Uncapped #54 | Sam Blond from Monaco

**Sam Blond** (0:00)
Buyers still want to talk to a person. They don't want to buy from an agent, a like, you know, Jack Altman avatar that shows up to a call that is like, not really Jack. So there's no higher ROI on my time than spending time with customers.
Sam, what a delight to be here. I'm really excited to do this with you. Thank you for having me. Awesome to be here. I've been a fan of this for a really long time, so it's cool to be in this chair. I'm gonna try to live up to the hype of that. I actually first learned about you by reading Jason Lemkin's Sastra blog back when I was starting the lattice, trying to learn about sales. I remember in there it was like, Jason's talking about my best sales rep at EchoSign, and he did all of this. Then I obviously knew about you through Parker, who we both know from Zenefits and Rippling. Obviously, I've known about you for a long time. Obviously, I've gotten to know you well over the last couple of years, but I actually want to start by talking about your sales journey. Can you talk through maybe just a quick summary of how you came up through sales, a bit about these companies, and maybe some of the things that you learned in each of those chapters? Yeah. We'll talk about looking into some incredible company. So Jason and Parker, both of which you alluded to, two of just the greatest people, but also most influential people on the career that I've had, and just amazing advocates and close friends and all that stuff. So shout out to those guys.
So let's see, I grew up in Kansas City and went to University of Missouri when I graduated. I was really fortunate that my older brother, Brian, was in San Francisco doing tech sales. I don't think I ever would have ended up out here, but for that. So then 22 moved to San Francisco, got into tech sales. I was at EchoSign, and I appropriately said like sort of lucked into the relationship with Jason. I was just using a recruiter that was introducing me to early stage startups. One of them was EchoSign, and I had a job offer and I took the job. So I started as an SDR, as many folks do in early sales go to market in tech startups. I was there for something like six years. The company did relatively well and afforded me the opportunity to move up into more senior sales roles within the organization. Then Jason introduced me to Parker, went to Zenefits. I was VP of sales there for a few years. Crazy years there, which we can get into, but what a growth trajectory that was. Yeah, it was awesome.
I was there for a little under two and a half years. For two of those almost two and a half years, it was incredible. And then towards the end, sort of a left turn. And so lots of lessons and we can go as deeper or as not as you want there. And then prior to doing Founders Fund and ultimately Monaco, most recently in this sort of sales career, I was CRO at Brex. And again, same idea, just joined a company that was really exceptional from a very early stage. And so I think three times have benefited from the experience of joining when companies are relatively unknown and near zero dollars of revenue, and then being able to leave when they were much, much larger and lots of revenue. Yeah. So we can spend the least time on this because it's like reaching far back into the past. But like, what did you take away from EchoSign? Like obviously those were formative years for you, as you thought about like what good sales looks like, and what a good go-to-market machine looks like. But like that's probably where you got a lot of your early ideas about how this stuff should work. So like what were your takeaways there? Yeah. Well, I think there was some- Were you guys up against DocuSign? Yeah, that's right. So DocuSign was a competitor. EchoSign was private for like three or four of the years that I was there, and then Adobe had acquired us. EchoSign became AdobeSign after the acquisition. We were actually beating DocuSign when Adobe acquired us. And DocuSign is maybe the more familiar name now because EchoSign evolved into AdobeSign. And so let's see a couple of things stand out. First and foremost, and again, I genuinely lucked into this. I think there's nothing more influential early in one's sales career than the company that you join. And you control a little bit of the success of that business. I was an SDR, and then I was a sales rep, and I was one of, let's call it like 10 growing into 40 salespeople. There's only so much that I can sort of attribute EchoSign's overall success to me. It's funny, I put this in the true but hard to convince people of bucket of things where it's like with somebody early in their career, it's like you've got compensation, title, and quality of company. And it is very hard sometimes to convince people that quality of company is more important than those other things. It's arguably like, we can of course deal with the other side, it's arguably like the only thing that matters. Especially if you are joining as it is starting to take off. The way that I think about these things, a lot of it is like the risk reward. And like the earlier you join, almost definitionally there is more risk. But if you can join like right at an inflection point, when there is some signal that this company is really about to take off, but you also join in a very early stage where you are like the first, the second, the third, the fourth higher in the role or function that you are joining in. And then the path dependency on the career from there just is like, so, so strong. That's exactly right. So EchoSign, there was this thing that was largely outside of my control, that was like the overall success of the business. Market market fit was just good. That influenced my personal success, as much as anything. I think there is like a different variable here.