The Goats of Growth

'The Goats Of Growth' features exclusive interviews with GTM Leaders who discuss topics such vision, leadership, strategy, execution, and other insights into how start-up can build a successful go-to-market function.

The Goats of Growth is a business podcast hosted by Jason Webb, with 200 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Jason Webb hosts The Goats of Growth, a business show with 200 episodes published.

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  The Goats of Growth

  Knowing What to Hand to AI and What to Keep--Jessica Storry, CEO-Stockpress

  Sep 28, 202650 min

  Jessica Storry co-founded Stockpress in 2019 out of the web design agency she was running, drowning in files across Dropbox, Box, Google Drive and hard drives clients mailed them. They took a contract building on an open-source DAM, decided it was overcomplicated, pitched the customer on something simpler, got told no, and built it anyway -- on her promise that she'd sell it. She did. Stage 2 Capital invested, they closed the agency in 2020, and Stockpress now occupies the gap nobody was serving: a $9.99 Dropbox account on one side, a $2,500-a-month enterprise DAM on the other, nothing in between. The same instinct drove the decision that actually grew the business. They started out cloning the enterprise DAMs and charging less, and were still doing every onboarding by hand. So they re-architected around self-serve, lowered the price -- the only time it's ever gone down -- and replaced a product full of in-app pop-ups with a five-step onboarding checklist. "Maybe we don't give customers enough credit sometimes. They can figure it out if they if it's presented in the right way." She also tells the story of the Friday night she spent topping up tokens in Claude Design and ended with nothing to show: "I could have just designed that page myself in an hour and it would have been fine." WHAT WE COVER - Arguing against an AI support agent, and being wrong: 72% of tickets closed by the bot - What AI is allowed to write, and what has to be accurate enough that it isn't - Wireframes straight to the dev team, and why nothing AI-made ships as final design - Going self-serve: lowering the price and cutting the hand-holding - The five-step checklist that beat in-app pop-ups - 85% of customers leaving every AI feature switched on - Buyers who arrive from ChatGPT having never seen the website - Where AI burned money for an eight-person team and produced nothing CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro and sponsor: Common Room 1:16 What Stockpress is, and the founding story 4:23 Cutting the hand-holding, and lowering the price 7:59 The five-step checklist that replaced the pop-ups 10:28 AI inside the product, and the 85% who turn it all on 13:17 Arguing against Fin, and losing 15:36 Under three minutes, by hand, at any hour 18:02 Common Room, and how leads get attributed 19:07 Otterly and buyers who never see the website 19:59 Fifty prompts, and building content to show up against them 21:17 Narrowing the ICP after being "Stockpress for everyone" 23:38 Writing with AI, and the one thing she won't hand over 27:22 Claude Design for wireframes, straight to the dev team 28:46 AI in customer success, and the MCP server in progress 35:18 Her Friday night with no output 38:37 Rapid Fire Five Connect with Jessica Storry on LinkedIn, or learn more about Stockpress at stockpress.co. This episode is sponsored by Common Room (https://www.commonroom.io/?utm_source=goat-podcast&utm_medium=partner), the AI GTM Intelligence Platform trusted by teams like Okta, Anthropic, and Fireworks AI. To hear more conversations like this one, subscribe to The GOATS of Growth on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

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  The Goats of Growth

  Trust but Verify: Why AI Is Still Just a Tool — Eric Herzog, CMO at Infinidat

  Sep 21, 202639 min

  Eric Herzog says AI cut his team's content development time in half — and that anyone treating it as more than a tool is about to embarrass themselves in front of their biggest customers. A farmer still drives the tractor. A lumberjack still runs the chainsaw. What's changed is that the tool is now fast enough to make a sloppy company look sloppy at scale. Eric is CMO at Infinidat, the enterprise storage company behind InfiniBox, recently acquired by Lenovo and now operating semi-independently inside its Infrastructure Solutions Group. He runs a 15-person team across the full breadth of marketing, selling high-end systems to the Global Fortune 1000. Before Infinidat he held CMO and VP roles at IBM Storage and EMC, and helped build several startups that were acquired. His operating motto is trust but verify. Humans make errors; AI hallucinates, which is the same thing. He's seen it firsthand — someone showed him an AI-generated profile of himself with the wrong university, the wrong location, and the wrong Eric Herzog. In high-end enterprise, a data sheet claiming something technically impossible tells the buyer you're a sloppy company, and in storage people lose their jobs over a bad buying decision. The payoff is real when it's controlled. Eric's team ran an AI competitive analysis for sales, and it surfaced genuine Reddit reviews from end users explaining why they ripped out a competitor's product — material the reps now carry in their back pocket. His warning on workflow design is just as concrete: get the data sources wrong at a global manufacturer and the bulldozer bolts ship to the Corolla factory. WHAT WE COVER - Why AI is transformational but still a tool — and how open-source AI can expose your IP, customer data, and GDPR, HIPAA and PII obligations - The bulldozer-and-Corolla problem: what bad AI workflow design does to a supply chain - "Trust but verify," and the AI profile that got Eric's own biography wrong - Where the ROI actually shows up: content creation and competitive intelligence - The Reddit reviews an AI tool found that Infinidat's sales team now uses - Why a human designer still beats AI at building a deck, and why AI still gets you halfway there - Build vs. buy, and why AI inside the martech stack is becoming a checkbox, like a spare tire - Rapid Fire: the collegiate wrestler who wants to be a CEO, and why Frodo is his model for quiet leadership CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 2:18 Infinidat, Lenovo, and a 15-person marketing team 5:45 What AI changed — and why it's still just a tool 7:08 How open-source AI exposes your IP 9:34 Bulldozer parts at the Corolla factory 11:43 Trust but verify — and the wrong Eric Herzog 13:14 Where the ROI shows up: content and competitive 15:39 Verification still cuts the time in half 17:22 Workflow automation and the AI-guided website 19:02 Why the designer still beats AI on slides 21:24 Playing to your audience: CIOs and King Oberon 23:24 Build vs. buy 25:46 AI as a checkbox: the spare-tire argument 28:53 Rapid Fire Five 37:18 How to reach Eric Connect with Eric Herzog on LinkedIn, or learn more about Infinidat at infinidat.com . This episode is sponsored by [Common Room]( https://www.commonroom.io/?utm_source=goat-podcast&utm_medium=partner ), the AI GTM Intelligence Platform trusted by teams like Okta, Anthropic, and Fireworks AI. To hear more on what AI and agents are actually doing inside real go-to-market organizations, subscribe to The GOATS of Growth on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

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  The Goats of Growth

  Why Heavy Industry Might Skip SaaS and Jump Straight to AI — Lance Hodgson, CRO at Sitemate

  Sep 14, 202654 min

  Lance Hodgson thinks a huge slice of the economy — construction, oil and gas, mining, manufacturing — is about to skip SaaS entirely and jump straight to AI. Not because these industries got faster at digitizing, but because AI removes the reason they needed the in-between step. Lance is CRO at Sitemate (formerly Construction Cloud), the AI platform for what he calls "the built world." He joined as the company's first go-to-market hire and worked every seat on the way up — marketing, VP revenue, GM of Oceania, and now CRO — including years running the sales funnel himself after his own "negative perception of sales" wore off. Before Sitemate he was in marketing at Sony Pictures and CBS. Internally, Sitemate runs four categories of AI agents — workflow, intelligence, coaching, and collateral — built by Lance's chief of staff, who does the building while he defines the go-to-market logic. The team now ships three to four new agents a week. The intelligence agents are the ones he can't function without: instead of combing through call recordings by hand, agents now surface who's following the playbook — turning "high viz" from an aspiration into something that actually runs. The clearest signal of AI's impact isn't GTM headcount — Sitemate is still hiring SDRs, AEs, and CSMs at close to the same pace. It's ops. RevOps hiring has slowed sharply, because a chief of staff plus a few agents now does work that used to need a growing team under him. Engineering keeps hiring aggressively — the agents just make them ship faster. WHAT WE COVER Why the built world (construction, oil & gas, mining, manufacturing) might skip straight to AI, bypassing the SaaS step most industries went through Sitemate's four categories of agents — workflow, intelligence, coaching, collateral — and which one Lance can't live without How a chief of staff, not a platform, became the unlock for shipping 3–4 new agents a week Where AI has and hasn't touched headcount: flat in GTM, down in RevOps, still climbing in engineering Lance's unconventional path to CRO — Sitemate's first go-to-market hire, who'd never carried an AE quota Why "everyone can build agents now" and the real bottleneck is deciding which ones and what context to feed them CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 1:43 Sitemate and the built world, defined 3:51 Skipping straight from paper to AI 5:13 Why Lance bet on Sitemate: the TAM math 9:42 From marketer to accidental salesperson 10:53 Building the systems: the VP of Revenue years 13:36 Redefining what sales actually is 20:28 Rolling out AI: the four agent categories 22:31 Documentation first: mapping the funnel before building agents 29:38 Intelligence agents: "High Viz on steroids" 32:43 The chief of staff model: shipping 3-4 agents a week 38:23 "Everyone can build agents" — the real bottleneck 40:50 Headcount: steady in GTM, thinner in ops 44:44 Rapid Fire Five 48:33 Bonus question: lessons from "failures," not perfection Connect with Lance Hodgson on LinkedIn ( linkedin.com/in/lancehodgson ), or learn more about Sitemate at sitemate.com . This episode is sponsored by Common Room , the AI GTM Intelligence Platform trusted by teams like Okta, Anthropic, and Fireworks AI. To hear more on what AI and agents are actually doing inside real go-to-market organizations, subscribe to The GOATS of Growth on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

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  The Goats of Growth

  Bigger and Better Than LinkedIn — Ben Keighran on the Relationship Intelligence Layer

  Sep 7, 202641 min

  Ben Keighran got frustrated that Claude couldn't search LinkedIn. So he built a dataset larger than LinkedIn's and pointed AI at it. It's over a billion people, 10 billion records, 75 million updates a day. Not scraped — crawled from public profiles, sourced through 50 data partnerships, enriched with inference tokens. Available inside Claude and your own agents for eight dollars. Ben is a four-time founder whose products have reached over a billion people. He started coding at 13 in Australia, moved to Silicon Valley in 2006, built Chomp — the app search engine Apple acquired and turned into App Store search — then Caffeine, a live streaming platform that grew to 61 million users. Super Carl is his fourth. But the database isn't the moat, and he says so. He expects everyone to have one eventually. The thing he thinks is durable is the relationship intelligence layer on top: you upload your own contact exports, Super Carl works out who you actually know among the matches, and the AI tells you who to ask for the intro. Not scraped, not read — metadata only, and you can export or delete it whenever. Jay uses it to run his own recruiting agent. Searches that used to take weeks now finish in twenty minutes, which is why he spends part of this episode complaining that eighteen minutes feels slow. WHAT WE COVER - How Ben picks problems: watch a medium shift, then ask who won the last one and why they probably won't win this one - Why Chomp existed — apps had no metadata, so you had to type "Facebook" to find Facebook - The Instagram App Store chart hack, and what it teaches about distribution timing - Build the product first, then build the business — and how you know you've crossed over - The three things blocking AI from your network: walled gardens, disconnected graphs, and cold outreach getting worse - Why the billion-record dataset is a diminishing advantage - What "your data stays yours" actually means in practice - Rapid Fire 5: play-based learning, Steve Jobs, and the skateboard injuries CHAPTERS 00:00 The show is looking for a sponsor 00:27 Chomp, Caffeine, and a billion people 02:36 How Ben decides what to build 06:06 You had to type "Facebook" to find Facebook 06:50 Finding the first users 09:46 The Instagram App Store chart hack 11:07 Why Claude couldn't search LinkedIn 16:39 Walled gardens, broken graphs, dead cold outreach 18:04 Building a data set bigger than LinkedIn's 20:41 The relationship intelligence layer 22:35 Why the database is a diminishing advantage 26:46 Product fit first, then build the business 31:02 Rapid Fire 5 36:01 Bonus question: what's your biggest learn? 39:10 Where the name Super Carl came from Find Ben at supercarl.ai — free account in ten seconds, or book a meeting with him directly from the homepage. This episode is unsponsored. If you want to reach GTM leaders and founders who ignore your emails, reach out: jay@thegoatsofgrowth.ai Subscribe wherever you listen, and tell someone who'd like it.

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  The Goats of Growth

  800 Calls Told Him What Was Broken — Cris Mendes on Why Bad Data Kills AI Agents

  Aug 31, 202643 min

  "No data, no agent. Bad data, bad agent. Good data, good agent." Cris Mendes thinks data readiness is the number one reason the agentic enterprise fails, and he has the receipts — he ran the experiment on his own team before he sold it to anyone else. He's VP of Revenue at Momentum.io , acquired by Salesforce in large part because of the go-to-market motion he built there. Before that: Drift, Airtable, and LogMeIn. Before all of it, U.S. Navy search and rescue swimmer. I've known him almost twenty years and introduced him to LogMeIn myself, so take the enthusiasm here with whatever salt you need. His argument is that everyone is buying agents on top of a data layer that was never built. The average customer conversation moves about eight thousand words; maybe eight of them make it into the CRM. Companies don't have a first-party data layer, they have a human-input data layer — and that's what every agentic project quietly runs aground on. The story worth the listen: Momentum had a brutal drop-off after the first call. Rather than sampling a few calls and guessing at messaging or ICP, Cris pushed 800 first calls through deep research and got one answer back — the reps weren't prescribing a next step. So he had Momentum listen to the last ten minutes of every call and fire a clip into Slack whenever an AE either didn't prescribe or tried and missed. With humor, so it didn't read as surveillance. Prescription went through the roof. As he puts it: a team respects what you inspect, but you can't inspect everything — unless the inspecting is automated. WHAT WE COVER - Selling shovels in a gold rush, and why structured data was the bet - Why "not everything called an agent is an agent" — deciding vs. automating - The last ten minutes of a sales call as sacred ground, and how to enforce that at scale - Bringing AI into QBRs: "it got so real so fast" — no more recency bias and self-preservation dressed up as a forecast - 10x growth six quarters running, zero attrition, 95% of the team over quota — and why he credits hiring over product - Whether AI cuts headcount: expands capacity, thins middle management, and the ~10% of companies that are actually AI-forward are hiring hardest - Auto-advancing pipeline stages on deal milestones instead of trusting a rep's guess — "otherwise you're just buying something like Clari to miss your forecast very expensively" - His IDEC hiring model, and why he'd trade relevant experience for intrinsics every time CONNECT WITH CRIS LinkedIn: Cris Mendes — Cris with no H, Mendes with an S Momentum.io --- The GOATS of Growth has two Founding Sponsor slots open — category exclusive, $1,250/mo, in front of GTM leaders and founders who don't answer their phones. Includes personal introductions where guests opt in. jay@thegoatsofgrowth.ai Subscribe, rate, and review — and send this to whoever on your team is being asked to "roll out agents" this quarter. CHAPTERS 00:00 Twenty years, and a Navy rescue swimmer 03:39 Selling shovels in a gold rush 04:13 "No data, no agent" 05:33 Is it deciding, or just automation? 07:07 Running Momentum on Momentum 08:33 800 first calls, one missing skill 10:27 You respect what you inspect 14:46 Does AI actually cut headcount? 20:41 Killing hype in the QBR 22:05 Zero attrition, 95% over quota 25:57 8,000 words spoken, 8 reach the CRM 31:43 Auto-advancing deal stages on milestones 35:44 Orchestrate, or get orchestrated out 38:39 IDEC: how Cris hires 40:53 How to reach Cris

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