Chad Peets is one of the most straight-talking, no BS sales leaders of our time. Today, he partners with founders of the fastest growing companies in the world, like Harvey, Factory to build the best sales teams in a world of AI.
Chris Degnan is a legendary technology sales leader who achieved the historic feat of scaling Snowflake from $0 to $4BN in ARR.
AGENDA:
00:00 – The $100M CRO Packages Nobody Believes Are Real
04:10 – Why Most "Elite" Salespeople Are Actually Just Order Takers
08:00 – The Secret to Hiring Killer Sales Talent at Early-Stage Startups
10:05 – 20x Quotas & The Death of Traditional Pipeline Generation
16:20 – The ARR Scam: Why Most AI Revenue Numbers Are Fake
17:45 – Why the Best Engineers Do Not Want to Be Forward Deployed Engineers
21:10 – Why Paying Everyone the Same Kills Great Sales Organisations
24:15 – Anthropic's Crazy Compensation Is Breaking the Entire Sales Market
29:00 – The Brutal Truth About Replacing CROs & Firing Sales Leaders
32:20 – Forecasting in AI Is Completely Broken
38:20 – The Fatal Mistake Founders Make Chasing Venture Valuations
39:40 – Why Most VCs Give Absolutely Terrible Sales Advice
42:10 – Global Sales From Day One: The New AI Go-To-Market Playbook
44:15 – "Anthropic Is a $5 Trillion Company"
47:40 – The Death of the Traditional SDR & The Rise of Full-Stack AI Sellers
49:00 – Consumption Pricing, Vertical AI & Why SaaS Is Getting Rewritten
52:00 – What the Best Sales Cultures Still Get Right in the AI Era
Winston Weinberg is the CEO and Co-Founder of Harvey, the leading professional services platform engineered with AI for law, tax, and finance. Winston has raised over $980M for Harvey from Sequoia, a16z, GV, Elad Gil and more with a last round price of $9.2BN post-money. Before founding Harvey in August 2022, Winston was an attorney at O'Melveny & Myers LLP, specializing in antitrust and securities litigation.
AGENDA:
04:10 #1 Thing Every Founder Needs to Do Everyday
05:33 Must Do Daily Routines and Productivity Tips for CEOs
12:45 How to Get Sequoia and a16z Term Sheets
15:06 Why VCs Suck at Helping Companies Hire?
27:01 What No One Understands About Enterprise AI Adoption
38:06 AI's Impact on Professional Services
39:26 Future of Law Firms: Do They Die?
43:38 What Everyone Should Know That No One Tells You About Hiring in Europe
47:08 I Have Massive Trust Issues…
54:17 Biggest Lessons on Effective Deal-Making
59:20 Cold Emailing OpenAI and It Leading to a Term Sheet
01:02:33 Quick Fire Round
Try NEXOS.AI for yourself with a 14-day free trial: https://nexos.ai/20vc
Chad Peets is one of the great sales leaders of our time. Previously, he was the sales saviour at Snowflake and was an advisor to the CEO there. He was also an MD at Sutter Hill where he sat on the board of companies like Sigma Computing and Augment Code.
AGENDA:
04:53 How to Recruit the Best Sales Talent Today
06:27 Why Europe is a Nightmare for Recruitment in Sales
11:29 How to Evaluate Sales Talent: Green and Red Flags
21:58 Why Remote Work is BS and You Have to be in Office
23:43 How to Improve Sales Team Performance in Just 24 Hours
27:45 When to Fire vs When to Give More Time
32:10 How to Set Sales Quotas Effectively
34:39 Adjusting Compensation Plans for Better Performance
37:50 Why Work Life Balance is Total BS
41:08 Biggest Lessons on Leading Sales Teams
50:37 What is The Future of Enterprise Sales with AI
58:40 Quick Fire Questions and Final Thoughts
In this recap episode, we highlight the best moments from our 2025 interviews and reflect on the ideas that defined the year.
Featuring:
David Rubenstein (co-founder of Carlyle)
Yamini Rangan (CEO of HubSpot)
Ben Chestnut (co-founder of Mailchimp)
Winston Weinberg (co-founder and CEO of Harvey)
Garrett Lord (co-founder of Handshake)
Aidan Gomez (co-founder and CEO of Cohere)
Michelle Zatlyn (co-founder of Cloudflare)
Evan Spiegel (co-founder and CEO of Snap)
Connect with Joubin
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joubin-mirzadegan-66186854/
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
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Learn more about Kleiner Perkins: https://www.kleinerperkins.com/
In just over three years, Harvey has not only scaled to nearly one thousand customers, including Walmart, PwC, and other giants of the Fortune 500, but fundamentally transformed how legal work is delivered. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil are joined by Harvey’s co-founder and president Gabe Pereyra to discuss why the future of legal AI isn’t only about individual productivity, but also about putting together complex client matters to make law firms more profitable. They also talk about how Harvey analyzes complex tasks like fund formation or M&A and deploys agents to handle research and drafting, the strategic reasoning behind enabling law firms rather than competing with them, and why AI won’t replace partners but will change law firm leverage models and training for associates.
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Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @gabepereyra | @Harvey
Chapters:
00:00 – Gabe Pereyra Introduction
00:09 – Introduction to Harvey
02:04 – Expanding Harvey’s Reach
03:22 – Understanding Legal Workflows
06:20 – Agentic AI Applications in Law
09:06 – The Future Evolution of Law Firms
13:36 – RL in Law
19:46 – Deploying Harvey and Customization
23:46 – Adoption and Customer Success
25:28– Why Harvey Isn’t Building a Law Firm
27:25 – Challenges and Opportunities in Legal Tech
29:26 – Building a Company During the Rise of Gen AI
37:24 – Hiring at Harvey
40:19 – Future Predictions
44:17 – Conclusion
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Today’s show:
Find out why AI is perfectly suited to legal tasks… despite being too fast for “billable hours”
On today’s TWiST, Alex takes a deep dive into LLM Law with Harvey AI co-founder/president Gabe Pereyra. It turns out, much like software development, doing legal work relies on learning specialized language and sifting through a dense and expansive corpus of information… making it an IDEAL use case for LLMs.
Buuuuut AI works so fast… the current structure of legal payments (billable hours) no longer applies. Find out how Harvey is working around these challenges — and what they plan to do if OpenAI decides to get into the legal game — in this fascinating interview.
THEN, Alex chats with another AI visionary — OpenRouter co-founder and CEO Alex Atallah — who allows developers to plug and play all the major models into their applications. Find out why specialized LLMs trained for “resourcefulness” are coming into fashion… why benchmarks and evals have become so crucial to the industry… AND whether we’ll end up spending as much on AI inference as the human workers it’s replacing… in this essential discussion.
PLUS Jason stops by for some more Founder Q’s!
Timestamps:
(0:00) Welcome back to TWiST!
(1:32) Alex kicks off the show with Harvey AI co-founder and President Gabe Pereyra to talk about applying AI to the legal profession
(4:52) How major international law firms (and their enterprise clients) fueled Harvey’s mega-growth
(6:54) Why LLMs are perfectly suited for legal work
(9:24) Enterpret - Enterpret turns feedback noise into Customer Intelligence, so your team knows exactly what to fix and build next. Head to Enterpret.com/twist to book a demo and see it in action.x and build next. Head to Enterpret.com/twist to book a demo and see it in action.
(17:22) Looking ahead: expanding beyond the law.
(20:42) Uber AI Solutions - Your trusted partner to get AI to work in the real world. Book a demo with them TODAY at Uber.com/twist
(21:44) The problem: AI can’t charge “billable hours”… it’s too fast!
(23:44) Will the major AI players like Google and OpenAI build their own version of this?
(29:53) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist
(30:41) Alex welcomes OpenRouter co-founder and CEO Alex Atallah, whose rankings he loves and uses all the time
(33:10) Why Alex says we’re seeing more specialized LLMs trained for more “resourcefulness”
(36:05) How increased competition and diversification makes things tougher for developers
(41:09) Alex suggests that new models are exciting for users, like product launches used to be
(42:29) OK, let’s get into it… How does OpenRouter make money?
(45:38) Understanding what kinds of training data the AI companies want the MOST
(47:47) The important currency of evals and benchmarks
(49:13) Why OpenRouter is ramping up its LLM recommendation engine
(53:44) Will AI inference spend end up costing as much as the humans it’s replacing?
(56:49) Time for a Founder Q! What should founders do about quick vibe-coded competitors?
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Thank you to our partners:
(9:24) Enterpret - Enterpret turns feedback noise into Customer Intelligence, so your team knows exactly what to fix and build next. Head to Enterpret.com/twist to book a demo and see it in action.x and build next. Head to Enterpret.com/twist to book a demo and see it in action.
(20:42) Uber AI Solutions - Your trusted partner to get AI to work in the real world. Book a demo with them TODAY at Uber.com/twist
(29:53) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist
Chad Peets is one of the greatest sales leaders and recruiters of the last 25 years. From 2018 to 2023, Chad was a Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures. Chad has worked with the world's best CEOs and CROs to build world-class go-to-market organizations. Chad is currently a member of the Board of Directors for Lacework and Luminary Cloud and on the boards of Clumio and Sigma Computing. He previously served as a board member for Astronomer, Transposit, and others. He was an early-stage investor at Snowflake, Sigma, Observe, Lacework, and Clumio.
In Today's Discussion with Chad Peet's We Discuss:
1. You Need a CRO Pre-Product:
Why does Chad believe that SaaS companies need a CRO pre-product?
Should the founder not be the right person to create the sales playbook?
What should the founder look for in their first CRO hire?
Does any great CRO really want to go back to an early startup and do it again?
2. What Everyone Gets Wrong in Building Sales Teams:
Why are most sales reps not performing?
How long does it take for sales teams to ramp? How does this change with PLG and enterprise?
What are the benchmarks of good vs great for average sales reps?
How do founders and VCs most often hurt their sales teams and performance?
3. How to Build a Hiring Machine:
What are the single biggest mistakes people make when hiring sales reps and teams?
Are sales people money motivated? How to create comp plans that incentivise and align?
Why does Chad believe that any sales rep that does not want to be in the office, is not putting their career and development first?
Why is it harder than ever to recruit great sales leaders today?
4. Lessons from Scaling Sales at Snowflake:
What are the single biggest lessons of what worked from scaling Snowflake's sales team?
What did not work? What would he do differently with the team again?
What did Snowflake teach Chad about success and culture and how they interplay together?
2025 has thus far been a year of great leaps and advances in AI technology. And Sarah and Elad have spoken with some of the most enterprising founders and scientific minds in the field of AI today. So we’re revisiting a few of our favorite conversations on No Priors so far in 2025 – Winston Weinberg (Harvey), Dr. Fei-Fei Li (World Labs), Brendan Foody (Mercor), Dan Hendrycks (Center for AI Safety), Noubar Afeyan (Flagship Pioneering), Brandon McKinzie and Eric Mitchell (OpenAI o3), Isa Fulford (OpenAI), Arvind Jain (Glen), and Dr. Shiv Rao (Abridge).
Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com
Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil
Chapters:
00:00 – Episode Introduction
0:21 – Winston Weinberg on Leaning into New Capabilities
02:01 – Dr. Fei-Fei Li on Spatial Intelligence
04:13 – Brendan Foody on AI Disruption in the Workforce
06:10 – Dan Hendrycks on the Geopolitics of Superintelligence
08:06 – Noubar Afeyan on Entrepreneurship
10:38 – Brandon McKinzie and Eric Mitchell on Reasoning Models
12:41 – Isa Fulford on Training Deep Research
13:49 – Arvind Jain on Innovating Enterprise Search
16:21 – Dr. Shiv Rao on AI’s Human Impact
18:58 – Conclusion
Six leaders from across tech — from SaaS and semis to law and logistics — come together for our 250th episode milestone in this very special AI recap, where we unpack how new advances are transforming the way industries function, and how work gets done.
Featuring:
• Bret Taylor (Sierra Co-founder)
• Winston Weinberg (Harvey Co-founder and CEO)
• Matt Murphy (Marvell Technology Chairman and CEO)
• Yamini Rangan (HubSpot CEO)
• Chris Urmson (Aurora CEO)
• Varun Mohan (Windsurf Co-founder and CEO)
Connect with Joubin:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joubin-mirzadegan-66186854/
- X: https://x.com/Joubinmir
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins: https://www.kleinerperkins.com
Aatish Nayak is the Head of Product at Harvey where he oversees product vision, strategy, design, analytics, marketing, and support. This is his third hypergrowth AI unicorn having previously held product leadership roles at Scale AI from 40 to 800 people, and Shield AI from 20 to 100 people.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
04:21 Biggest Product Lessons from Scale AI
7:18 Why Product Managers Are Wrong: They are not the CEO of the Product
12:28 Why Market Selection is More Important than Anything Else
16:40 If Distribution is King then Product is President
22:06 Effective Product Strategy and Execution
26:24 How to Write the Best PRDs
31:01 Balancing New Features and Technical Debt
33:17 Analysing Retrospectives and Postmortems
33:55 Introduction to Pre-mortems
38:25 Biggest Product Mistakes and Lessons Learned
41:40 Evaluating AI Models and Lessons Learned
45:03 The Future of AI in Product Management
55:21 What Should Product People Learn to Win in a World of AI
59:37 The AI Talent War in San Francisco
01:01:26 Quickfire Round
Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg explains why success in legal AI requires more than just model capabilities—it demands deep process expertise that doesn’t exist online. He shares how Harvey balances rapid product development with earning trust from law firms through hyper-personalized demos and deep industry expertise. The discussion covers Harvey’s approach to product development—expanding specialized capabilities then collapsing them into unified workflows—and why focusing on complex work like international mergers creates the most defensible position in legal AI.
Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital
Guests: Winston Weinberg, CEO & co-founder of Harvey; and Ilya Fushman, partner at Kleiner Perkins
“If you think about pretty much any job out there in the world, we will have some sort of [AI] copilot,” says Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman. “The question is, who are the right folks to build it, and what’s their vision?”
For Harvey CEO & co-founder Winston Weinberg, the vision is clear: Silicon Valley cannot and should not try to disrupt the legal profession by automating the job of lawyers. Instead, he says, they need to have “respect for the industry” before designing AI solutions that speed up specific tasks.
“These industries are incredibly complex,” Winston says. “Legal is one of the oldest professions known to man. There are firms that are over a hundred years old. There are firms that are hundreds of years old, and having a brand that says, ‘We are partnering with the industry to transform it’ versus ‘We are just going to steamroll the industry’ is really important for us.”
Chapters:
(01:16) - The zeitgeist switch
(02:58) - What is Harvey?
(06:10) - Chief Law Officers
(07:58) - Agentic workflows
(09:43) - Ilya’s investment thesis
(12:48) - Collaborating with AI
(16:05) - Task automation
(20:52) - Why is it called Harvey?
(23:14) - Respecting the legal industry
(26:43) - Winston’s past jobs
(28:47) - First steps
(32:13) - Scaling the company
(35:02) - Scaling yourself
(37:19) - Who works for Harvey
(40:50) - Making mistakes
(43:15) - Making sacrifices
(45:51) - Growing too fast
(50:50) - Setting priorities
(54:54) - Harvey’s competitors
(57:38) - Internal virality
(01:00:46) - Testing Harvey’s limits
(01:03:29) - Who Harvey is hiring
(01:04:01) - What “grit” means to Winston
Mentioned in this episode: ChatGPT, the Fortune 500, Microsoft Copilot, Gabe Pereyra, Activision, Excel, Counsel AI Corporation, Suits, Harvard University, Netflix, Dell, O'Melveny & Myers, Hueston Hennigan, Meta, Reddit, Jason Kwon, Anthropic, Marissa Mayer, Eric Schmidt, Google, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Glean.
Links:
Connect with Winston
Twitter
LinkedIn
Connect with Ilya
Twitter
LinkedIn
Connect with Joubin
Twitter
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm
This week on No Priors, Sarah sits down with Harvey cofounder and CEO Winston Weinberg. Harvey is one of the leading application layer AI companies, building domain-specific AI for law firms, professional service providers, and the Fortune 500. They are already working with companies like Bridgewater, KKR, PWC, and O’Melveny with over $500M in funding from OpenAI, Sequoia, Kleiner, GV and Elad and Sarah. In this episode, Sarah and Winston cover AI product strategy, the future of professional services, company values, keeping up with research, and the law industry of the future.
Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com
Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @WinstonWeinberg
Show Notes:
0:00 Introduction
2:39 Harvey’s founding story
3:46 Capability improvement
6:39 Building teams around AI capabilities
9:17 End to end task completion
12:37 Beginning with large industry leaders
17:21 Working with users skeptical of automation
20:40 Being a lawyer today and in the future
26:02 Adapting product for other domains
26:58 Hiring philosophy at Harvey
30:39 Lessons and mistakes as a founder
32:53 Personal drive
40:21 Advice to other founders
44:35 Prediction for next ChatGPT moment
Chad Peets is one of the greatest sales leaders and recruiters of the last 25 years. From 2018 to 2023, Chad was a Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures. Chad has worked with the world's best CEOs and CROs to build world-class go-to-market organizations. Chad is currently a member of the Board of Directors for Lacework and Luminary Cloud and on the boards of Clumio and Sigma Computing. He previously served as a board member for Astronomer, Transposit, and others. He was an early-stage investor at Snowflake, Sigma, Observe, Lacework, and Clumio.
In Today's Discussion with Chad Peet's We Discuss:
1. You Need a CRO Pre-Product:
Why does Chad believe that SaaS companies need a CRO pre-product?
Should the founder not be the right person to create the sales playbook?
What should the founder look for in their first CRO hire?
Does any great CRO really want to go back to an early startup and do it again?
2. What Everyone Gets Wrong in Building Sales Teams:
Why are most sales reps not performing?
How long does it take for sales teams to ramp? How does this change with PLG and enterprise?
What are the benchmarks of good vs great for average sales reps?
How do founders and VCs most often hurt their sales teams and performance?
3. How to Build a Hiring Machine:
What are the single biggest mistakes people make when hiring sales reps and teams?
Are sales people money motivated? How to create comp plans that incentivise and align?
Why does Chad believe that any sales rep that does not want to be in the office, is not putting their career and development first?
Why is it harder than ever to recruit great sales leaders today?
4. Lessons from Scaling Sales at Snowflake:
What are the single biggest lessons of what worked from scaling Snowflake's sales team?
What did not work? What would he do differently with the team again?
What did Snowflake teach Chad about success and culture and how they interplay together?
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