Recall.ai

I ask my direct reports to rate their personal relationships, life outside of work, and happiness 1-5. Every two weeks. My directs answer these questions: - how’s Alyssa doing, 1-5? - how’s bidding on the house going, 1-5? - outside of work, how much fun are you having, 1-5? Then I pick the lowest number and we talk about it. ”What would move this from a 2 to a 4?” Sometimes I can help directly. Intro to a mentor Intro to a good tax person. Friday afternoon off to see family. Sometimes it’s just that I asked. None of this I would know without this dedicated space. It’s the highest-leverage thing I do.

I set 7 goals in January for H1. The scorecard: Goal 1: cut sales cycle by 33% Actual: cut by 41% Goal 2: 100 new customer logos Actual: 161 new logos Goal 3: Sign a household name customer Actual: XXXXXXXXXX Goal 4: 3x top of funnel volume Actual: 8x Goal 5: double $50K+ deals YoY Actual: 2x exactly Goal 6: double $100K+ deals YoY Actual: grew by 50% Goal 7: scale outbound to 50% of pipeline Actual: 23% On $100K+ deals: our overall cycle is down 41%, but enterprise deals are still slow. Many of the $100K+ deals are getting larger so the deals we started in H1 will land in H2. On outbound: I planned to build a full outbound motion in 6 months. It took longer than that. I underestimated how much of the motion needed to be rebuilt from scratch, even though I’ve done outbound before. Nobody who beats every goal set the goals right.

Every one of our job listings has the exact salary. $185K for a marketer. $235K for an engineer. The number on the JD is the number in the offer. I’ve heard a lot of comp stories over the years. Salary bands hidden until final round. ”Competitive” pay that isn’t. Best negotiator paid more than best performer. side note: I used to give ranges but I’d end up offering the top end anyway… None of that at Recall.ai The employees see each other’s comp. Hiding it from candidates just delays the awkward conversation. Post the number.

$4.1M from outbound this year. Zero sequences. One prospect replied 5 months after my last email. I had followed up exactly once. Just in case it got buried. Then I moved on since I have nothing new to say. He replied. One line: “Very timely. I can do next Thursday at 2pm ET.” I didn’t remember him. I opened the thread and scrolled down to my original email. That email sat in his inbox for five months until the timing on his end was right. He had saved it. To make an email worth saving, you need: - a specific belief about their business. Not “I noticed you.” A claim: “I think you’re going to hit a wall on [insert here] in the next 3 months.” - a reason it’s you and not any of the 30 other sellers in their inbox. Something only you would notice or say. - a clear ask. Follow-ups don’t fix timing. Only useful emails do.

Every employee gets a corporate card. $20K monthly spending limit. No approvals. Nobody spends $20K a month. I’ve never actually seen someone come close. The limit is high because I want people to spend without checking with me first, not because I expect them to hit it. what people actually use it for: - commuter benefits (waymos to the office, gas, transit) - team dinners after a hard week - books they want to read - software licenses when they need a tool - flights to visit customers Nobody’s abused it. Instead of a system of tickets and approvals, we solve it by hiring people whose judgment we trust. If someone on your team would abuse a $20K limit, the problem isn’t the limit.

I built a $250M company over 3 years while waiting to find out if I could stay in the U.S. Finally got my greencard. The process took 3 years. During that time I couldn’t leave the country. That meant no: - visiting international customers - going to my sister’s graduation - celebrating holidays/birthdays with my family in Canada The company kept growing anyway. $250M valuation. Customers like HubSpot, Metaview, ClickUp, and Wealthbox. Built all of it from the same 50 mile radius. The greencard doesn’t change what I missed. But changes what’s ahead. I can meet the customers I’ve only known over Zoom. I can be at my mother’s next birthday. I can take a walk in Canada. To everyone waiting on their own process right now: keep building.

437 people have visited our office in 24 weeks. That alone makes the $500K worth it. Customers coming in for onsites. Candidates flying in for interviews. Investors dropping by. Partners for kickoffs. Friends of the team just stopping in to see what we built. Our old office had none of this. It was described to us as “like a call center” and “like Severance” (still haven’t watched). Nobody wanted to come. We didn’t really want to invite anyone. Now every week the door is opening. The building is the meetings that would have never happened. $500K feels like a lot for an office until you realize every one of those 437 relationships got a different starting point because we invested in the space. That’s the ROI you don’t put in a pitch deck.

31.6% of the $500K+ accounts I cold outbounded converted to pipeline. The email isn’t why. The single highest leverage thing is whether you picked the right account to reach out to. Here’s what I check before I send. Signals I skip: - recent funding announcement. they’re hiring, not buying. wait 6 months. - new person in the role. they’re still learning the stack. - they just released a product/feature. they’re in rollout/build mode. your outreach is a distraction. Signals I write to: - they already use meeting transcription. if it’s not us, they built in-house. it means the problem is real to them. - job openings involving meeting AI or conversation intelligence. they know they need help. - product changelog shows AI features shipping downstream of us. every AI feature needs meeting data. 31.6% converted because I only wrote to accounts where the signal was already there. You don’t need a better email. You need a better list.

One of my direct reports had 13K unread recruiting emails. That’s why I outbound to candidates the same way I outbound to enterprise accounts. My response rate is 63%. Here’s what that looks like: 1/ find their actual work For an engineer, I read their PRs and blog posts before I write. For a marketer, I read their landing pages. For an AE, I dig into who they actually talk with. Then I reference something specific in the outreach. Something like: “I saw you were the only marketer during the Series B announcement. That type of ownership is who we’re looking for.” That kind of specificity cannot be spray-and-pray. 2/ reach out on more than one channel I’ll message candidates on 2-3 channels within a week (LinkedIn, email, whatever platform they’re active on). Same message shape, but matching the medium. These are busy people, and often messages will get missed. 3/ stay in touch even when the answer is no If someone takes a call and it’s not the right fit right now, I stay in contact. Send them things I think they’d like. Introduce them to people. These are the kind of people I want to know. What breaks through is the same thing that breaks through in an enterprise deal: Someone did their homework, reach out through the right channels, and treated the relationship like it was worth building whether or not it converted right now.

All the words ever written in human history are less than 20% of one year spoken in US office conversations. That's why I don't burn out. At 9am Pacific, millions of people click “start meeting” within 60 seconds of each other. Every hour. Our load graph goes vertical at the top of every one. When Amazon built AWS, they built it to handle Black Friday. Once a year, millions of people hit their systems at the same time. We handle roughly 240 Black Fridays a week. 100,000 computers in our cluster. 3,000 full-length movies of raw video processed per second at peak. And last year we captured 0.02% of US office conversations. 0.02%. Not 2%… I can see the scale of what we’re building, and impatience is what I feel. There’s too much to do to be tired. p.s. apologies for not responding to comments lately p.p.s. if this is the kind of scale you want to work on: https://lnkd.in/gxUmUDni