?—SPONSORS:RightRev is an automated revenue recognition platform that lets your product team ship new pricing without asking finance for permission, and your sales team close deals without creating downstream chaos. Check out their free tool at calculator.rightrev.com It scores your rev rec process, shows what's exposing you to risk, and tells you exactly where to focus before it bites you in the rear end. Check it out at https://calculator.rightrev.comRillet is an AI-native ERP built for modern finance teams that want to replace NetSuite and close faster. With revenue recognition, close management, multi-entity support, and native Stripe and Salesforce integrations, Rillet helps scaling companies run their finance stack in one place. Hundreds of teams, including Windsurf and Mercor, use Rillet to make the zero-day close real. Book a demo at https://www.rillet.com/cjEY has been part of Silicon Valley since it was just a valley, helping the most successful names in tech go from startup to exit to megacap. With teams across strategy, tax, audit, and transactions, EY helps you get your financials right early, long before your investors start asking for it. You build the next big thing, and EY will help you build it right. Learn more at https://www.ey.com/techstartupsSpendHound cuts your SaaS and AI spend by up to 30% using real pricing benchmarks across 10,000 vendors, so you always know what fair pricing looks like before your next renewal. Rated #1 on G2 in SaaS spend management, it's free forever for teams up to 1,000 employees. Sign up by June 12th and get $500 just for getting started. Go to https://www.spendhound.com/cjBrex is an intelligent finance platform with AI-powered agents that capture expenses automatically, enforce policy before the spend happens, and close your books in minutes instead of weeks. 35,000+ companies like OpenAI, Coinbase, Anthropic, and DoorDash already run on Brex. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at https://www.brex.com/metricsAleph is a modern FP&A platform built for teams that want more than another planning tool. By connecting your ERP, CRM, and other systems into one trusted data layer with AI workflows, Aleph helps you move faster with real-time insights. Get a personalized demo at https://www.getaleph.com/run—LINKS: Mostly Talent: https://mostlymetrics.typeform.com/to/cLTxtAsNCJ: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cj-gustafson-13140948/Mostly metrics: https://www.mostlymetrics.com—TIMESTAMPS:0:00 What is Bending Spoons?1:03 The Internet's attic: the portfolio3:11 The metrics rundown5:44 Revenue: $1.3B, 95% growth6:04 82% of growth was bought, not built6:29 Gross margin: 66%6:50 Subscription mix and NRR7:33 Net income: basically zero8:00 Cash: $741M, debt: $4.4B8:35 Revenue per employee: $2.57M9:39 Sponsors — RightRev | Rillet | EY12:42 Organic growth is mostly price hikes13:50 A house of adjustments14:54 Add-backs bigger than the profit15:22 The reorganization line: cost of firing19:21 Sponsors — SpendHound | Brex | Aleph22:51 Does the playbook actually work?23:07 Evernote: the proof point23:45 Romini: the growth proof point24:10 AI in three directions at once25:45 The debt engine27:50 Red flag 1: material accounting weaknesses28:38 Red flag 2: pro forma numbers come with a confession29:00 Red flag 3: App Store dependency29:11 Red flag 4: no long-term contracts29:30 Red flag 5: foreign private issuer29:52 Red flag 6: they've never sold anything30:19 Cap table and board31:07 Valuation: 14–18x33:00 Bull vs. bear case33:55 Miscellaneous: the S1 is already stale35:25 Credits
What does it take to move from being a transactional Executive Assistant to becoming a true strategic business partner?In this episode of The EA Campus Podcast, I sit down with Gillian Gelston, Executive Assistant at Salesforce, to discuss her career journey from the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service to supporting senior leaders in one of the world's leading technology companies.Gillian shares how she built a successful remote EA career, the systems and workflows that have helped her save time and money for her Executive, and why understanding personality types has transformed the way she works with different leaders.We also discuss:How Gillian transitioned into the Executive Assistant professionBuilding trust and credibility as a remote EAThe importance of boundaries and protecting your timeUsing Slack workflows to streamline approvals and reduce email overloadHow a simple budget approval workflow saved thousands in unauthorised spendWhy compliance can be a valuable area of expertise for Executive AssistantsManaging competing priorities in a fast-paced sales environmentCreating a single source of communication to reduce overwhelmThe role of personality frameworks in understanding ExecutivesFinding your support network as a remote EADeveloping a growth mindset and continuing professional developmentThe books, podcasts and resources Gillian recommends for Executive AssistantsThis conversation is packed with practical ideas for Executive Assistants who want to become more strategic, work more effectively with their Executive, and create systems that make work easier for everyone around them.Whether you work remotely, in the office, or in a hybrid role, you'll come away with plenty of ideas you can implement immediately.Training & Courses→ The Strategic Business Partner Online Course (The EA Campus)→ Elite EA Course by C&C AcademyBooks→ The Modern-Day Assistant by Lucy Brazier→ The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor→ The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen CoveyPodcasts→ The EA Campus Podcast→ The Crodie Files→ Executive Office InsightsFrameworks & Assessments→ Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)→ The Four Tendencies by Gretchen RubinTechnology & Tools→ Slack→ Slack Canvas→ Slack Workflow Builder→ ChatGPT→ Google Gemini→ Google DocsLearning Resources→ Slack Academy→ The Global Skills Matrix for Executive Assistants→ The Rundown AI The EA Campus
How can leaders support their team's mental health if they ignore their own? In this episode, Kevin talks with Melissa Doman about why leadership mental health deserves more attention. Melissa explains that leaders are often expected to shoulder more responsibility, model resilience, support employee well-being, adapt to constant change, and deliver results—without the same permission or support to care for themselves. Kevin and Melissa explore the pressure leaders face, the self-sacrifice narratives they tell themselves, and why organizations must make it clear that mental health resources are for leaders, too. They also discuss practical first steps, including reflecting on what you want to share, why, whether your workplace is safe for the conversation, and how organizations can build mental health self-management into leadership development. Melissa's Story: Melissa Doman, MA, is the author of Yes, You Can Talk About Mental Health at Work (Here's Why And How To Do It Really Well), and the new title, Cornered Office: Why We Need To Talk About Leadership Mental Health. She is an Organizational Psychologist, a former Mental Health Therapist, and Founder of The Workplace Mental Health Method™. Melissa works with companies across industries and around the globe, including clients like Google, Progressive, Estée Lauder, the MLS team - Orlando City Soccer Club, Microsoft, and Salesforce. She's spoken and mentored at SXSW and has been featured as a subject matter expert in CNN, Vogue, NPR, Fast Company, the BBC, CNBC, Inc., and LinkedIn's Top 10 Voices on Mental Health. Melissa has one core goal: to equip companies, individuals, and leaders to have constructive conversations about mental health, team dynamics, and communication at work. https://www.melissadoman.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissadoman1/ https://www.instagram.com/thewanderingmel/ Looking to Develop Stronger Leaders? Want help developing the leaders in your organization? Reach out to explore how the Kevin Eikenberry Group can support your team at info@kevineikenberry.com. Book Recommendations Yes You Can Talk About Mental Health at Work — Melissa Doman Cornered Office — Melissa Doman The Righteous Mind — Jonathan Haidt Radical Respect — Kim Scott Radical Candor — Kim Scott Like this? Bringing the Art of Reflection into Your Busy Life with Joseph Badaracco How to Break Free from Daily Burnout, Struggle Less, and Thrive More with Nataly Kogan How Leaders can Connect with People and Reduce Isolation with Ryan Jenkins and Steven Van Cohen Leave a Review If you liked this conversation, we'd be thrilled if you'd let others know by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Here's a quick guide for posting a review. Review on Apple: https://remarkablepodcast.com/itunes Join Our Community If you want to view our live podcast episodes, hear about new releases, or chat with others who enjoy this podcast join one of our communities below. Join the Facebook Group Join the LinkedIn Group
Is your 2027 software budget ready for the AI spend that's about to blow past every forecast you've built? In episode #376, Ben Murray covers five takeaways for CFOs from the Pricing I/O AI Pricing Report, produced in partnership with Benchmarkit, which surveyed 296 software buyers in Q1 2026. With budget season around the corner and demand for tokens, agentic AI, and tools like ChatGPT and Claude climbing fast, the gap between what buyers want and where AI pricing is heading has never mattered more. If you own a software budget or sell AI software, these findings reshape how you should think about predictability, governance, and the guardrails buyers are actually asking for. Why buyers rank predictable total cost as a top-3 priority, far above low entry price, and why the seat-based pricing obituary may be premature for enterprise deals. What the 89% budget-overrun rate really signals: a forecasting problem on the buy side, not vendors changing the rules after signing. Why credit and token pricing is the single hardest model to evaluate, and what Salesforce's new agentic work units mean for your bill. The surprising finding that IT, not Finance, owns AI cost risk, and why department-level allocation of token spend is the fix. Why buyers want soft caps, alerts, and approval steps over hard cutoffs, and where hard caps get genuinely painful in outcome-based pricing. Tune in to get the buyer-side data shaping AI pricing before you lock in your 2027 budget. Resources Mentioned Pricing I/O AI Pricing Report: https://www.benchmarkit.ai/widget/ai-pricing/cy-26?utm_source=TheSaaSCFO&utm_medium=Podcast&utm_campaign=TheSaaSCFO Ben's blog post: 12 Steps to Creating Your Outcome-Based Pricing: https://www.thesaascfo.com/how-to-build-outcome-based-pricing/
Here's how to turn Why They Resonate into Why YOU Resonate. Plus, a rant in two parts about the troubled relationship between thought leaders with big followings and AI. You see, they've all taken unpaid jobs working for other people. They just don't seem to notice yet. EPISODE CREDITS:Written and produced by me, Jay Acunzo. For more, subscribe to my newsletter→Music by Embleton (Instagram - Facebook).***ABOUT ME, JAY ACUNZOI'm a public speaking and storytelling advisor trusted by bestselling authors, TED speakers, seven-figure coaches, and brands like Mailchimp, Wistia, and Salesforce. Before starting my advisory firm (where I work 1:1 with clients and run group programs), I was a digital media strategist at Google and head of content for 3 organizations, including HubSpot.I've given keynotes across the US and several other countries to marketers and managers, designers and dentists, leaders and landscapers, and my journey as a speaker has been featured in 3 different books.Today, I teach business leaders how to communicate with greater clarity, influence, and resonance.Learn more about my advisory work at jayacunzo.comBook me to speak at jayacunzo.com/keynotes***IF YOU ENJOY THE SHOW:Leave a review on Apple Podcasts Leave a rating on Spotify Thanks for your support! Keep making what matters.
Send us Fan MailThe Salesforce job market is finally showing a pulse, but it is not a comeback story. We sit down with Sasha Semyonova, a leading tech journalist at Salesforce Ben, to unpack what the latest hiring signals really mean for Salesforce careers, from admins and developers to architects and ISVs. If you have been watching job boards fill up with “unicorn” roles and deflating salaries, you are not imagining it, and we explain why it keeps happening.We talk candidly about the realities candidates face right now: market saturation, ghost jobs, layoffs, and the growing influence of AI on staffing decisions. Sasha shares what she is seeing across the Salesforce ecosystem, including the shift toward specialized specialists who can blend platform knowledge with business analysis, architecture thinking, and practical AI skills. We also dig into why blasting out AI-generated resumes is a losing strategy for most people and how being undeniably human can still cut through the noise when everyone else looks the same on paper.Then we look ahead. Headless Salesforce, a Slack-first workflow, Agentforce, and rapid UI changes are reshaping how users interact with the platform and what employers will expect next. For ISVs and partners, we cover the pressure to build agent-oriented solutions and the simple question that matters most: what do customers actually want from AI?Subscribe for more honest market breakdowns, share this with someone job hunting in Salesforce, and leave a review with your biggest question about where the ecosystem is headed next.
Jack sits down with Denise Carbone, two-decade Salesforce veteran, MVP, co-leader of the Chicago Admin User Group, and Director of Delivery at ImagineCRM. Denise has seen more of this ecosystem than almost anyone. From the pre-Trailhead days of learning through user groups, to the Lightning migration wars, to where we are now with AI reshaping what it means to work in Salesforce. Her perspective is hard-won, warm, and reassuring for anyone feeling uncertain about what comes next.The conversation covers how to build a network with intention rather than just collecting LinkedIn connections, why domain knowledge is a bigger differentiator than most people realise, and why the business analyst mindset (process first, technology second) has never been more valuable than it is right now. Denise shares how her team is actually using AI in delivery work today, closes with a reflection on what corporations can learn from the mission-driven focus of the nonprofit world.
AI can now write code faster than any human alive, and most of the time it's more than good enough. That's the magic powering the entire vibe coding wave. But there's a category of software where "most of the time" just doesn't cut it: the code running a fighter jet, a power grid, an autonomous vehicle, a piece of medical hardware. When that code is wrong, the consequences aren't a bug. They're a recall, an accident, a national security incident.In this episode of Talking AI, Matt Paige sits down with Ryan Aytay, the former CEO of Tableau and now President and COO of CodeMetal, which just raised $125 million to close that gap. Ryan explains what he calls "the last mile" for mission-critical industries: the verification, validation, and provability layer that sits between AI-generated code and the systems where failure is catastrophic.The conversation covers why 99% correct is still failure in defense and autonomous systems, how CodeMetal translated a million lines of legacy C++ to Rust in weeks (like rewiring a city without the power going out), and why the real problem isn't code generation, it's behavioral assurance at scale. Ryan also shares how he's using AI to run a sub-100-person startup, why the biggest risk for any company right now is doing nothing, and what an operator who lived through 19 years of per-seat SaaS at Salesforce thinks about outcomes-based pricing in the age of AI.In this episode, you'll hear about:Why every AI coding tool says "almost, but not quite" when asked about production-ready guarantees. The difference between code generation and behavioral assurance at scale. How CodeMetal translates legacy C++ to Rust with provable correctness in weeks, not years. The concept of V&V (verification and validation) and why it's the missing layer in AI code gen. Real use cases in defense, autonomous vehicles, and simulation environments. Why hardware in the loop matters as much as human in the loop. How a sub-100-person company uses AI across M&A, recruiting, marketing, and operations. Ryan's take on token economics, outcomes-based pricing, and the SaaS evolution. Why the biggest risk is inaction, not AI errors. What attracted Ryan to CodeMetal after 19 years at Salesforce and leading Tableau.Key Moments02:47 — From Tableau fanboy to the trust gap in AI03:52 — Why Ryan left Salesforce/Tableau for CodeMetal05:55 — "Is it safe for the things I depend on every day?"06:45 — 99% correct is still failure for mission-critical systems08:20 — The sycophantic nature of AI: "Heck yeah, I can do that"09:22 — It's not a coding problem, it's a behavioral problem at scale11:22 — Human in the loop isn't enough: hardware in the loop14:30 — What is fuzzing? Formal methods explained in plain English16:02 — How a sub-100-person company leverages AI across every function18:19 — The Shopify mandate: using AI reflexively21:33 — Rewiring the city without the power going out: the million-line translation24:38 — Defense use cases: drones, autonomous vehicles, and simulation26:28 — "Prove is even a stronger word than guarantee"28:32 — Accountability and the coming wave of AI insurance32:54 — Token usage, the Uber CTO's blown budget, and outcomes-based pricing36:26 — SaaS isn't dead, it's evolving: Ryan's Salesforce/Tableau perspective40:08 — The biggest risk is doing nothing42:07 — Where to find CodeMetal (and they're hiring)Key LinksCodeMetalConnect with Ryan on LinkedInMentioned in this episode:AI Opportunity FinderFeeling overwhelmed by all the AI noise out there? The AI Opportunity Finder from HatchWorks cuts through the hype and gives you a clear starting point. In less than 5 minutes, you'll get tailored, high-impact AI use cases specific to your business—scored by ROI so you know exactly where to start. Whether you're looking to cut costs, automate tasks, or grow faster, this free tool gives you a personalized roadmap built for action.
Take control of every AI agent, managed or not, running in your environment using Agent 365 and Microsoft Entra. Surface agents across AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, Databricks, and Salesforce in one registry, assign Entra Agent IDs via CLI or SDK, and enforce least-privilege access through Conditional Access policies and Agent Blueprints, all without rebuilding your existing identity infrastructure. Lock down agent activity with sign-in logs that capture every authentication attempt, policy hit, and failure. Govern agents as first-class identities alongside your users, apps, and devices, and draw a hard line between managed and unmanaged AI in your organization. Vince Smith, Microsoft Entra Principal Product Manager, shares how to establish full visibility, access control, and lifecycle governance for AI agents using Microsoft Entra and Agent 365. ► QUICK LINKS: 00:00 - Visibility and control with Agent 365 01:39 - Multi-platform registry sync 02:29 - Assign Agent ID 04:14 - Agent Blueprints 05:24 - Conditional Access for agents 06:24 - Sign-in logs audit trail 07:03 - Unblock the agent 07:54 - Wrap up ► Link References Check out https://aka.ms/EntraforAgents ► Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? As Microsoft's official video series for IT, you can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. • Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries • Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog • Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast ► Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: • Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics • Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ • Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ • Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics
Most cold call advice you see celebrated on LinkedIn has one thing in common — it starts with an apology. "You're going to hate me, but this is a cold call." "Did I catch you at a bad time?" "I'll be honest with you — this is a sales call." Justin Michael has spent 20,000 hours on the phone and written 10 books disagreeing with all of it. And in this episode, he makes the case — backed by brain science — for why permission-begging openers kill your status, trigger the wrong response in the prospect's brain, and actually cause the rejection salespeople are trying to soften. Justin is a former sales leader at Salesforce and LinkedIn whose methodology has generated over $1 billion in pipeline for more than 200 ventures. He's one of the sharpest minds in outbound sales, and Art ranks him among the top in the industry. In this conversation, the two compare notes on everything from the neuroscience of cold call openers, to why personalization at scale is a myth, to the Route technique that gets executives talking without a single pitch. Fair warning — this one gets opinionated. In the best possible way. What you'll hear in this episode: Why the croc brain fires the moment your prospect picks up — and what that means for everything you say in the first ten seconds The Route technique — a dead-simple opener that works by asking a routing question instead of pitching or begging for time Why email and phone require completely opposite psychological approaches The difference between a comment and an objection — and why treating them the same is costing you conversations Attraction selling, pronoia, and the mindset shift that separates reps who grind from reps who produce Why the person listening is always in control — and what that means for how you open every call What unconscious competence actually feels like, and how to get there faster
Description The Future of Tech is Here. Subscribe to our Newsletter:https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this presentation from Ultimate Partner Live, industry analyst Jay McBain breaks down the monumental macroeconomic shifts rewriting the tech sector in 2026. https://youtu.be/r0qTDyw97Gs As the industry rapidly approaches a $6.07 trillion valuation, driven by massive AI infrastructure investments from Sam Altman and the “Magnificent Seven,” traditional sales and channel models are fundamentally collapsing. McBain reveals how buyer demographics have transformed to an integration-first millennial base, why marketplace ecosystems now command over half of all partner-funded deals, and how a tiny elite of just 1,000 tech service providers control two-thirds of global tech revenue. Learn the exact mechanics behind how Microsoft out-partnered AWS to win 26 straight quarters of dominant growth and how your business can deploy an algorithmic early warning system to capture massive wallet share before competitors even step into the boardroom. Key Takeaways Over half of the Fortune 500 companies vanish every 20 years because their leadership fails to anticipate macroeconomic technological cycles. The true opportunity in the $6.5 trillion AI boom lies not in single vendor products, but in the hardware, software, services, and telecom ecosystem surrounding them. Indirect tech sales are undergoing a structural shift toward direct cloud hyperscaler models driven heavily by Nvidia's core infrastructure client base. Modern business deals are won or lost months before the point of sale based on the average of 6.3 partners surrounding a customer’s environment. Over 51% of tech buyers are now millennials who prioritize software integration capabilities and digital marketplaces over traditional human sales interactions. Tech service economics are pivoting aggressively away from upfront margins toward point-based multi-partner funding across subscription cycles. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags Nvidia AI buildout, $7 trillion AI opportunity, cloud ecosystem decade, Microsoft vs AWS growth, multi-partner cloud deals, digital marketplace migration, millennial B2B buyers, B2B tech subscription economics, tokenized micro consumption, tech services wallet share, hybrid cloud infrastructure, 28 customer moments, IT services industry growth, telecom spend breakdown, channel chief strategy, managed service providers MSP, global systems integrators GSI, software integration first, point-based vendor incentives, automated co-selling workflows Transcript JAY McBAIN AUDIO PODCAST [00:00:00] Jay McBain: So to go back to that story about the 53% of companies who are gonna fail, one of us is gonna be asked to write the book, but chapter one is always you Blame the CEO. [00:00:13] Vince Menzione: We just came back from Ultimate Partner live in Bellevue, Washington, where we hosted incredible leaders for two amazing days. Come join us for this next session where we explore the tectonic shifts we’ve all been seeing. With that, I am incredibly blessed to invite a friend of mine to the stage. I have a quick little side note, like I found an old LinkedIn post from this gentleman from like many years ago, like 20 years ago. [00:00:39] Vince Menzione: And I wasn’t really that nice to you on that LinkedIn post. Like, oh, like this is before Jay became the Jay, that we all know Jay to be j. But he was in the space and I was at Microsoft doing something and he reached out about something. It was kind of rude, Jay. I was like, oh my gosh. I can’t believe. But Jay has been a great friend. [00:00:54] Vince Menzione: When we started the podcast back up, uh, during COVID we started doing podcasts together. When we moved to the studio, Jay was the first person in the studio. He’s always got a spot, uh, at our events. He’s s Spot Art, and, and he’s a great friend and supporter of Ultimate Partner Jay McBain. For those of you who don’t know him, Jay, welcome. [00:01:13] Vince Menzione: Thank you, sir. [00:01:22] Jay McBain: 31 days ago, we landed Artemis two. The furthest humans have ever been away from the planet Earth 57 years ago. We landed on the moon in the 56 years. Between those two moments, the tech industry has been the fastest growing industry in the world. Every single year we moved from the space race to the technology race, and we’re just getting started. [00:01:46] Jay McBain: If you’re old enough, you’ll recognize the mainframe and mini era for 20 years. You’ll recognize a young disheveled Bill Gates showing up in Boca Raton, Florida for, uh, August the 12th, 1981 launch, where Bill thought that every one of us would’ve a PC in our home, and IBM thought they were gonna sell 10,000 of them to hobbyists. [00:02:12] Jay McBain: 1999, a small startup from an executive who just left Oracle in San Francisco named Mark Benioff. A couple of years later, Jeff Bezos went into a boardroom and said, listen, we’ve spent a lot of money building infrastructure to our busiest day, Christmas, black Friday. You’re telling me this stuff sits idle 10 or 20% for the rest of the year. [00:02:35] Jay McBain: Why don’t we rent that out to others? Got laughed outta that boardroom and then got made of fun of on magazine covers. Maybe you should just tend the store, let the adults talk about technology. In March of 2023, our neighbors, our friends, our family saw DeepFakes. They saw poetry, they saw music, and they came to us as tech people and said, did we just light up Skynet? [00:03:03] Jay McBain: Now every one of these 20 year eras, this is the Taylor Swift version of our industry. Every single one of these eras triggers the fastest growing product in history. Today it’s actually Chacha bt first to a billion users. It triggers a new, richest person in the world, bill Gates, to Jeff Bezos. Now, Elon Musk is the first to sign a trillion dollar pay package, and it’s not for car. [00:03:27] Jay McBain: It’s not for cars. It also triggers a most valuable company in the world change. And today that’s nvidia. These are monumental changes in our industry and they’re monumental changes in partnering every single time. And it also links to our customers. If you take a 20 year view of business, one era, and, and think about the AI era, you know, at the start of it here, if you’re to grab the Fortune 500 magazine from 20 years ago and start to flip through it, 53% of the companies in there no longer exist. [00:04:06] Jay McBain: Every 20 year cycle, we lose over half of the biggest companies in the world. These are the companies that have very deep pockets to buy their way outta problems. If you’re not in the Fortune 571% of tech companies don’t make it 10 years. These are the changes that cost industries. There are changes that cost really big companies and the decisions we make, the trends we’re in right now, in 2026 will be written about in the future. [00:04:39] Jay McBain: This new era, a lot of big numbers being thrown around. Vince’s best friend talk about a six and a half trillion dollar AI opportunity, but it’s not Microsoft’s tam. Microsoft is chasing about a trillion dollars of this. And the ecosystem, the hardware, the software, the services, the telecom is gonna make up the rest. [00:05:04] Jay McBain: It is an ecosystem. Every time these big numbers are thrown, the word ecosystem is always thrown around it. Not to be outdone, Sam Altman’s talking about a $7 trillion build out. The world economy this year, the world GDP will be 126. These are material numbers to world GDP, but even better, they’re both larger than our entire industry is today. [00:05:27] Jay McBain: So what took 56 years of the fastest growing industry this year will be $6.07 trillion. Big numbers, but it’s easier to think about it in terms of a dollar that our customers spend in that dollar. They’re gonna spend 25 cents on hardware. They’re gonna spend 25 cents on software. So for anyone that read the memo 15 years ago, that software’s gonna eat the world, there’s still a dollar a hardware to run every dollar of that software. [00:05:57] Jay McBain: And whether you’re thinking humanoid robots or whichever future you’re envisioning, there’s going to be a dollar of hardware to run every dollar of software for the next 20 years. There’s over 25 cents now in IT services, and in many cases, these services are growing faster than the product categories and just under 25 cents in telecom, that’s how it breaks out today. [00:06:19] Jay McBain: And this industry, which took 56 years to get to this point, is gonna double in size in the next three to five years. We already have two and a half trillion of that seven raised and being spent. Part of the reason Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world. Now our industry, uh, you talk about ultimate partnerships. [00:06:40] Jay McBain: Our industry traditionally, and world trade by the way, is 75% indirect. The dealerships, the agencies, the brokers, the resellers, the retailers, the franchisees, the gas stations, the grocery stores, the pharmacies, all 27 industries sell indirect. You gotta think back the last time you bought something direct. [00:07:01] Jay McBain: Well, I bought a Dell from that dude in the nineties. Cool. Well, Dell Technologies is now 60% indirect. Well, I bought insurance. Direct is 15 minutes. Could save me 15%. Well, Geico last year sold more insurance through agencies and brokers than they did direct. This is the world now. We used to be 75% indirect four years ago. [00:07:26] Jay McBain: Then it went to 73.2, then it went to 70.1 and it then it went to 66.7. By the way, marketplace is in these numbers indirect. It’s not marketplace causing this change. It’s one company, Nvidia. Nvidia has seven customers. The magnificent seven, uh, half of them are in the room right now that every morning we wake up to a hundred billion dollars press release about this $7 trillion buildout. [00:07:56] Jay McBain: What’s interesting is indirect sales in our industry is growing by revenue. It increases every year, just not at the pace that this AI build out is happening direct with seven companies. But the reason we’re all here, and I think the core reason that Vince is building this community is this, you know, Microsoft forever has measured and been very vocal. [00:08:21] Jay McBain: About 96% of their deals have partners in them. Kind of who cares, who collects the money. We care about the moments, the 28 moments before the customer makes a purchase. We care about every 30 days forever, because two thirds of our industry, over $4 trillion now is subscription consumption based. Winning a customer today is only winning the first 30 days. [00:08:46] Jay McBain: We care about this cycle. We care about who surrounds our customer. So six years ago, I stood on a big stage and said, you know, we went through a decade of sales. You know, in 1999, you thought you were born to be a salesperson. You’re managing your territory with your gut. Well, a few years later, you were introduced to the science of selling. [00:09:07] Jay McBain: You know, 10 years later you thought as a marketer, you sit around a cocktail party joking with your friends, 50% of my marketing dollars are wasted. I just don’t know which 50%. Really funny. In 2009 until every 58-year-old CMO got replaced by a 38-year-old growth hacker. Coming in with Marketo and Eloqua and Pardot and HubSpot, and 15,505 as of yesterday, MarTech and iTech tools, ninjas in marketing, they wouldn’t let a nickel go through without measuring. [00:09:43] Jay McBain: Now we understand 96% of deals and partners that surround it. No deal is gonna be won or lost in this era without partnering effectively. So we had to have this decade of the ecosystem. One of the ways we’re tracking is by outsiders. You know, Salesforce every year publishes the state of sales and they’ve got, you know, the number one CRM in the world. [00:10:05] Jay McBain: So they get to go talk to all the CROs, all the salespeople in the world. And as of this year, a couple months ago, 94% of every salesperson in every industry in the world uses partners every single day. You wanna see what this number was six years ago. Also, 89% of salespeople around the world don’t think they’re going to club this year without partners. [00:10:29] Jay McBain: So this is a big moment for us, halfway through the decade ecosystem, but we’re only halfway through. We’re starting to understand now at a more granular level. What partnering means. It’s not theory, it’s not flywheels. It’s not really cute. McKinsey slides that we keep showing to our board saying how important partnering is. [00:10:51] Jay McBain: We’re trying to get to the very specific level of the 6.3 partners on average that surround the deal and what they’re doing. How their business model works, and that’s average if I’m working on a public sector deal. I was at a Red Hat conference yesterday talking sovereignty. If I’m in an enterprise or a large public sector deal, it’s north of 10 partners in the deal. [00:11:15] Jay McBain: So we’re starting to understand what used to be this, this, you know, you’ve been the fastest growing industry for 56 straight years. Every single professional services person in every industry has come in to join the fund. Over 90% of accountants are tech services firms. Over 90% of marketing agencies are tech services agencies. [00:11:36] Jay McBain: All of this 250,000 software companies, a million emerging comp tech companies, the half a million VAR that have been in that traditional channel. The managed service providers, all of these 20 different partner types, millions of companies, tens of millions of people competing for 6.3 spots. Around the customer. [00:11:58] Jay McBain: That’s it. Luckily, there’s 141 million global customers to compete for. There’s, there’s some open slots that you can go find, and that’s the point. Our industry never had our own Fortune 500. We always talk to, you know, these partners and GSIs are doing this and SI are doing that. And we never really had a view of capability and capacity or what our own TAM was inside of that partnering. [00:12:25] Jay McBain: And so we set out and we would’ve loved, you know, chat GPT or Gemini or Claude or any of those tools to do this. But there’s one problem in partnering with AI is that it doesn’t know one partner from the next. There’s a big digital sameness problem in our industry that every single partner, whether it’s Larry in the White van or Accenture, with 786,000 employees all say they do all things to all people all the time. [00:12:53] Jay McBain: 98% of them, 99% of them are private companies that don’t share their p and l. You can’t go into Microsoft’s LinkedIn system and find out how many employees, ’cause it’s a block system, it AI can’t see into it. So it just sees, and it’s a great pattern matching. Google, SEO can’t figure out who’s who, nor today can the large language models. [00:13:14] Jay McBain: ’cause all the things they’re trying to match, the transformers are trying to match. It all looks the same. Every tweet, every ebook, every website, every digital history looks the same. So this took us thousands of people hours across two years to do, to dig into every p and l to dig into every dollar of what they’re doing. [00:13:33] Jay McBain: But what was interesting is only a thousand partners in our industry do two thirds of all tech services. When you get into enterprise, it goes up to 80 to 90%. The partners in the middle, in Blue do more tech services. The 30 of them than the 970 partners in white on the outside, the 970 partners in White do more tech services than the next million combined. [00:14:03] Jay McBain: This is our industry in a nutshell. Every time we talk to a a vendor, every time we talk to a partner, every time we talk to a distributor, we’re now talking names, faces, and places. You you wanna talk sovereignty. Yesterday in Atlanta, 90% of sovereign conversations in public sector in the globe is handled by these companies here. [00:14:26] Jay McBain: Forget about how much you do with these partners today. You wanna chase the next column, which is the wallet share. And I was a channel chief for 17 years. I get the weekly report and I see a million dollar partner, another million dollar partner, sorted top to bottom. You don’t know which partners which, which of those million dollar partners is doing 1.2 million in your category. [00:14:46] Jay McBain: They deserve a baseball cap and a front row seat at your event as an MVP. The next partner right next to them is doing 10 million in your category. They’re only doing a million with you. ’cause customers are pulling them into it. Nine times outta 10. They’re leading with your competitor. So I don’t want that list anymore. [00:15:03] Jay McBain: I want the new list, which is showing me those $9 million opportunities. And I as a board member, as A CEO, as a CFO, as a CRO, I wanna see this list. And then I want to talk people, processes, programs, technology. What are we gonna do to go get our fair share of that 9 million? Where’s our lowest hanging fruit? [00:15:24] Jay McBain: How do we double our pipeline? How do we double the size of our company in three years? It’s all right here. Let’s have very specific conversations and move away from flywheels and move around from force multipliers and and things like that in partnering. Let’s figure out how this partner community is surrounded. [00:15:45] Jay McBain: What do 10 million people who have to be smart in front of their customers every single day, what do they read? Where do they go and who do they follow? It’s the law of a few. This is the old Malcolm Gladwell of tipping point 10 million people in the broader channel. A hundred percent of our TAM comes down to only a thousand watering holes. [00:16:08] Jay McBain: 12% of that entire audience. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s over A million. People love podcasts. Number one way they learn the Joe Rogan effect. In our industry, there’s 121 podcasts. These are all public lists. You can go get on my LinkedIn newsletter on canals, oia. But there’s 121 podcasts that drive him forward. [00:16:28] Jay McBain: Really high up on that list, actually number one on the list is ultimate partner, Vince. That’s how I met. ’cause I asked people, 10 million people, you love this. You walk your dog, you drive to work, you listen to podcasts. I’m not the biggest podcast fan. It’s not number one on my list, but it’s number one on theirs. [00:16:44] Jay McBain: They say, you know, you gotta meet this guy, Vince. It’s unbelievable how great these podcasts are. They’re ultimate. [00:16:54] Jay McBain: Then I talked to Vince and said, but Vince, you know, 35% of your community, the 10 million people love to come to events like this one. The hallway conversations, the hotel lobby bar last night. This is what we love to do, especially post pandemic. It’s the number one way we learn. We learn from our peers, we learn from those around us, and, and the learn from the conversations we have here. [00:17:17] Jay McBain: We always remember these moments, you know, years and years later. There’s 352 choices. I’m going to five of them this week in five different cities. It’s a lot of coverage, but again, it’s a tighter li list of how people work. The magazine lists 106 of them associations like Conter. Now the GTIA peer groups, there’s 15 different spheres of influence, but only a thousand places. [00:17:43] Jay McBain: I could walk you through billionaire, after billionaire, after billionaire in this industry and show you how they did this. How did Arne Bellini at ConnectWise? How did Austin McCord at Datto, how did Nerdio become a unicorn? How did threat locker and huntress move away from 6,500 cyber companies and become unicorns over and over and over again? [00:18:05] Jay McBain: It’s only one slide. Unicorns and billionaires are made here, and a lot of people don’t get it. So walking away from Bellevue, a thousand partners, top down, a thousand watering holes, bottoms up. You’ve covered a hundred percent of your tam. You do it better than 10% of your competitor, 10% better than your competitors. [00:18:27] Jay McBain: You win. You carry that on your resume into the next company. You get a bigger job at a bigger pay scale. Let’s just walk through some examples. Cyber 91.7% of it goes through the channel. Huge channel audience. You know, if you’re in MarTech, it’s only 10%, but this one happens to be all channel, but that’s not the story. [00:18:48] Jay McBain: For every dollar that the 6,500 cyber companies are trying to close, there’s $2 in services. Plot twist, the products are grown at 11, the services are grown at 12.6. Your partners are growing faster than you are, and they will continue to for the next, at least five years, probably 10. So when I’m here, five years from now, you’ll hear in me talk about a three to one split in cyber and then a four to one split in cyber. [00:19:18] Jay McBain: Now, when we’re in Miami a couple days ago is CrowdStrike, they’re talking about a $7 and 5 cent multiplier, chasing that two to one up higher. You look at managed services. Here’s a fun story. Managed services. 82% of customers who are man, uh, outsourcing more this year than last year. 650 billion in size. [00:19:38] Jay McBain: This is bigger than the entire SaaS industry. Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Marketo, NetSuite, HubSpot, 250,000. Others. This is bigger. It’s also bigger than all the Hyperscalers combined, not just AWS, Microsoft and Google, but Alibaba and Oracle and everybody down the list. This is a massive market also growing at double digits. [00:19:59] Jay McBain: So these are some big things and obviously we’re watching, you know, week in and week out, quarter in, quarter out, the Battle of Software and Battle of the Hyperscalers and things like that, and who’s growing at what pace and, and how partnering is connecting to all of this. You know, we watched a moment really early in the pandemic where Microsoft started growing faster than AWS and they haven’t stopped since 26 straight quarters. [00:20:27] Jay McBain: And you ask customers and say, you know, does Microsoft have a better product? And in most cases they say no. You know, AWS had a five year head start. Well, did they have a better price? Well, no, actually most cases Microsoft’s more expensive. Well, did did they have better promotion? Was their Super Bowl ad better? [00:20:44] Jay McBain: No, they’re both kind of crap. So you kind of ask the questions of what’s the only difference that could create growth above the leader in the market? Well, it’s place. More of the 6.3 partners are walking into those keyboard room meetings and drawing clouds up on the wall and labeling the Microsoft than they are AWS. [00:21:03] Jay McBain: Very simple. It’s never been about product. The best product in our industry has never won. And now the best way forward is that partnering moment, and this is the moment. So to go back to that story about the 53% of companies who are gonna fail, one of us is gonna be asked to write the book. And it could be the book like Kodak, they invented the product that ended up killing them. [00:21:26] Jay McBain: And it’s a woe is me story, but chapter one is always you blame the CEO. How could they not see those trends happening in 2026? How could they, you know, were they blind? Were they stuck in their own, you know, innovation chamber? Innovator’s dilemma, were they stuck in their own boardrooms? Why couldn’t they see? [00:21:46] Jay McBain: Well, chapter two, you, you blame the board. They have fiduciary responsibility, outsider view, and how could they not see it? But really, this is the future right here. If you take this slide and apply it 10 or 20 years from now to every failure and every success, these are the chapters of the book. Your buyer is now a millennial. [00:22:05] Jay McBain: As of last year, the 51% of our market is bought by people born after 1982. Different psychology, different behavior, different journey, different criteria, their integration. First buyers. The buy a product, 80% as good as the next one. If it works better in their environment. 94% of people won’t buy a car unless it has CarPlay or Android Auto. [00:22:26] Jay McBain: New Buyer. You have to be more integrated than your competitors. That’s a partnering story. The 6.3 partners. If you heard cyber, you need some great channel partnerships, but you need the other 5.3 partners as well, the consultants, the advisors, the designers, the architects, the implementers, the integrators, the manner service, all of the other partners. [00:22:44] Jay McBain: You need to know more of them than your competitors do, and have them label clouds with your name in them. You need better alliances. Even if you compete, you only compete in the morning. You’re best friends by the afternoon. You have to be tight with the hyperscalers, tight, with the big SaaS platforms, tight with cyber, tight with distribution, there are layers, seven layers to every deal. [00:23:04] Jay McBain: You gotta be tight in and have better alliances than your competitors. And then it all comes to the 28 moments, which I’m gonna end on, but the go to market of all of this, the co-selling, co-marketing, co-innovation, co-development, co keeping. This is it. Your product has to be good enough that somebody’s gonna renew it. [00:23:21] Jay McBain: Your Super Bowl has to be, you know, ad has to be good enough that people don’t, you know, shame you on social media. Your pricing has to be somewhere in a country mile of the bell curve of what the customer wants to pay. But successor failure is just here and platforms are synonymous with partnering. [00:23:40] Jay McBain: It’s our role now in the decade of the ecosystem to drive our companies forward. Marketplace. It’s probably the most predict, you know, great prediction we ever made. You know, growing at 82% compounded, it’s hard to predict ’cause it doubles almost every year. We were almost exact to the decimal point. Five years later now till 2030, we’re watching a second story, which is more interesting. [00:24:02] Jay McBain: If 96% of all deals have partners inside of them and there’s private offers and multi-partner offers and distributor sellers record all these funding mechanisms or services as a product. As of last week, over 50% of all deals in marketplaces now have partner funding. It means that while money changes hands differently, the respect and the recognition of what partners do is in the deal. [00:24:26] Jay McBain: We think that’s going to 59, but at some point, that’s gonna have to hit 96. ’cause to run the best programs, whether it’s an indirect sale, whether it’s a direct sale, whether it’s a marketplace deal, it doesn’t matter how money changes hands. What matters is we recognize the 6.3 partners. They’re not only making the deal happen bigger and faster, but renewing and enriching that every 30 days forever. [00:24:48] Jay McBain: When we watch, you know, billion dollar clubs and when we read all the press releases and all the hubbub about how fast this is growing and who, which companies are behind all this. When I’m quoted in some of these press releases, it’s because of this. You know, CrowdStrike, you know, brags are a billion dollars in a single year, but inside of that, they’re showing that 91% growth in marketplaces, which is pretty phenomenal for any company to almost double in size every single year. [00:25:17] Jay McBain: What’s more phenomenal is they’re growing the channel piece of it, 3548%. That green part of it is growing. Companies that understand platform and have people and processes and programs and technology to do it are winning. And they’re getting recognition and partners are starting to join the Billion Dollar Club who don’t sell a product, but are also winning at Extreme Scale. [00:25:44] Jay McBain: So talk about those partner 1000 and who are leaning in to win at this level. As well as everything changes, traditional billing moved into subscription models, moved into consumption models. Now we’re being tokenized to death multi it’s, it’s in this mode of micro consumption. There’s no chance there was little chance in subscription consumption that would be resold. [00:26:09] Jay McBain: You don’t buy Netflix from the cable guy in the white van. There’s zero chance when you’re buying tokens at a buck a piece that that’s going through any indirect sale. This continues to grow. Now the tectonic shifts is what happens when money changes hands differently. These old programs that we used to all write hundreds of different boxes, we checked every day on deal reg and trainings and all the other things are changing. [00:26:35] Jay McBain: To this, you’ll get these slides, by the way, in high res, inside of this now is the customer. For the first time ever, 45 years later, we have the customer in the middle of what we do, the 28 moments in green before they buy the seven layer stack and the partners inside it. The implementation. The integration, the managed services in a cycle that never ends, and two thirds of our industry. [00:26:55] Jay McBain: With the customer in the middle, we can now move money around to the different moments. It’s not all landing in front or backend margins or market development funds or new customer bonuses or spiffs. It’s landing where it needs to land. Over 400 companies now, pretty much led by Microsoft 400 companies are in a point system right now and 400 more. [00:27:18] Jay McBain: We’re working kind of behind the scenes to get that announced in the next 12 months. This is a total changeover in terms of how economics work and partners are yelling over half of us. I don’t care. Don’t call me a VAR anymore. Don’t call me an MSP. Don’t call me a regional system integrator. I do the consulting over half the time. [00:27:36] Jay McBain: I do the design, I do the implementations, I do the managed services, and 44% of us are vibe coding. On weekends. We’re not happy. Just on the services side. We wanna join the seven layer tech stack as well. These are partners growing faster than their vendors by understanding this cycle and where to show up and where the money is in ai. [00:27:56] Jay McBain: And the number one thing they’re asking for is not more leads, which they did for 45 years. The number one thing is now recognized for what I do. I’ve never just been a cash register. We’re completely now past this idea of a channel being a channel of distribution, and now a channel being this platform for the future. [00:28:16] Jay McBain: As we lay that on top of ai, the first couple of years of AI has really been consumer driven. The 95% failure rate that MIT reported last year is now 70%. That’s the failure to get from proof of concept to production. That 70 will be 50 by the summer we’re moving now in business, the maturity rates are going up at the end customer and in 88% of cases, that’s because of the channel. [00:28:43] Jay McBain: They’re working with partners. They’re not vibe coding themselves and working in little skunkwork groups. They’re working with partners to make it happen, and it now becomes the partner’s number one growth opportunity. I can grow at 11 or 12% in cyber every year. Compounded I can grow in 10% in managed services. [00:29:03] Jay McBain: You know, those are great double digit growth ’cause my customers are growing at 2.7% and I can go four x my customer, but I can go 10 x my customer if I have the right services built around ai. And this compounded growth rate and that big number in 2 20 32, 267 is what’s got those top 1000 partners obsessed. [00:29:25] Jay McBain: And your companies are leading with ai. Now you need to connect to those AI services. You need to get partners on this scale of growth. And they will be adding your name inside every cloud. They write on every whiteboard, but 82% of partners around the world, you know, we survey 25,000 of them aren’t ready, and they’re blaming vendors for not being ready, and they’re telling them exactly the workshops and the training that they need to get ready for this cycle. [00:29:53] Jay McBain: 82% of our entire partner, tens of millions of people, aren’t ready to grow at 35% and they need our help. Last thing I’ll say about AI is it’s the first time from client server to cloud, edge to cloud that it’s been segment driven. SMB alone has one, you know, six different segments, one to nine, 10 to 24, 25 to 49, et cetera. [00:30:18] Jay McBain: Mid-market into enterprise. No one that runs a restaurant is calling Jensen to buy a GPU to put next to the stove. No one’s calling Sam or Dario or anyone at Anthropic or OpenAI directly. They’re waiting. If you run a restaurant with all the people running around with tablets, you’ve invested in toast or square or clover or one of the platforms to run your business. [00:30:41] Jay McBain: A hundred different things. And you’re gonna wait for toast to work with a hyperscaler and build out the capabilities genetically. So when they see a spike in Uber Eats orders, they automatically place a food order and automatically change the staffing to deliver on it. That’s what the restaurant’s waiting for, and there’s no one calling and having a big a agent conversation. [00:31:03] Jay McBain: But even if you go into hundreds of people in medium sized business, every one of the vice presidents have their tech stack already built. I talked about the marketing person already, but the HR leader has one, and everybody’s got their seven layer stack. They’re not calling to buy a GPU and they’re not calling to, you know, bring in open AI directly or, or anthropic. [00:31:22] Jay McBain: They’re waiting for the platform they built to integrate together ag agenta capabilities. Everybody’s in wait mode up until enterprise and public, large public sector. So we are looking at this market and at 90% of that AI market is run by those thousand companies, and the rest of the millions of partners are helping in terms of how these businesses are gonna change at that level. [00:31:46] Jay McBain: Here’s where I end. You know, the 28 moments used to be a theory. It used to be a flywheel. How do we buy a car? [00:31:55] Vince Menzione: Well, we Google it, [00:31:57] Jay McBain: 81% of us now, 94% of us use large language models. We find out that there’s 365 brands of car. I’d have to test drive one every day of the year to get through them all. So we start narrowing these things down. [00:32:09] Jay McBain: We configure it. We put our rims on it, we color it. We download the invoice price. We download the backend rebates this month, whether I buy it in May or June, we find out what 5,000 people paid for our exact car within 50 miles of us. And then we don’t wanna go to the dealer because we know more than the salesperson, the manager ever will. [00:32:26] Jay McBain: We know what we’re gonna pay within, you know, dollars or cents. Just carvana the car. Hand me the keys. Let’s just forget the whole eight hour back and forth. I’ll get you a deal thing. I’m smarter than you in technology. Our customers are smarter than us, smarter than salespeople. That’s why 75% of millennials don’t wanna talk to a salesperson. [00:32:48] Jay McBain: They want to end digitally, and by the way, they’re not gonna send a fax after 28 digital moments. They’re gonna end on a digital marketplace. This is all demographics. It’s not hard to see where it’s going, but we’re getting into names, faces, places again. What if every dollar of your tam, the board, the CEO, runs around with their big multi-billion dollar number, they’re chasing? [00:33:09] Jay McBain: What if every single deal looks the exact same? This is a deal with AstraZeneca, A real deal, real customer spending millions of dollars. We know it starts in October, it ends in April. It’s a six month cycle. We see what they read, the MQ ls at the beginning. We see the sales demo moments. We see ISV, but we’ve never had the light blue boxes. [00:33:30] Jay McBain: What if we as a team could overlay the 6.3 partners in this deal? And when you find out a couple things. Here’s where I end. In December, five deals were one, three of them by NTT. The person at NTT probably coaches AstraZeneca’s, you know, kids’ soccer team. They probably have a cottage together at the lake. [00:33:50] Jay McBain: For the last 20 years, if the person at NTT worked at Deloitte, Deloitte would’ve run this deal. But Software One and Yash are both there, so we understand that when they were drawing clouds up on the wall in the boardroom in December, this deal was won and lost there. It was not won and lost at the point of sale. [00:34:09] Jay McBain: So what if you knew more about this and could see every dollar in your tam? You had an early warning system that this was happening. Two things jump out at this now that we’re in Bellevue. AWS was touched twice in this deal, directly in the marketing cycle and the sales cycle. AWS lost this deal. Here’s an example of Microsoft winning a deal with Microsoft never being touched. [00:34:34] Jay McBain: For some reason, NTT who won, who won AWS’s partner of the year a couple years ago led with Microsoft, so did Software one, Microsoft’s biggest reseller in Europe, and as did Yash, they all led with Microsoft and without Microsoft, knowing Microsoft took a multimillion dollar deal away from their competitors by winning in December. [00:34:53] Jay McBain: That’s one. Second. These partners didn’t just show up other than soccer and cottages. They didn’t show up in December. It went closed one in their CRM system. Back in the summer, August, September, we already knew AstraZeneca was in market, spending millions of dollars. We didn’t need them to read an ebook or go to an event to find that out. [00:35:17] Jay McBain: We knew it because it was closed one. They’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars times five in December to know what to do at the end. This is an early warning system that’s better than any MQL, better than any SQL. And if you could give your company these level of view into their pipeline with an early warning system that I can work with those partners for months before they ever show up at the customer’s boardroom. [00:35:44] Jay McBain: This is it. Talk about 47% winners. This takes you from not only surviving the AI era to being a top five platform winner. Thank you very much. [00:36:01] Vince Menzione: Until next time, we’ll see you in person. Hopefully at our next event.
AI agents are not just changing sales tools. They are changing the job of the seller.In this episode, John sits down with Kris Billmaier, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Agentforce Sales and Growth Products at Salesforce, to talk about Agentforce, headless software, AI-native sales workflows, and what happens when sellers start managing teams of agents.If you are in sales, sales leadership, enablement, or GTM strategy, this episode gives you a practical look at where humans still matter, how agents can support pipeline and qualification, and why AI adoption needs clear use cases, measurement, and training.Want to stay ahead of where sales are heading next? Visit www.jbarrows.com and learn how you can Make It Happen.What You'll LearnWhy product-led growth is moving toward agent-led growthHow Salesforce is thinking about headless software and conversation-first AIWhy AI-first SaaS is not just a front-end feature or branding exerciseHow agents are changing SDR and BDR work at SalesforceWhy successful AI adoption starts with a narrow use case and a real training planWhat sellers need to become as agent teams take on more busy workKris Billmaier is Executive Vice President and General Manager of Agentforce Sales and Growth Products at Salesforce, where he leads the product strategy and vision for Agentforce Sales. With more than 20 years of experience across productivity software, search, and enterprise technology, Kris has launched category-defining products, scaled startups, and is now building a future where agents and sellers work together to grow revenue.Connect with Kris Billmaier:Website: https://www.salesforce.com/ap/Li: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisbillmaier/John Barrows is a sales trainer, speaker, and founder of JB Sales with over 25 years of experience in the industry. He has made hundreds of cold calls a week, led startups to acquisition, and trained high-performing teams at companies like Salesforce, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Okta. Through JB Sales, John focuses on practical sales execution—helping reps fill pipeline, close deals, and build trust with buyers in today's AI-driven sales environment.Connect with John Barrows:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbarrows/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnmbarrows/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@johnmbarrowsCheck out John's Membership: https://go.jbarrows.com/Join John's Newsletter: https://www.jbarrows.com/newsletter
After more than a decade of crossing paths at conferences and following each other's work, Theodora Lau finally gets the opportunity to host Sarah Biller, Co-Founder & Member Board of Directors of Fintech Sandbox, and Bank Director and Investor of Thread Bank, on the One Vision Podcast. In this episode, Sarah talks about building innovation ecosystems beyond traditional hubs, including her work in West Virginia and the influence of leaders like Brad Smith and John Chambers. Sarah describes what she looks for in founders. It's about digging deep, listening closely, and finding solutions that truly matter. The conversation turns to AI's rapid adoption in financial services, the shift to agentic AI, risks of replacing human judgment in regulated credit decisions, and the need to prioritize understanding and human-centered outcomes over speed and efficiency. The real constraint on a better financial future isn't AI, it's data, and whoever controls access to it controls the upper hand. And the episode closes on something both Sarah and Theo keep returning to in their work: the fragility of the household balance sheet, the millions of Americans who are one flat tire away from financial distress, and the choice in front of an AI-enabled industry — to widen that gap, or close it.If AI is the most transformative technology any of us will see in our lifetimes., whose financial future are we actually building?
Join the conversation on the 7investing discord: https://discord.com/invite/PT9ZQqdXXSWant access to all our investing content? Join at 7investing.com/subscribe Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) just reported $11 billion in Q1 fiscal 2027 revenue, and the stock is still trading at less than 13x free cash flow, a valuation that Salesforce itself apparently finds too cheap. The company borrowed $25 billion in a single quarter to execute an accelerated share repurchase, reducing its diluted share count by 10% in 90 days as part of a $50 billion buyback authorization. Simon Erickson breaks down why this is one of the most aggressive and under-appreciated capital return stories in enterprise software right now.Beyond the buyback, the real growth engine is Agentforce, Salesforce's AI agentic platform, which is tripling year over year and now generating $3.4 billion in annual recurring revenue combined with its Data 360 customer record platform. With 1.6 billion agentic work unit interactions already logged and a $67 billion remaining performance obligation backlog, Salesforce is positioning itself as the largest and most embedded AI enterprise software platform in the world, one that has spent two decades accumulating the customer data that AI agents actually need to work properly.Simon argues Salesforce has successfully navigated the transition that's destroyed many SaaS peers: moving from per-seat licensing to usage-based AI credits, internalizing AI to reallocate 4,000 customer service jobs into revenue-generating roles, and growing its AI revenue at 200% year over year. With a long-term target of $63 billion in fiscal 2030 revenue (already raised from $60B), a growing dividend, and a management team putting real capital behind the buyback, this is a very different company than the hyper-growth Salesforce of a decade ago, and possibly a more reliable one for long-term investors.0:00 - Introduction and Overview of Salesforce's business1:13 - Review of Q1 2027 results4:36 - A closer look at the Agentforce AI platform6:48 - Why Salesforce is an "Underappreciated Winner in the AI Software World"7:55 - Investor Day Commitments for Fiscal 20309:48 - Why Salesforce's Accelerated Repurchase Plan is important11:06 - Review of Salesforce as an investment opportunity12:20 - Q&A and audience questionsStocks MentionedSalesforce (NYSE:CRM)Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ:PLTR)Oracle (NYSE:ORCL)Informatica (NYSE:INFA) — acquired by Salesforce#Salesforce #CRM #AIAgents #EnterpriseAI #SaaSStocks #TechStocks #ShareBuyback #StockAnalysis #Q1Earnings #GrowthStocks #StocksToWatch #InvestingIn2026 #7investing #Simonerickson
Last week, Mark Carney announced his big A.I. strategy. Two billion dollars to support creating jobs, providing free A.I. literacy training, and protection against some of the potential harms and risks around A.I., especially with kids. Oh, and he wants to build a world-leading supercomputer. Canada's leading A.I. company is Cohere. Cohere isn't like OpenAI or xAI or Anthropic or any of those other well-known large language model companies. They're not public facing. They don't do image generation or music generation, or tell you what recipe you can make with the leftovers in your fridge. They develop private models for specific companies trained in part on that company's private data. RBC, Bell, Salesforce, just to name a few. Their current valuation sits at $7 billion. Cohere's co-founder is a 33 year-old indie rockstar named Nick Frosst. He joins host Stephen Marche to discuss Canada's A.I. sector, his band, Star Trek, and those students booing A.I. at convocations.Host: Stephen MarcheCredits: Tristan Capacchione (Producer), Bruce Thorson (Senior Producer), max collins (Director of Audio), Jesse Brown (Editor and Publisher)Fact checking by Julian AbrahamPhoto: Gabriel HutchinsonAdditional music by: Audio NetworkSponsors: Fizz: Visit https://fizz.ca and activate a first plan using the referral code CAN25 to get 40$ off and 10GB of free data.Douglas: Douglas is giving our listeners a FREE Sleep Bundle with each mattress purchase. Get the sheets, pillows, mattress and pillow protectors FREE with your Douglas purchase today. Visit https://douglas.ca/canadaland to claim this offer.Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at https://shopify.caArticle: Article is offering our listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit https://article.com/canadaland and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout.Can't get enough Canadaland? Follow @Canadaland_Podcasts on Instagram for clips, announcements, explainers and more.If you value this podcast, support us! You'll get premium access to all our shows ad free, including early releases and bonus content. You'll also get our exclusive newsletter, discounts on merch at our store, tickets to our live and virtual events, and more than anything, you'll be a part of the solution to Canada's journalism crisis, you'll be keeping our work free and accessible to everybody. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
CJ Gustafson sits down with Marten Abrahamsen, CFO of Vercel, at the NYSE to talk about running finance inside a hypergrowth AI company. They cover AI use cases in finance, rev rec, forecasting, KPI dashboards, PLG, consumption pricing, and Marten's “speeding tickets vs. parking tickets” framework for moving fast without losing control.—SPONSORS:Brex is an intelligent finance platform with AI-powered agents that capture expenses automatically, enforce policy before the spend happens, and close your books in minutes instead of weeks. 35,000+ companies like OpenAI, Coinbase, Anthropic, and DoorDash already run on Brex. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at https://www.brex.com/metricsAleph is a modern FP&A platform built for teams that want more than another planning tool. By connecting your ERP, CRM, and other systems into one trusted data layer with AI workflows, Aleph helps you move faster with real-time insights. Get a personalized demo at https://www.getaleph.com/runRightRev is an automated revenue recognition platform that lets your product team ship new pricing without asking finance for permission, and your sales team close deals without creating downstream chaos. Check out their free tool at calculator.rightrev.com It scores your rev rec process, shows what's exposing you to risk, and tells you exactly where to focus before it bites you in the rear end. Check it out at https://calculator.rightrev.comRillet is an AI-native ERP built for modern finance teams that want to replace NetSuite and close faster. With revenue recognition, close management, multi-entity support, and native Stripe and Salesforce integrations, Rillet helps scaling companies run their finance stack in one place. Hundreds of teams, including Windsurf and Mercor, use Rillet to make the zero-day close real. Book a demo at https://www.rillet.com/cjEY has been part of Silicon Valley since it was just a valley, helping the most successful names in tech go from startup to exit to megacap. With teams across strategy, tax, audit, and transactions, EY helps you get your financials right early, long before your investors start asking for it. You build the next big thing, and EY will help you build it right. Learn more at https://www.ey.com/techstartupsSpendHound cuts your SaaS and AI spend by up to 30% using real pricing benchmarks across 10,000 vendors, so you always know what fair pricing looks like before your next renewal. Rated #1 on G2 in SaaS spend management, it's free forever for teams up to 1,000 employees. Sign up by June 12th and get $500 just for getting started. Go to https://www.spendhound.com/cj—LINKS: Mostly Talent: https://mostlymetrics.typeform.com/to/cLTxtAsNGuest: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martenabrahamsen/Company: http://vercel.com/CJ: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cj-gustafson-13140948/Mostly metrics: https://www.mostlymetrics.com—TIMESTAMPS:0:00 Speeding tickets vs. parking tickets3:21 Visa IPO in the financial crisis5:09 Going public has changed6:45 Private market: 22–24 trillion9:03 More or fewer public companies?9:48 Sponsors — Brex | Aleph | RightRev13:04 KPI dashboard on your phone14:12 Revenue flux via Slack and Notion15:37 RevRec tool: green, yellow, red17:56 V0 is a job requirement19:43 Speeding tickets vs. parking tickets20:33 Sponsors — Rillet | EY | SpendHound23:49 Very few one-way doors25:02 Finance in hypergrowth25:39 Three-scenario planning27:00 Honest with the board31:00 PLG + consumption at Vercel33:32 What Marten checks every morning34:03 Why RPO doesn't work here35:36 Holiday usage is up37:10 ICP shifted to solo developer39:22 Capital allocation in a fast market41:32 Growth compounds; margin can't43:22 SaaS gross margins: spicy take44:24 Cash-burning AI: 2026 vs. 202147:29 Are some hypergrowth cos destroying value?50:00 Lightning round50:11 Bank of Ireland mix-up51:10 Don't punt problems forward52:04 Finance software stack52:38 Expensed an oven53:12 Credits
והפעם – פרק עם מתן כהן (קורס תכנות רכ״ב, שירות בבסמ״ח ובמצפ״ן) ועופר חופשי, מייסדי Doti, שנמכרה ל־Salesforce בעסקה של כ־100 מיליון דולר
"Third-party content drives 85% of brand discovery in LLMs." It's the GEO stat making the rounds on LinkedIn right now, and a lot of marketers are using it to argue that your own site content doesn't matter anymore- that GEO is really about getting mentioned everywhere else.We disagree. And we have client data that contradicts it.In this episode, Devesh and Benji break down where this narrative came from (an Air Ops post citing a Graphite study), where the methodology breaks down, and what we're actually seeing across our clients in Traqer.ai. The short version: big brands like Salesforce and Peloton skew studies like this because they already have category-level brand awareness. For smaller players like Toro TMS and Climb Hire, clients we've worked with where their own content is essentially all we've done, they're pulling strong brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini. That's not third-party publications doing the work.We also get into:– Why Perplexity, AI Overviews, and AI Mode behave differently than ChatGPT and Gemini (and what visibility numbers look like across each)– The growing evidence that LLMs may decide what to recommend from training data and a loose SERP read first, then find sources to cite after the fact– Why competitive categories (CRM, exercise bikes, content marketing agencies) need a different playbook than less-saturated ones– Why your own site is the only place with enough canvas to spell out the specific use cases, pain points, and customer types that LLMs match against real user conversationsReferenced posts: Invisible Prompts and Topic-Based GEOhttps://www.growandconvert.com/ai/invisible-prompts/https://www.growandconvert.com/ai/topic-based-geo/This is the companion to last week's episode on self-promotional listicles for SEO. Watch that one first if you haven't.Subscribe for new episodes. Newsletter and full written breakdowns: growandconvert.com/newsletter#GEO #AISearch #ContentMarketing
Shawn O'Malley and Daniel Mahncke explore Grab Holdings (ticker: GRAB). In this episode, you'll learn how Grab was able to quickly grow across eight countries in Southeast Asia, and what local adaptations they made to outmaneuver Uber, which eventually ceded its entire market share to Grab. Despite Grab's astronomical successes, the company's stock is down 70% since IPO, and investors are wondering if perhaps now is finally a good entry point after the company reached its first full year of profitability. Shawn and Daniel discuss and estimate Grab's intrinsic value, plus so much more! IN THIS EPISODE YOU'LL LEARN: (00:00:00) Intro (00:04:45) How Grab was able to outcompete Uber (00:11:46) What unique advantages Grab has been able to take advantage of in Southeast Asia (00:13:42) Why Grab's lending business fits so naturally into its flywheel (00:57:26) What are the biggest risks facing the company (00:41:21) Why Grab's profit margins are inflecting so dramatically, and where they could land (01:02:55) What makes Southeast Asia such an appealing market to invest in long-term (01:11:03) How to think about Grab's intrinsic value and attractiveness as an investment (01:14:26) Whether Shawn and Daniel decide to add Grab to the Intrinsic Value Portfolio Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community. Track The Intrinsic Value Portfolio Compound with Rene's deep dive into Grab. Listen to Shawn & Daniel's podcast on Uber. Read Shawn's newsletter on Uber. Check out our previous Intrinsic Value breakdowns: Transdigm, Salesforce, Berkshire Hathaway, FICO, PayPal, Uber, Nike, Amazon, Airbnb, Alphabet. Follow Shawn on X and Linkedin. Follow Daniel on X and Linkedin. Related books mentioned in the podcast. Ad-free episodes on our Premium Feed. NEW TO THE SHOW? Get smarter about valuing businesses through The Intrinsic Value Newsletter. Check out The Investor's Podcast Starter Packs. Follow our official social media accounts: X | LinkedIn | Facebook. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Plus500 Netsuite Shopify Vanta References to any third-party products, services, or advertisers do not constitute endorsements, and The Investor's Podcast Network is not responsible for any claims made by them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
Daniel Mahncke and Shawn O'Malley take a deep dive into Wix.com — the Israeli website-building platform whose investment case now turns on two of the most debated questions in the stock today: whether the generative-AI wave that lets anyone spin up a site from a text prompt is the end of Wix or whether Wix is too sticky, and whether the Base 44 acquisition — Wix's bet on AI-powered app generation — is the next leg of the story or a distraction from the SMB infrastructure business the company already dominates. IN THIS EPISODE YOU'LL LEARN: (00:00:00) Intro (00:00:48) How Wix Was Founded (00:23:46) Why Clients Keep Using Wix (00:26:19) How Much of Wix Is Actually Vulnerable to AI (00:35:32) Why Wix Is More Sticky Than It Seems (00:37:01) Whether Vibecoding Is Likely to Disrupt Drag-and-Drop Website Building (00:45:34) Why Base44 Could Change the Entire Investment Case (01:01:25) How Wix Could Survive and Turn Into a Multibagger (01:04:29) Valuation Discussion of Wix (01:09:21) Whether Shawn and Daniel Add Wix to the Intrinsic Value Portfolio Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community. Track The Intrinsic Value Portfolio. Portfolio Review Submit Tool. Value Investor Club Article. Chit Chat Stocks w/ Manuel Cunha. Future Investing Interview w/ Manuel Cunha. Rene Sellman Substack Article. Manuel Cunha Substack Article. Previous Intrinsic Value breakdowns: Figma, Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe. Follow Shawn on X and Linkedin. Follow Daniel on X and Linkedin. Related books mentioned in the podcast. Ad-free episodes on our Premium Feed. NEW TO THE SHOW? Get smarter about valuing businesses through The Intrinsic Value Newsletter. Check out The Investor's Podcast Starter Packs. Follow our official social media accounts: X | LinkedIn | Facebook. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Fiscal.AI References to any third-party products, services, or advertisers do not constitute endorsements, and The Investor's Podcast Network is not responsible for any claims made by them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
Historisch wordt het sowieso, komende vrijdag: de beursgang van SpaceX. Het heeft het in zich om de grootste beursgang ooit te worden. Het bedrijf mikt op een waardering van 75 miljard dollar, meer geld dan een beursgang ooit heeft opgebracht. De aanloop ging met horten en stoten. Maar het gaat er nu dus toch van komen. Hopen voor Elon Musk dat de stand van de maan goed staat. We vertellen je alles wat je moet weten over de aanloop naar die beursgang. In Beurs in Zicht stomen we je klaar voor de beursweek die je tegemoet gaat. Want soms zie je door de beursbomen het beursbos niet meer. Dat is verleden tijd! Iedere week vertelt een vriend van de show waar jouw focus moet liggen. Te gast: Corné van Zeijl van Cardano BNR Beurs is een journalistiek onafhankelijke productie, mede mogelijk gemaakt door Saxo. Over de makers: Jelle Maasbach is presentator van BNR Beurs en freelance financieel journalist. Zijn favoriete aandeel om over te praten is Disney, maar daar lijkt hij de enige in te zijn. Sinds de eerste uitzending van BNR Beurs is 'ie er bij. Maxim van Mil is presentator van BNR Beurs en journalist bij BNR, waar hij zich focust op de financiële markten en ontwikkelingen in de tech-wereld. Je krijgt hem het meest enthousiast als hij kan praten over ASML, of oer-Hollandse bedrijven zoals Ahold of ABN Amro. Jorik Simonides is presentator van BNR Beurs, economieredacteur en verslaggever bij BNR. Hij wordt er vooral blij van als het een keer níet over AI gaat. Je hoort hem ook in de BNR-podcast Moerdijk: dorp van de rekening. Milou Brand is presentator van BNR Beurs, freelance podcastmaker en columnist bij het Financieele Dagblad. Jochem Visser is presentator van BNR Beurs, maakt Beursnerd XL en is redacteur bij de podcast Onder Curatoren. Vraag hem naar obscure zaken op financiële markten en hij vertelt je waarom het eigenlijk nóg leuker is dan je al dacht. Over de podcast: Met BNR Beurs ga je altijd voorbereid de nieuwe beursdag in. We praten je in een kleine 25 minuten bij over alle laatste ontwikkelingen op de handelsvloer. We blijven niet alleen bij de AEX of Wall Street, maar vertellen je ook waar nog meer kansen liggen. En we houden het niet bij de cijfers, maar zoeken ook iedere dag voor je naar duiding van scherpe gasten en experts. Of je nu een ervaren belegger bent of net begint met je eerste stappen op de beurs, de podcast biedt waardevolle inzichten voor je beleggingsstrategie. Door de focus op zowel de korte termijn als de lange termijn, helpt BNR Beurs luisteraars om de ruis van de markt te scheiden van de essentie. Van Musk tot Microsoft en van Ahold tot ASML. Wij vertellen je wat beleggers bezighoudt, wie de markten in beweging zet en wat dat betekent voor jouw beleggingsportefeuille.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
AI agents can now connect to every tool your employees use. The problem is that connecting them and trusting them are two completely different things, and most enterprises have figured out the first without solving the second. Oren Michaels, co-founder and CEO of Barndoor AI, joins Craig Smith to explain why that gap is the defining challenge of the agentic enterprise era. His framework is simple and sharp: agents are like enthusiastic interns. They will absolutely do something when you ask them to. Whether it's what you intended is another matter, and when an agent can act across Salesforce, Slack, email, and calendar simultaneously, the blast radius of a misunderstood instruction is far larger than anything a human intern could cause. The conversation covers the 100,000 agent problem - the reality that each agent handling a discrete task needs its own set of rules about what it's allowed to do, and that number scales to a size no human team can govern manually - and why traditional identity management systems were never built for the failure modes AI agents create. The new threat isn't bad actors getting in; it's authorized people using allowed tools with agents that still do the wrong thing. Barn Door's governance layer sits between the agent and the tools it can access, specifying exactly what each agent is permitted to do in each context, and Venn brings that same capability to individuals who want to understand what's possible before their organizations catch up. This is one of the most practically useful conversations available about what enterprise AI governance actually looks like. Subscribe to Eye on A.I. for weekly conversations with the people building and deploying the future of AI.
Agentic AI is being misread as a series of separate battles - e.g. Snowflake vs. Databricks, copilots vs. agents, model makers vs. app vendors, etc. We think the real story is that the biggest opportunity in software is converging around who owns the new intelligent client and the AI back end that makes it useful. The new client is the agent-based system of engagement - Snowflake's CoWork & CoCo, Databricks Genie, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini Enterprise, ChatGPT/Codex, Claude/Cowork and others. But that client cannot deliver business outcomes without a new back end - what we call a System of Intelligence - that represents a model of the enterprise in terms of its business rules and tacit knowledge. You can't build one without the other. We frame this premise using Clay Christensen's integrated innovation and Jensen's extreme co-design as applied to enterprise software.That is why Snowflake is the focal point for this Breaking Analysis, but not the whole story. Snowflake is not just competing with Databricks anymore. It is now in the same strategic arena as Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Celonis and others - all trying to define where business users, builders and agents get work done, and where the enterprise context that powers that work gets built.
Local AI, Salesforce, Fluttershell, Aspose, http/2 bomb, Passwords, Cisco, Used Tech, Josh Marpet, and More on this episode of the Security Weekly News Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swn for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-587
Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky sit down to unpack a busy stretch across tech, shipping, and commerce. They open with Anthropic's confidential IPO filing, submitted to the SEC on June 1st, and what it signals about the AI lab's trajectory. After a $65 billion Series H that pushed its valuation to $965 billion, Anthropic now sits ahead of OpenAI on that measure, and Rick and Jessica dig into how it got there: a revenue run rate that climbed from roughly $10 billion a year ago to about $47 billion by May 2026, helped by a developer-first bet through Claude Code that has made it a serious contender for enterprise spend.The Watson Weekly Weekend episode is sponsored by Avalara. Its Agentic Tax and Compliance automates behind-the-scenes work for ecommerce brands, enabling accurate checkout tax calculation, clearer tariff and duty visibility, and fewer customer surprises. Avalara integrates with platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. Learn more at avalara.watsonweekly.comFrom there the conversation turns physical. USPS and DHL have signed a multi-year contract valued at well over $10 billion, with DHL handling pickup, sorting, and transport while USPS covers final-mile delivery. It lands at an awkward moment for the Postal Service, which posted a $9.5 billion loss in fiscal 2025 and whose Postmaster General has warned of a possible cash crisis within a year absent action from Congress.The last segment covers Salesforce's push to wake up a commerce cloud that had been growing under 2%. The reported Contentful acquisition (somewhere in the $1 to $1.5 billion range) fits a long pattern that runs through MuleSoft, Tableau, Slack, and PredictSpring. Rick and Jessica close on whether the integrated Agentforce suite can hold up against focused players like Shopify.
Rupert Mayer is the founder of IPfolio, a vertical SaaS platform built for corporate intellectual property teams to manage patents, trademarks, renewals, and innovation workflows. Originally from Austria, Rupert stumbled into IP software while helping a patent law firm solve Y2K risks, then moved to Silicon Valley to build a modern cloud-based product on Salesforce for smaller in-house IP teams. IPfolio started as a lightweight alternative to legacy enterprise systems but gradually moved upmarket as customers like Dropbox, Square, GoPro, and Alphabet companies adopted the platform. Built largely on Salesforce with a lean team, the company grew steadily, signed six-figure enterprise contracts, and expanded to roughly 40 employees while serving increasingly complex global enterprises. After raising a small strategic investment to scale faster, IPfolio grew too quickly and burned through capital chasing larger enterprise deals that took longer to close. Rupert ultimately sold the company in 2019 to a strategic partner, stayed through multiple acquisitions, and helped position IPfolio as the flagship product inside a much larger global company. Today, he is building again—this time in climate tech. Key Takeaways Go All In - Growing software companies need full-time focus once you know the opportunity is real. Move Upmarket - Lightweight SaaS products often evolve into enterprise systems as big customers reshape the roadmap. Enterprise Leverage - Selling to innovative companies like Google accelerated product maturity and credibility faster than expected. Growth Trap - Hiring ahead of demand after rapid growth can create painful consequences when pipeline assumptions fail. Platform Advantage - Building on Salesforce dramatically reduced enterprise security, compliance, and infrastructure complexity. Quote from Rupert Mayer, Founder of IPfolio "I think the US innovation culture, especially in Silicon Valley, is very different from the business culture in Europe. I think it's just the willingness to take risks. When I started selling, I was basically now a solo entrepreneur. When I approached big companies to buy IP Folio, the early version, I did not have big names to go out with. I was a nobody. And so I walk into, what was it at the time already, a public company in Silicon Valley. I do my demo and everyone likes the product. And then they ask the dreaded question, well, how big is your company? We're two people plus a developer. And I thought that was it. This public company will never sell from, buy from this no name, more or less solo startup. And they said, wow, that's so cool. This is great. We'd love to buy from you because 15 years ago, this company was basically just three people in the garage and someone trusted them and bought their product." Links Rupert Mayer on LinkedIn IPfolio on LinkedIn IPfolio website Podcast Sponsor – LaunchBay LaunchBay helps B2B software companies automate client onboarding and implementation so customers activate faster and everyone stays aligned. If your onboarding includes data collection, setup steps, approvals, training, or any level of customization, LaunchBay replaces the messy mix of emails, spreadsheets, and meetings with a clear, all-in-one onboarding system. Teams use LaunchBay to onboard clients faster, stay on top of follow-ups automatically, and deliver a smoother experience, without hiring more people or adding more tools. Visit launchbay.com/practical and get 25% off your first 3 months on any LaunchBay plan. The Practical Founders Podcast Tune into the Practical Founders Podcast for weekly in-depth interviews with founders who have built valuable software companies without big funding. Subscribe to the Practical Founders Podcast using your favorite podcast app or view on our YouTube channel. Get the weekly Practical Founders newsletter and podcast updates at practicalfounders.com. Practical Founders CEO Peer Groups Be part of a committed and confidential group of practical founders creating valuable software companies without big VC funding. A Practical Founders Peer Group is a committed and confidential group of founders/CEOs who want to help you succeed on your terms. Each Practical Founders Peer Group is personally curated and moderated by Greg Head.
The Road to Macstock takes a serious turn as Mike T. Rose previews his workshop on becoming a digital caretaker for family members and loved ones. Mike discusses scams targeting older adults, password sharing, remote support, Apple Passwords, financial preparedness, and the need to balance protection, respect, independence, and trust when helping others manage their digital lives. Today's edition of MacVoices is supported by MacVoices Live!, our weekly live panel discussion of what is going in the Apple space as well as the larger tech world, and how it is impacting you. Join us live at YouTube.com/MacVoicesTV at 8 PM Eastern 5 PM Pacific, or whatever time that is wherever you are and participate in the chat, or catch the edited and segmented versions of the show on the regular MacVoices channels and feeds. Show Notes: Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to Mike T. Rose on the Road to Macstock00:59 Remembering Mike stepping in during a past conference02:12 Mike reflects on filling in and returning to MacStock03:00 Speaker continuity and community expectations04:23 Staying healthy before the conference04:52 Mike introduces his workshop format05:12 Stepping into the role of a digital caretaker06:48 A Microsoft Office upgrade reveals a bigger issue08:39 A family member is caught by a Venmo scam09:19 Managing risks, passwords, and financial access10:11 Using built-in Apple tools instead of advanced services10:25 Safari, Chrome, verification codes, and Apple Passwords10:57 Setting up shared family password folders11:29 Defining digital caretaking12:39 The family “alpha nerd” becomes responsible14:11 Remote tech support challenges and FaceTime troubleshooting16:01 Asynchronous support, screenshots, and remote access tools17:57 Older adults as prime targets for scammers18:53 AARP, Craig Newmark, and scam-interruption resources19:51 Gift cards, retail workers, and scam warning signs20:35 Deepfakes, safe words, and trusted contacts21:40 Fake profiles and stolen valor scams22:48 Protecting family members from criminal targeting23:25 Romance scams, business scams, and phishing tactics25:02 Keeping loved ones safe without burning out26:09 The Beekeeper as a scam-awareness example27:07 Recommended resources and My Mother's Money28:18 Financial preparedness and how quickly gaps appear29:39 Using AI tools to find validated resources30:18 Why this workshop may matter to everyone31:02 The future reversal of helper and helped33:00 Balancing safety, respect, and autonomy34:00 Managing support while preserving dignity36:23 Mike's MacStock discount code37:01 Registering for MacStock and planning ahead38:14 Where to find Mike T. Rose and The Aftershow39:29 Mike's social channels and listener acknowledgments40:17 Remembering John Martellaro and Chuck La Tournous41:22 Final Macstock encouragement and wrap-up Guests: Mike Rose is a past Macstock speaker and multi-year attendee. He is an occasional podcaster with fellow Macstock speaker Kelly Guimont at aftershowpodcast.com, continuing their collaboration from the much-missed TUAW.com (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) in the 2000s and 2010s.Mike began his technology career at the dawn of the desktop publishing revolution, helping transform workflows and introduce the Mac at Entertainment Weekly and LIFE magazines in the 1990s. After his second career in the event production and sales training industry (working with clients such as Pfizer, Dell, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Deloitte), he pivoted to enterprise software in 2013 and is now a Senior Director of Solution Engineering at Salesforce.Outside of work, Mike is active in an NYC community choir, and supports his wife Heidi's congregation as a volunteer technology, AV and operations consultant. Mike & Heidi live in Brooklyn, NY with their two young adult daughters and one young adult cat. Catch him on The Aftershow with Kelly Guimont. Support: Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon http://patreon.com/macvoices Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect: Web: http://macvoices.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner http://www.twitter.com/macvoices Mastodon: https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner MacVoices Page on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/ MacVoices Group on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe: Audio in iTunes Video in iTunes Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher: Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss
Local AI, Salesforce, Fluttershell, Aspose, http/2 bomb, Passwords, Cisco, Used Tech, Josh Marpet, and More on this episode of the Security Weekly News Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-587
SAP and Enterprise Trends Podcasts from Jon Reed (@jonerp) of diginomica.com
Salesforce Connections 2026 had an ambitious narrative: apply agentic AI to turn marketers from bogged-down admins to "makers." But how did that narrative go over with attendees? And how do Salesforce customers achieve these changes and reduce marketing/sales pain points - even on older "heritage" releases? Does the fragmentation of enterprise data remain an obstacle? Jon Reed hashes out these questions and more with Rebecca Wettemann, who has done notable research through Valoir on CX data fragmentation. Can the two get to the bottom of the show on the clock, before their conference room time expires? We're about to find out...
Daniel Mahncke and Shawn O'Malley take a deep dive into Wix.com — the Israeli website-building platform whose investment case now turns on two of the most debated questions in the stock today: whether the generative-AI wave that lets anyone spin up a site from a text prompt is the end of Wix or whether Wix is too sticky, and whether the Base 44 acquisition — Wix's bet on AI-powered app generation — is the next leg of the story or a distraction from the SMB infrastructure business the company already dominates. IN THIS EPISODE YOU'LL LEARN: (00:00:00) Intro (00:01:32) How Wix was founded (00:21:35) Why clients keep using Wix (00:28:05) How much of WIX is actually vulnerable to AI (00:37:07) Why Wix is more sticky than it seems (00:38:24) Whether vibecoding is likely to disrupt drag-and-drop website building (00:46:54) Why Base44 could change the entire investment case (01:06:24) How Wix could survive and turn into a multibagger (01:09:21) Valuation discussion of Wix (01:13:26) Whether Shawn and Daniel add Wix to the Intrinsic Value Portfolio BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community. Track The Intrinsic Value Portfolio. Portfolio Review Submit Tool. Value Investor Club Article. Chit Chat Stocks w/ Manuel Cunha. Future Investing Interview w/ Manuel Cunha. Rene Sellman Substack Article. Manuel Cunha Substack Article. Previous Intrinsic Value breakdowns: Figma, Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe. Follow Shawn on X and Linkedin. Follow Daniel on X and Linkedin. Related books mentioned in the podcast. Ad-free episodes on our Premium Feed. NEW TO THE SHOW? Get smarter about valuing businesses through The Intrinsic Value Newsletter. Check out The Investor's Podcast Starter Packs. Follow our official social media accounts: X | LinkedIn | Facebook. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Plus500 Netsuite Shopify Vanta References to any third-party products, services, or advertisers do not constitute endorsements, and The Investor's Podcast Network is not responsible for any claims made by them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
Gold is dipping even as the Middle East conflict intensifies and inflation worries mount — a counterintuitive move that has investors scratching their heads about where to find safety. We explore what's really driving gold prices and whether the precious metal still belongs in a defensive portfolio.Today's Stocks & Topics: Treasury Bill, Market Wrap, Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF (SCHD), Martin Marietta Materials, Inc. (MLM), Gold's Confusing Signal: Why the Safe-Haven Trade Isn't Playing Out as Expected, Select STOXX Europe Aerospace & Defense ETF (EUAD), Salesforce, Inc. (CRM), Uranium Royalty Corp. (UROY), AstraZeneca PLC (AZN).Our Next Wealth Webinar: “Beyond the Yield: How to Invest for Your Income Needs” June 30th, 2026 - 12:00 pmTo sign up: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/5717793889555/WN_XuoDgMVwSv6wZXXurrZTLgOur Sponsors:* Check out Anthropic and use my code Claude.ai/invest for a great deal: https://www.anthropic.com* Check out Chilipad and use my code sleep.me/INVEST for a great deal: https://sleep.me* Check out Plaud AI and use my code INVEST for a great deal: https://plaud.ai* Check out Progressive: https://www.progressive.com* Check out Quince and use my code quince.com/invest for a great deal: https://www.quince.com* Check out Scribe and use my code scribe.how/invest for a great deal: https://scribe.com* Check out TaskRabbit and use my code INVEST for a great deal: https://taskrabbit.com* Check out TruDiagnostic and use my code INVEST20 for a great deal: https://www.trudiagnostic.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
In this episode of Run the Numbers, CJ breaks down how stock exchanges became the operating system of modern capitalism. From ship captains raising voyage money, to the Dutch East India Company's first tradable shares, to coffee house traders, the Buttonwood Agreement, market crashes, Robinhood, and GameStop, this is the story of how markets turned ownership into something liquid, global, and very, very human.—SPONSORS:SpendHound cuts your SaaS and AI spend by up to 30% using real pricing benchmarks across 10,000 vendors, so you always know what fair pricing looks like before your next renewal. Rated #1 on G2 in SaaS spend management, it's free forever for teams up to 1,000 employees. Sign up by June 12th and get $500 just for getting started. Go to https://www.spendhound.com/cjBrex is an intelligent finance platform with AI-powered agents that capture expenses automatically, enforce policy before the spend happens, and close your books in minutes instead of weeks. 35,000+ companies like OpenAI, Coinbase, Anthropic, and DoorDash already run on Brex. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at https://www.brex.com/metricsAleph is a modern FP&A platform built for teams that want more than another planning tool. By connecting your ERP, CRM, and other systems into one trusted data layer with AI workflows, Aleph helps you move faster with real-time insights. Get a personalized demo at https://www.getaleph.com/runRightRev is an automated revenue recognition platform that lets your product team ship new pricing without asking finance for permission, and your sales team close deals without creating downstream chaos. Check out their free tool at calculator.rightrev.com It scores your rev rec process, shows what's exposing you to risk, and tells you exactly where to focus before it bites you in the rear end. Check it out at https://calculator.rightrev.comRillet is an AI-native ERP built for modern finance teams that want to replace NetSuite and close faster. With revenue recognition, close management, multi-entity support, and native Stripe and Salesforce integrations, Rillet helps scaling companies run their finance stack in one place. Hundreds of teams, including Windsurf and Mercor, use Rillet to make the zero-day close real. Book a demo at https://www.rillet.com/cjEY has been part of Silicon Valley since it was just a valley, helping the most successful names in tech go from startup to exit to megacap. With teams across strategy, tax, audit, and transactions, EY helps you get your financials right early, long before your investors start asking for it. You build the next big thing, and EY will help you build it right. Learn more at https://www.ey.com/techstartups—LINKS: Mostly Talent: https://mostlymetrics.typeform.com/to/cLTxtAsNCJ: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cj-gustafson-13140948/Mostly metrics: https://www.mostlymetrics.comSlacker Stuff: https://www.slackerstuff.com/Ben on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slackerstuff/—RELATED EPISODES:A CFO Explains Secondarieshttps://youtu.be/pENvBuXhGukA CFO Explains the Diamond Industryhttps://youtu.be/fPrho7hvykAA CFO Explains Marketplaceshttps://youtu.be/LpbH9GpBrSY—TIMESTAMPS:0:00 The First IPO, and Why It Changed Everything2:50 Coffee, Buttonwood Trees, and the First Insider Trading Scandal6:31 The Railroads Built Your Month-End Close10:17 Sponsors — SpendHound | Brex | Aleph13:47 Buying Stocks on Credit, and How That Ended18:13 Merrill Lynch Goes to the Suburbs, and the Paper Almost Wins21:44 Sponsors — RightRev | Rillet | EY24:47 NASDAQ, Pets.com, and the Most Expensive Sock Puppet in History28:49 The Phone in Your Pocket Democratized Everything, For Better or Worse33:03 The Stock Market Was Never Really About Stocks36:47 Credits#RunTheNumbersPodcast #FinanceHistory #StockMarket #Investing #FinanceLeadership
Cushman & Wakefield Executive Director Dylan Walsh on NYC investment sales, development sites, debt maturities, and why pessimism in a down market is always the wrong call. The Crexi Podcast connects commercial real estate (CRE) professionals with industry insights built for smart decision-making. In each episode, we explore the latest trends, innovations and opportunities shaping commercial real estate, because we believe knowledge should move at the speed of ambition and every conversation should empower professionals to act with greater clarity and confidence. Dylan Walsh has handled more than 100 transactions and over $2 billion in NYC commercial real estate. After stops at Rosewood Realty and Marcus & Millichap, he returned to Cushman & Wakefield in 2022 as Executive Director overseeing capital markets. In this episode, Dylan joins host Shanti Ryle on NYC investment sales, why development sites are the hottest asset class, how lenders and sponsors are navigating debt maturities, and why staying contrarian is where the real money gets made. Welcome to The Crexi Podcast Introducing Dylan Walsh of Cushman & Wakefield From Martha's Vineyard rentals to Cushman intern — and not getting the job Three years at Rosewood Realty: the art of the call Marcus & Millichap: team structure, suits every day, and why multifamily is the most nuanced asset class in New York Still 80% brokerage: time blocking, pipeline reviews, and building a team Class A office is back, residential vacancy is at 1.5%, and development sites are the hottest asset class Office conversions, the June 2026 commencement rush, and the quagmire of Class B and C The 485X abatement, the 99-unit workaround, and who is buying right now 1031 exchanges, two seller buckets, and debt maturities coming to a head How lenders and sponsors are navigating the foreclosure conversation Retail up 30% from 2019, industrial running out of space, and rezoning to residential Salesforce, AI, and why relationships don't commoditize Finding windows of opportunity in every conversation Rapid fire: Greenpoint, Ridgewood, and why bad markets create the best opportunities About Dylan Walsh: Dylan Walsh joined Cushman & Wakefield as an Executive Director in January 2022, to oversee the Cushman & Wakefield Capital Markets. His team is one of the most active in NYC commercial real estate sales and represents landlords on the disposition of their CRE in New York City. His experience spans all asset classes including office, land, multifamily, retail, industrial and development, air right transfers, coops and conversions. Dylan's clients include private equity, institutions, family offices, high net worth individuals, debt funds and the government. Dylan has handled the sale of over 100 transactions, totaling more than $2 billion worth of commercial real estate in New York City. He also specializes in transitioning his client's debt and equity out of NYC into income producing properties across the country using the 1031 tax exchange. Dylan has over 12 years of brokerage experience and started his career as an intern at Cushman & Wakefield in 2013. Throughout his tenure, Walsh spent 3 years at Rosewood Realty in Manhattan and 6 years at Marcus & Millichap working in NYC for the New York Multifamily Team. He has a bachelor's degree from St. Michael's College in Vermont and has family located across New York and Denver. For show notes, past guests, and more CRE content, please check out Crexi's blog.Looking to stay ahead in commercial real estate? Visit Crexi to explore properties, analyze markets, and connect with opportunities nationwide. Follow Crexi:https://www.crexi.com/ https://www.crexi.com/instagram https://www.crexi.com/facebook https://www.crexi.com/twitter https://www.crexi.com/linkedin https://www.youtube.com/crexi About Crexi:Crexi is reimagining commercial real estate with an AI-powered platform built to deliver smarter, more efficient solutions at every stage of the deal lifecycle. From real-time data and market insights with Crexi Intelligence, to targeted property marketing and seamless deal management through Crexi PRO, and a transparent, time-bound bidding experience with Crexi Auction— Crexi enables users to evaluate opportunities, maximize exposure, and close with speed and confidence. To date, Crexi has subsidized over $2.74 trillion in property value, 26 billion square feet listed, and supports a growing community of more than 23 million yearly users.
This episode is a rebroadcast of Auren's appearance on the GTMnow podcast ---------------------------------------------------Auren Hoffman (Flex Capital) joins the GTMnow podcast to share some of the most contrarian takes in tech today, from why AI moats are gone, to why your next VC meeting will be with a bot, to why AI is secretly going to trigger a baby boom.In this episode:Why Auren runs 500+ AI agents to source deals, and what that means for founders raising capitalThe "agent-to-agent" meeting prediction: by end of 2026, first VC conversations will be fully automatedWhy every software moat has been "blown up" and what Salesforce, LinkedIn & DocuSign need to do to surviveThe OpenAI x The Hustle acquisition breakdown: why it's the smartest (and cheapest) distribution play in AIWhy missing a great deal is 10x more painful than making a bad one, Auren's honest VC mistake frameworkThe baby boom thesis: why AI, IVF, self-driving cars & cheaper energy could reverse the fertility declineWhy companies won't sign yearly SaaS contracts anymore, and what that means for every B2B founderAuren Hoffman is the founder of NQB8, Flex Capital, SafeGraph, and LiveRamp. He's an early backer of Replit, Perplexity, Rippling, Vercel, Coinbase, Chime, and AppLovin.Max's socials: https://x.com/hackitmaxhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler/Auren's socials:https://x.com/aurenhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/auren/https://auren.substack.com/GTMnow: https://gtmnow.com
Bradley sits down with Emily Witucki, a Salesforce consultant and first-time mentor on the Trailblazer Mentorship Platform, alongside her three mentees: Andi Poulson, Ola Mostafa, and Monique Larroux. Together, they pull back the curtain on what mentorship in the Salesforce ecosystem actually looks like: the vulnerability, the breakthroughs, the LinkedIn glow-ups, and the genuine human connections that form along the way. Whether you're chasing your first certification, stuck in a job search rut, or an experienced pro wondering if mentorship still applies to you, this episode will meet you where you are. Spoiler: it does. And it's free. Episode Timestamps 01:16 - Welcome & Panel Introductions: Bradley welcomes mentor Emily Witucki and her three mentees: Andi, Ola, and Monique. 06:18 - Why Emily Became a Mentor: The Salesforce Fairy Godmother: Emily shares that her motivation to mentor came from a deep love of helping people and a desire to pay forward the sense of community she found in Talent Stacker. 08:22 - The Mentee Perspective. What Andi, Ola & Monique Were Looking For: Each mentee shares what drew them to the platform, from bombing interviews and feeling stuck, to needing direction after certification, to simply wanting to level up. 10:00 - How the Trailblazer Mentorship Platform Actually Works: Bradley clarifies the application and matching process, explains that membership in Talent Stacker is not required, and notes that 100% of applicants were accepted in the last two cohorts. 26:05 - Branding: Emily identified Andi's brand right away by seeing her pink hair. Emily's approach with all of them on social media and resume and portfolio, is to show people who they are, that who they are is already amazing. 30:14 – LinkedIn and Community: The panel discusses the importance of LinkedIn in the modern job search, but also the supportive community to be found there, along with the Salesforce Ohana and Talent Stacker. 42:08 - What's Next: Goals from Each Mentee: Andi aims for two new certifications and deeper community involvement, Ola is pursuing Salesforce legend status and Google Data Analytics, and Monique is weeks away from passing her admin exam. 51:50 - Advice for the "Mentorless" & How to Get Involved: The group encourages listeners to apply for mentorship without hesitation, with Emily also calling on companies to consider sponsoring the program through trailblazermentorship.com. Links & Resources Trailblazer Mentorship Platform: trailblazermentorship.com Talent Stacker: talentstacker.com