B2B Sales Elixir of AI + Collective Intelligence with Stephen Messer, Founder and CEO Collective[I]

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics at Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics at Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Stephen Messer, the founder and CEO of Collective AI. We'll be covering three primary topics with Stephen today. First, the callous for in the vision behind founding Collective I. Second, why a buyer's historic behavior is more important than your sales process. And third, the challenges and benefits of creating a give to get Collective and product. So Stephen, with that brief background, can you give an overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the Metrics at Measure Up podcast?

**Stephen Messer** (1:20)
Well, Ray, first of all, thank you for having me here. It's one of my favorite podcasts and I'm excited to be a part of it. I will continue to be a big supporter long after this, but I've been a big supporter from the beginning. So yeah, I'll give you a background. I've spent my whole life as an entrepreneur, after law school, I went to work at State Department, after State Department, I went to work at Columbia Business School at a think tank called CITI, and then started a company called Linkshare with my sister. Linkshare went on to become the world's largest affiliate marketing company, millions of websites around the world, influencers and everyone else still to this day make most of their money thanks to affiliate links.
We ended up selling that company in 2006 to Rockuton, have helped start other companies. I sit on the board of a company called Spire Global, which is a New York Stock Exchange-traded company of a Kube satellite company. I do a lot of different things, but we started Collective Eye about 10 years ago with the goal of building what is today called an economic foundation model. For your guess, you've probably heard foundation models talked about when it came to things like OpenAI or Anthropic or Mid Journey is an image-based foundation model as opposed to a language-based foundation model. We just study how the world does business. And we learn how the world does business by studying our customers and how they sell. It becomes a training data that allows our neural net to make these amazing insights that our customers benefit from every day.

**Ray Rike** (2:48)
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Metrics at Measure Up listeners get 40% off Scale Matters go-to-market data audit, but only until the end of Q1. Visit scalematters.com/metrics to claim your offer today. We're going to double click into the economic foundation model in a minute, but one of the things I love about being the host here of the Metrics Measure Up podcast is I get to meet with entrepreneurs, founders who were real visionary. So when you created LinkShare, that was before e-commerce was really taking off. I was at Netscape at that point in time leading the e-commerce group, and you created that largest affiliate network. So tell me a little bit about 10 years ago, what was that catalyst that says I need to create this new AI neural network company for revenue generating professionals?

**Stephen Messer** (4:08)
It's funny, AI has been around for a long time.
But if you basically go back to first principles, you're trying to understand how a technology that's gaining momentum can change a marketplace. And we saw the way companies manage and generate revenue was as inefficient as what we had saw with the advertising world at LinkShare. At LinkShare, we just saw these 50 websites getting 100% of the money. Millions of other websites, great ideas, great products left out in the dark. Could you imagine today the idea that 50 websites were the dominant players of the internet? That would be terrifying. I would be horrible. It would just be as bad as it could get. Well, it's the same thing. When we saw the neural net land starting to spring up about 10 years ago, we thought to ourselves, okay, where is the biggest pain point? The biggest pain point was salespeople treated every sale like it was the first one-off sale. You imagine if you created a map of every road you drove on for the first time, and that was how you built your business, is you had to create your own map. Now, you use Google Maps and Waves. It's the most obvious thing in the world is, why don't we just do what we did in advertising, what we did on mapping, what we did for search engines, what we did for everything that is successful out there, which is build a network and leverage an AI to enhance that. That was the idea. Wasn't that hard? Everyone said it wouldn't work, because everyone said nobody shared the data. You know this.