Ross Pomerantz:

You've been to President's club and you're a pilot, have you been to Mile High Club?

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AJ Bruno:

Aha. Oh, man.

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Ross Pomerantz:

That sounds like a yes.

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Pouyan Salehi:

We're back. I'm Pouyan from Scratchpad. We've got Ross with us today, without the headband. I don't know what's going on. I always say we're excited for our guests, but we really are.

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Ross Pomerantz:

This time we're not lying.

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Pouyan Salehi:

In all seriousness AJ, we're excited to have you. You've got an incredible story as well. Starting a company, investing, starting another company. Thanks for joining us.

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AJ Bruno:

I always like to say I'm excited to be here and I say that for everyone, but this time I'm really excited.

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Pouyan Salehi:

We're really excited to have you as well.

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Ross Pomerantz:

You were probably, right before this, like, "Fuck, I have this stupid podcast. I told him yes like two weeks ago, so here I am, I have to do it."

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AJ Bruno:

I'm excited to be here. I think the intro on me for my whole career in sales all 15 years, that's a lot of years. I started with Meltwater Individual Contributor. A lot of really great people that I'm sure you guys all know and I've talked to. We were talking about Sakil. Katie Ivy was, was also there.

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Pouyan Salehi:

How did you end up there in the first place?

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AJ Bruno:

At Meltwater?

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Pouyan Salehi:

Or just why sales?

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Ross Pomerantz:

What series of unfortunate mistakes did you have?

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AJ Bruno:

I couldn't get an internship anywhere else, and I'm like, "Fuck. I need a job after college at Penn State."

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AJ Bruno:

Actually it was a little bit more fortuitous than that. I knew I wanted to start my own company at some point. My uncle who was super successful in real estate sales, I was asking him, "How do I start a company? What type of career job do I get into?"

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AJ Bruno:

He said sales.

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AJ Bruno:

I was like, "Get the fuck out of here. I'm not going to get into sales."

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Ross Pomerantz:

Yeah, please I have self-respect, Uncle. I'm not a piece of shit.

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AJ Bruno:

My friends have self-respect and I want to be on their level and have self-respect. I don't want to be working in dealership, but he's like, "No, listen, you're going to get this grade-A MBA, on the job training. You're going to get all of the things that you need to get to and work outside your comfort zone. It's going to be great. And if you want to go start a company after that, I think you'll have the skillset to do it."

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AJ Bruno:

I applied to one job. I did one interview and I got that one job in that one interview. That was at Meltwater. Then, 2012, I was five years in it and I had done all the things. My wife was pregnant. We were going to move back to Philly. I knew I wanted to start a company at that point. I had a boss that I just didn't get along with at all. He wrote me an email once, I have the email still today.

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AJ Bruno:

It was like, "Hey, if you ever started a company, it would be losing thousands of dollars a month."

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Ross Pomerantz:

Should we put him on blast right now? Should we name-drop, dox him, and send the dogs?

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AJ Bruno:

You do not need to dox him. That was fantastic for me, so it's water on the bridge. The second thing he did is he took all of the leaders of his area, he was the area director of the west, to see Tony Robbins and see Unleash the Power Within. The second thing that happened is I got all juiced up on all of the Tony stuff. That made me just kickstart into, "I'm going to start a company."

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AJ Bruno:

I'm not only going to start a company, I'm going to start a company that competes against my previous company, because that's the smart thing to do.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Love that. Not bitter, just going to compete with you.

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AJ Bruno:

This won't be a problem for me at all down the road. You guys have hundreds of millions of dollars of resources, I'm sure this will work out really well.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Was that Trendkite?

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AJ Bruno:

Yeah, that was Trendkite.

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Pouyan Salehi:

You went into management at Meltwater, what's the thought processing going from that to starting your own company?

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AJ Bruno:

When I started the company my co-founder and I didn't know what we're going to do.

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AJ Bruno:

We were like, "Social is really hot right now. Why don't we do something in social? That Instagram's a really big thing. Maybe we should do something there."

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AJ Bruno:

We landed on TrendKite as the pure attribution, that's what we were. Meltwater does this thing, let's build that mousetrap, and then let's build a better mousetrap on top of it that is a BI dashboard for media monitoring. They're not doing it well, we can do a better, better UI. We know the market. We know we have product market fit. We know we can just go in and crush it.

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Pouyan Salehi:

What did you take from your experience in sales and apply as the founder CEO of a company?

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AJ Bruno:

Well, I think there's the empathy piece of it. What I loved about TrendKite is I had the science of sales at the board level of the productivity metrics and knowing the quota capacities and rep productivity models. Then the day-to-day mental trash that a sales rep goes through. I do all my one-on-ones walking. I did 80 one-on-ones every quarter in a two week span and I fucking loved it. It was just a lot of making sure that the reps were thinking from a career standpoint. I had the empathy piece of that. The other side of it is just, at the end of the day for a CEO, you're telling a story, right? You learn all of this craft of storytelling and sales and whether you're closing a fundraising round, and Pouyan, you know this, that fundraising process is just a sell. That itself, I learned a lot from my sales days. I think 60-70% of CEO's were sales leaders previously. There's a good reason for that.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Would you say QuotaPath is a sales driven organization or a product driven organization or do we have a happy balance?

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Pouyan Salehi:

You forgot the third one Ross, we are a customer centric organization.

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AJ Bruno:

We're customer centric, empathy. We're product led growth, man. Product led growth, PLG. We're all about that PLG. We are actually very product led as an organization. I think this is true for Scratchpad and QuotaPath. There are very few companies that do this, they think about the end-user the sales rep.

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Ross Pomerantz:

You've seen some shit go down in sales. You've seen it go down on the sales floor. You've seen it go down with other people and what have you. How do you think about that happening at your own company now as a leader and the CEO.

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AJ Bruno:

Man, I don't have time for the shit that I used to have. Can I tell a story real quick?

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Pouyan Salehi:

Yes. 

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Ross Pomerantz:

That's literally why we're here. So yes, please.

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AJ Bruno:

The buildup to me leaving the sales team was getting wilder and wilder. For example, in April in a quarter, we built a cashnado and got $10,000 from my own bank account and I threw it in there. Then if you close the deal, you'd get seven seconds. Everyone was hitting quotas. I would walk in at 7:30 in the morning on closing day, and you could not hear yourself think.

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AJ Bruno:

I was like, "All right, I'm going all out. I'm going to do a shot for every..." Shot of fireball. Fireball was our choice.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Naturally.

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AJ Bruno:

I took 17 shots that day. I was good, but we were...

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Ross Pomerantz:

Were you? 17, I'm pretty sure I would be in the shadow realm.

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AJ Bruno:

We rented out Greenlight Social in Austin. It was a bar, had the whole company, giving this massive talk and speech to the company. There's a whole commotion in the background. I want to preface this by saying everyone was completely fine, there was no....

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Ross Pomerantz:

No one was harmed. That's the way to start this story.

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AJ Bruno:

We had someone unfortunately mixed too many different things and was ODing in the background. It caused a whole change and transformation and how I thought. He survived. There was 14 people fired. There was lawsuits galore and it was fairly fucked up. That was a big change for me in thinking about how I wanted to set up my next company in the sales led versus product led. I just wanted to have more of a culture where everyone felt like there was inclusivity.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Now it sounds like there's only five grand in the cashnado.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Yeah, I know. I was going to say that the Fireball is replaced with small cups of green tea.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Everybody's drinking kombucha.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Now that you had that experience, it sounds like you're building a company or an organization that's less on that party culture. What are you noticing as a difference between them?

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AJ Bruno:

When we talk about the DEI or diversity, people typically think about the gender and different ethnicity backgrounds, but actually interestingly, I think about the different personalities of people, introvert versus extrovert, certainly your backgrounds and your culture backgrounds make up who you are. I just also know that not everyone in the organization is going to want to go hang out at on 6:30, 6 in Austin.

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Ross Pomerantz:

I'll be there this weekend.

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AJ Bruno:

You've been there.

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Ross Pomerantz:

I'm going this weekend.

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AJ Bruno:

Yeah. You're going to be at a... What is it? Barbarella's.

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Ross Pomerantz:

I will be everywhere, I assume.

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AJ Bruno:

Not everyone wants to do that. You've got to find ways to make sure that everyone can celebrate as a team. I think in remote culture, that's something that we're now dealing with is like, "Shit, how do we all celebrate without it feeling like, we've already done the all the virtual things. We've done the drink tasting. We've done all of that stuff. Now we can have some level of in-person. What does that look like? And how do we not overwhelm the team when they get back?"

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Pouyan Salehi:

One thing we're actually learning a lot in working with our customers, our users who are salespeople is neuro-diversity, which is really interesting in talking to so many folks that are in sales that are neuro-diverse. This is something that I'm learning a lot about still.

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AJ Bruno:

The hell does that mean? What the fuck does that mean?

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Pouyan Salehi:

It was new to me, but once you unpack it's really interesting, and I think it's something that will be talked about a lot more, which is we all process information differently. We prioritize differently. In sales, you're made to fit into this mold, which is here's your fucking process, here's your Salesforce CRM, go. You've got to log activities. You've got to do this, this and, this. People just work very differently.

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Pouyan Salehi:

We think great ideas can come from anyone and anywhere. It doesn't matter what your tenure at the company is, what your role is, what your background is in it. I think we keep that at the forefront and that's actually helped us try to find folks that have very different backgrounds and ways of thinking. Some of our team sessions turned more into creative jam sessions than updates on anything, which I guess I have to get feedback from my team on how they like it, but I think they like it because everyone's contributing and smiling. How that translates into an in-person session, I don't know. We've never done a team onsite. We're going to have our first one coming up.

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AJ Bruno:

A quick digression there, you and I had the last in-person meeting that I ever had prior to the pandemic.

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Pouyan Salehi:

That's right. I forgot about that.

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AJ Bruno:

Everyone was freaked out. I remember one of the founders was super freaked out and was like, "I haven't left my apartment in a week and I'm just coming here for this."

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AJ Bruno:

That was the last collaborative in person, founder meeting that I had.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Then the world shut down right after, and here we are opening up again. I do think it's something that for a lot of folks, a lot of companies that are more remote first now, will have to really think seriously about what does getting the team together look like now?

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Ross Pomerantz:

It's going to be hard to not put salespeople together, in even mini pods.

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Ross Pomerantz:

I would much rather sell with other people getting absolutely dominated on the phone than me alone, getting dominated by myself. All right. I have a lot of issues just being on my own as it is. Selling on my own? Not for me.

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AJ Bruno:

We opened our sales office in Austin back up last month and it's been great. There's been a lot of questions, how many days can I do? I just know how much knowledge transfer gets taken from sales specifically. It just is so helpful to be, to do that.

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AJ Bruno:

But there's a lot of people that have applied that were in person that are like, "No, I want to be remote, even though I can see your office. I don't want to do that.

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AJ Bruno:

I'm like, "Okay, well..."

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Pouyan Salehi:

I wonder if the microdosing has gone to major serious dosing on from the investor side because some of this shit just doesn't make sense.

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AJ Bruno:

I know. You know. We all know. It is what it is. You're either in the market and you're playing or you're sitting it out. So you got choices.

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Pouyan Salehi:

I'll tell you one thing I think it's important to recognize is when the game changes. I think that's what's actually happening in startup fairy land, if you will. The game is changing from where it was five years ago, and definitely from where it was 10 years ago. When we did our seed rounds, at Scratchpad, it's what I would have considered a Series A when, when I first started getting into startups. Now there's something called a pre-seed round.

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AJ Bruno:

Mangoes round.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Yeah, seriously the fruit seeds. I think it's important to recognize, I would assume, just in sales situational awareness of when has the landscape shifted? I think that's definitely happening in them building companies right now.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Well, this was great. AJ, thanks for joining us. We like to end with two questions.

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Ross Pomerantz:

I have a third question though.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Well, let's start with that one.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Yeah, okay I'll start with that one. Okay. You've been to President's club and you're a pilot, have you been to Mile High Club?

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AJ Bruno:

Aha, oh man.

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Ross Pomerantz:

That sounds like a yes,

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Pouyan Salehi:

Look at that smile. No response needed.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Don't look away.

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AJ Bruno:

Oh man. Well, I'm going to take the fifth on this question.

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Ross Pomerantz:

I'll take that as a probably.

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Ross Pomerantz:

One question, two parts. You get one song, pump up, big sports game, big deal. What is it?

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AJ Bruno:

White Panda, Bearly Legal.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Then, the other side of that is you just had the worst day of your life. A bunch of deals fell through. Nobody's getting into the cashnado. What are you putting on?

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AJ Bruno:

I'm a little bit more Zen and chill, so Blackmill is probably what I'm doing. You're like, these aren't even songs, what the fuck are you doing right now?

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Ross Pomerantz:

Were you listening to this the day after 17 shots of Fireball?

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AJ Bruno:

Blackmill, is a very, I need to recenter and get my chi back. That's what I play in the mornings, and if I'm ever feeling down. Blackmill Radio.

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Pouyan Salehi:

AJ, Thanks so much for joining us. This was great.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Thanks AJ.