$100M ARR with 100 FTEs...

Last Friday, I chatted with the founder of an AI start-up who said his goal was to get to $100M ARR with ~100 employees.  A few months ago, he hired an BDR, then quickly fired him and built an automated outbound stack leveraging AI GTM tools.

3 years ago, that would’ve been ludicrous. 

But this founder isn’t alone. Later on Friday, a friend told me about another start-up that hit ~$60MM ARR with ~10 employees.  

How the hell is this happening?  AI = leverage.  

Let’s look at two wildly popular companies and how they hire BDRs:

Company #1: Redis (founded 2011) is the leading open-source platform for running low latency queries to power real-time applications. When hiring SDRs, the primary tools they want SDRs to learn (or know) are Outreach, Salesforce, LinkedIn, and ZoomInfo.  They’re hiring like its 2018…

Company #2: Weaviate (founded 2019), on the other hard, is a leading vector database born in the age of AI.  They are lean and actively finding leverage to grow faster and more efficiently.  The primary tools that they want their SDRs to learn (or know) are CommonRoom, Clay, and even BigQuery… 

For those that are unfamiliar - Outreach, LinkedIn, and ZoomInfo are tablestakes tools used to find leads and send automated emails. However, these are low barrier to learn tools and their proliferation allowed inexperienced 22-yr old BDRs to abuse outbounding by spamming potential buyers into numbness.

By comparison, CommonRoom and Clay (esp Clay) require much more intellectual horsepower to use, but allow the person prospecting to automate personalized messaging unique to a prospect by scraping relevant intent signals and pulling that into the outbound.

More and more GTM jobs specs are going to look like Weaviate’s. And soon, these companies won’t hire BDRs - they’ll either (A) Hire a GTM systems expert who’s job is to stitch these AI-powered systems together and do the job of many BDRs, (B) Require AEs to learn these tools, or (C) Some combo of the two.

Chris is a big fanboy of Clay, so I’ll let him go deep on the power of Clay later this week.

Bisous,

Julian