The AI-Native GTM Playbook | Sam Blond, Monaco
Show notes
Sam Blond is the Co-founder and CEO of Monaco, the revenue engine for startups. Sam is one of the best sales operators in tech. He spent four years as CRO at Brex, where he helped scale it to a ~$12B valuation, ran sales at Zenefits before that, and got his start at EchoSign. If there’s a modern GTM playbook, Sam helped write it. Our conversation walks through how AI has rewritten a big chunk of it. But most importantly, we talk about what hasn’t changed. We get into the sales work AI is now better at than humans, and why Sam thinks 90% of startups misdiagnose their bottleneck as conversion when it’s really demand gen. He explains why he doesn’t measure early brand marketing at all and trusts anecdotes over attribution, walks through the full Monaco launch playbook including the Super Bowl box-truck story, and shares a rev-ops insight from Brex, including how they figured out a specific ICP converted at 4x the rate of another. Thank you to Numeral, Flex, Amplitude, and Merge for supporting this episode. Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance https://www.numeral.com Flex: Get premium banking and a net 60 day credit card at 0% APY https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapital Amplitude: AI analytics, all you have to do is ask https://www.amplitude.com Merge: Every modal. One API. Total control. Check out Merge’s Agent Handler. merge.dev/turner Timestamps: (0:00) Scaling Brex to $12B (1:14) How AI speeds up prospecting and TAM building (5:19) Using AI to get more leverage (9:15) Incubating Monaco at Founders Fund (12:56) Innovator’s dilemma in AI (15:57) Why AI companies build full platforms, not wedge products (23:30) Revenue is just a math equation (27:18) Two ways AI increases conversion rates (36:56) AI will never replace spending time with customers (39:46) Don’t measure the impact of brand marketing (49:03) Your marketing must be different (and hard) (58:39) Customer discovery calls and working with design partners (1:03:03) The zero to 100 launch (1:11:00) Monaco’s launch playbook (1:19:00) Send gifts that are unique and social (1:22:17) Naming your company (1:28:04) Founders should send early outbound (1:32:38) How multi-channel augments AI outbound (1:39:42) Using intent signals and outreach timing to increase conversions (1:43:28) Two common ways founders mess up when scaling revenue (1:50:22) Monaco’s Forward Deployed AE's Referenced Try Monaco: https://www.monaco.com/ Careers at Monaco: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/monaco Sam’s launch post: https://x.com/samdblond/status/2026420015793320129?s=20 Follow Sam Twitter: https://x.com/samdblond LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-blond-791026b/ Follow Turner Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/
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