The GTMnow Podcast

Chris Lee joined Deel at $1M in revenue. Now, it just hit $1.5B. He joined GTMnow to walk through the pivotal decisions behind that run, including the ones he's never discussed publicly.

Chris (Head of Sales, Americas at Deel) breaks down the "five-star sales experience" framework he built by studying luxury hotels, why speed itself became a reason customers bought, how he's had zero regrettable director-level attrition in 5.5 years, and why they hire people with the job title "Ghostbuster" to keep a 7,000-person company moving like a 30-person startup. 

What you'll learn:
- The five-star sales experience framework, and how to map your own process from three-star to five
- Why every new sales leader at Deel spends their first 30 days taking inbound and selling
- How speed became the reason Coinbase chose Deel over a legacy vendor with no references to show
- The hire-slow, fire-fast principle behind zero regrettable director attrition in 5.5 years
- Why "tell me about a time" interview questions optimize for the best liar, and the scenario-based alternative
- What a "Ghostbuster" is, and how the role fights operational decay as you scale
- Leading a sales team through public crisis: cry, quit, or fight
- The trillion-dollar thesis: why 95% of the world's workers sit outside the US market
- Why Chris went back to first-principles systems thinking instead of fiddling with AI tools

Thank you to our sponsor:
Primer unlocks B2C ad channels for B2B marketers with precision targeting and next-gen measurement. GTMnow Network exclusive offer: Extended 45 day trial and 15% off with code GTM15 - just apply the code when you go to upgrade from the free trial. See who’s really in your funnel: sayprimer.com

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:58 Welcome to GTMnow
01:33 From Granular (agtech, employee #11) to a DuPont acquisition
05:30 The failed recruiting startup he launched in January 2020
07:17 How he found Deel, and applying to the wrong role on purpose
09:48 The first-30-days lesson from CEO Alex Bouazizi: go sell
11:44 What Deel actually does today
13:14 Scaling a distributed sales org remotely
15:41 Building rapport on a global remote team
17:35 From transactional SMB to multi-product enterprise
20:16 Sales-led, not product-led, and why consolidation wins
22:45 "Deel speed," and why speed is a reason people buy
25:31 Sponsor: Primer
26:57 Frank Slootman, Amp It Up, and outpacing competitors
29:12 How he got Slootman to open the sales kickoff
30:28 Zero director attrition in 5.5 years, and hire slow, fire fast
33:54 Why "tell me about a time" fails, and the scenario-based alternative
37:46 The five-star sales experience framework
41:54 Bringing enterprise-grade experience to SMB with AI
45:49 The trillion-dollar thesis: 95% of workers are outside the US
47:22 Building 60+ payroll engines: the Amazon Prime parallel
53:02 First-principles systems thinking for sales
59:38 The problem-framing framework he gives his team
01:01:09 The "Ghostbuster" role and fighting operational decay
01:05:25 Where to find Chris

Chris Lee (Head of Sales, Americas at Deel):
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/techcontrarian/
X: https://x.com/TechContrarian

Sophie Buonassisi (Host, SVP at GTMnow/GTMfund):
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona

About Chris Lee:
Chris Lee is Head of Sales, Americas at Deel, which he joined as one of its first sales hires at $1M in revenue and helped scale to $1.5B. Previously he was employee number 11 at Granular, an agricultural tech company acquired by DuPont for $300M.

About GTMnow: 
GTMnow shares how the best in tech build, scale and invest. The media brand is owned and operated by venture firm, GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund.

Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/
The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

The Co-Founder & CEO of Merge joins GTMnow to break down how she built a company that now powers integrations for OpenAI, Perplexity, Netflix, Uber, Mistral, and enterprise logos like Mastercard, JP Morgan, and Amex, backed by $75M from Accel and NEA.

Shensi gets tactical on the GTM decisions behind that growth: why she went enterprise-first into greenfield, why she's now layering a self-serve motion back on top (20,000+ self-serve orgs, 400+ enterprise customers), how forward-deployed engineers turned a 1% edge case into 5 to 10x usage growth, and why she rebuilt marketing to run like an engineering team. She also gets candid on founder-led sales, the mercenaries-versus-missionaries hiring trap, the open-source model shift and the China question, and why every founder who started pre-AI should build one product 0-to-1 themselves.

What you'll learn:
- Why she reversed the standard GTM playbook (enterprise first, then PLG) and how to run both motions at once
- How forward-deployed engineers close the 1% edge case that unlocks 5 to 10x enterprise usage
- Why marketing now runs like an engineering function at Merge, and how it took her from 1 to 2 dinners a quarter to 3 to 5 a month
- Why product got fast and go-to-market became the new bottleneck
- How to know when to hire your first salesperson (hint: you should be "dying" first)
- The mercenaries-vs-missionaries test, and the "anti-sell" she uses in hiring
- The 2026 shift away from "token-maxing," and how model routing cuts AI spend
- The truth about open-source (often Chinese) models: where they're built vs. where your data actually lives
- Why founders who started pre-AI should build one product 0-to-1 to understand what's now possible

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:14 What Merge does: products, workforce, and three core offerings
02:05 Agent Handler, Gateway, and the new Embedded Routing Stack
04:52 The 2026 shift away from "token-maxing"
07:29 Open-source models, the China question, and where data really lives
10:14 How Merge works with open-source model providers
12:00 What she's learned as a first-time founder: get over your ego
13:22 Reversing the GTM playbook: enterprise-first, then PLG
15:50 Running both motions: 20,000+ self-serve, 400+ enterprise
17:31 Why buyer behavior moved to Twitter and brand
19:06 Founder-led sales, and what a real sales process taught her
22:27 When to hire your first salesperson
23:49 Forward-deployed engineers and 5 to 10x usage growth
27:00 Keeping go-to-market up to speed with product
28:33 Rebuilding marketing as an engineering function
30:45 The dinner agent: 1 to 2 a quarter to 3 to 5 a month
31:24 How AI buying reshaped the marketing org
33:54 Maintaining agents: prompts over legacy builders
35:02 Mercenaries vs. missionaries, and the "anti-sell"
40:25 The market view: from hostility to collaboration
42:06 Is a valuation reckoning coming?
43:07 Why she stayed hands-on building Agent Handler and Gateway
45:18 What's next: training your own models off open-source
46:52 Where to find Shensi and Merge

Connect with Shensi Ding:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shensiding/
X: https://x.com/shensi
Merge: https://merge.dev

Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona

About the guest: Shensi Ding is the co-founder and CEO of Merge, a unified API platform that now spans product integrations, agent tooling, and LLM routing/governance. Merge powers companies including OpenAI, Perplexity, Netflix, Uber, and Mistral, and enterprise customers like Mastercard, JP Morgan, and Amex. The company has raised $75M from Accel and NEA.
Thank you to our sponsor:
Primer unlocks B2C ad channels for B2B marketers with precision targeting and next-gen measurement. GTMnow Network exclusive offer: Extended 45 day trial and 15% off with code GTM15 - just apply the code when you go to upgrade from the free trial.
See who’s really in your funnel: sayprimer.com

About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.

Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/
The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

Are your sales compensation plans driving the right behaviors or causing your best reps to quit? In this episode of GTMnow, Brian Le (Global Sales Compensation Partner at Notion) breaks down how to build a scalable sales comp operating system.

Brian shares his firsthand experience scaling Notion's sales comp from 80 to over 400 employees and explains why trust is the ultimate currency in revenue operations. If you are a founder, revenue leader, or sales professional, this breakdown covers everything from structuring pay mix to identifying the earliest signs of comp plan degradation. You will even hear what it takes for top AEs to pull in upwards of $1 million in a single quarter.

In this episode, we cover:
00:00 Intro
01:15 Brian Le's journey through Salesforce, Carta, and Notion
04:33 Why sales comp is the operating system for go-to-market
07:07 Phase 1: Building a scalable comp foundation at Notion
13:50 Transitioning from seat-based to usage-based pricing models
18:15 The 3 core pillars of a successful sales commission plan
22:09 Early warning signs your quota and comp structures are breaking
31:41 The real cost of losing sales reps over bad commission payouts
39:35 How to structure compensation for your first early-stage sales hires
42:39 Will AI agents replace SDRs and sales compensation?

Connect with Brian Le, :
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianhoangle/

Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona

Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/
The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

"Investing in companies that OpenAI won't kill." That's Vanessa Larco's thesis, and in this VC bonus episode of GTMnow she breaks down exactly how she decides what survives. Vanessa, founder and GP at Premise (formerly a longtime partner at NEA, where she backed Robinhood from seed to IPO), joins Max to get into the nitty gritty of how AI is rewriting venture, distribution, and the entire go-to-market playbook.

She makes the case for why "it's just a wrapper" got a lot of VCs in trouble, why she only backs technical founding teams, and why the old GTM playbook is breaking fastest exactly where you'd least expect it. She also opens up about leaving a big platform to build a two-person fund from a blank canvas, and why she treats the fund itself like a startup.

What you'll learn:
- The "OpenAI won't kill it" framework for spotting durable AI companies (and why not everything OpenAI ships actually wins)
- Why the "it's just a wrapper" dismissal cost VCs real deals, and the kayak/AWS parallels that explain why
- Why Premise only backs technical founding teams, and the shipping speed that becomes the real early moat
- How the old go-to-market playbook is breaking, especially in DevTools, and what replaces it
- Why someone on the founding team has to "nerd out" on distribution, and why no-playbook moments are where you growth hack
- How to run a conviction-based investment committee, and why big funds drift toward consensus whether they like it or not
- Why running a fund is just running a startup: fundraising, product, and customer success by another name
- The unanswered question Vanessa keeps circling: how to give experienced GTM talent space to rewrite the playbook

Chapters:

00:00 Intro & OpenAI Moats
01:12 GTMnow Intro
01:51 Technical vs. Non-Technical AI Founders
04:37 The Bottleneck of Hiring AI Talent
05:15 Do Old Moats Still Exist?
06:36 Cloud Era Lessons vs. Today's AI Layer
09:18 The Shift to the Distribution Era
11:38 Interview: Vanessa Larco (Premise VC)
12:40 Companies OpenAI Won't Kill
13:37 Consumer Habits vs. Enterprise AI
15:05 Moving Beyond the "Wrapper" Stigma
17:39 Thesis Building vs. Founder Curiosities
20:11 Sourcing & The "Surreal" Community
22:26 Learnings From NEA & Lightspeed
24:06 Rethinking the Investment Memo
26:43 Consensus vs. Conviction Investing
31:26 Running a VC Fund Like a Startup
35:04 Building Internal Automation Tools
37:35 Distribution Moats & DevTools
39:38 Sourcing New GTM Playbooks
41:12 Parallel to the AWS Boom
43:55 Human Psychology vs. AI Tools
47:06 SF's Best Cookie Spots
48:32 Outro

Connect with Vanessa Larco:
About the guest: Vanessa Larco is the founder and GP at Premise. Previously a partner at NEA, she backed consumer and fintech companies including Robinhood from seed through IPO. She started her career in product and engineering, was a computer science undergrad, and founded and sold her own startup before moving into venture.

Connect with Max: 
https://x.com/hackitmax
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler/

Connect with Vanessa:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessalarco/
https://x.com/veelarco

About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market. This is the VC bonus series, where we host VCs and get into the VC ecosystem.

Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/
The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

A $1.2 billion exit is the dream. Elias Torres calls it his biggest failure. The Drift co-founder joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to unpack why the headline number felt hollow, what he learned in the quiet stretch afterward, and why he jumped straight back in to build Agency, an AI company that runs your entire customer organization.

Elias gets honest about identity after the exit, the difference between chasing a title and building something enduring, and the operating thesis behind Agency: a billion-dollar company with fewer than 100 people, where 80 to 90% of the team are engineers and everyone talks to customers. He also gets into distribution as the hardest problem in the AI era, why he only takes money from investors who lead with value (Pat Grady and Brian Halligan back the company), and the two decades he's spent building alongside David Cancel.

What you'll learn:
- Why a $1.2B exit can still feel like a failure, and what "enduring" actually means
- How to rebuild your identity when the title goes away
- The Agency thesis: $1B with under 100 people, and how AI agents make it possible
- Why Elias runs the whole company on Agency itself, with no CRM
- Why sales may be the last role AI eliminates, and what that means for GTM
- How to spot investors who lead with value instead of a pitch deck
- Why distribution, not product, is the hardest problem in the AI era
- What 20+ years building with David Cancel (Performable, HubSpot, Drift) taught him about partnership

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
02:25 Time off, slowing down, and losing the title
04:00 The inflection point and what comes after a big exit
07:00 What Agency is and the problem it solves
11:00 Why he brought people he's known for years
11:40 Investors who lead with value (Pat Grady and Brian Halligan)
17:30 Building with David Cancel for 20+ years
23:00 The bold claim: $1B with under 100 people
26:00 The go-to-market motion behind it
28:30 "Sales is the last role AI will eliminate"
36:00 High-agency people and how Agency runs itself
42:00 Building distribution in the AI era
51:00 Where to find Elias and Agency

About the guest: Elias Torres is the founder and CEO of Agency, an AI company that provides agents to run a company's customer organization. He previously co-founded Drift (acquired in a $1.2B deal) and held senior roles at HubSpot and Performable, building alongside David Cancel for over two decades. Agency is backed by Pat Grady (Sequoia) and Brian Halligan.

Connect with Elias Torres:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliast/
X: https://x.com/eliast

Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona

About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.

Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/
The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.