How we scaled Databricks with CMO Rick Schultz
At our GTM Summit, Scale CPO Craig Rosenberg sat down with Databricks CMO Rich Schultz to talk category creation, keeping a narrow audience focus, and how to adapt to AI.
Category: Go-to-market
Tools, templates, and been-to-market learnings
From hype to utility: What agents actually mean for GTM teams
If you ask ten revenue leaders what AI means for GTM, you’ll get ten different answers. The conversation around AI in GTM has been muddied by buzzwords, overpromises, and a general tendency to treat AI like magic. To appreciate the…
Naming the Lakehouse: How Databricks created their category
Databricks' success is hard to overstate. They had the largest raise of 2024, $10 billion at a $62 billion valuation, making them the fourth most highly-valued US-based startup. They’ve achieved 60% YoY growth in recent quarters and crossed a $3…
How to price AI: The cheat sheet for B2B founders
We wrapped our Scale VP GTM Summit last week, and during my session, I addressed the billion-dollar question keeping founders up at night: How do we price our AI features without leaving money on the table OR scaring customers away?…
Cracking the SMB playbook: Scaling through the leaky bucket
Building for SMBs is deceptively hard. On paper, it looks like a dream: a massive market, fast sales cycles, and low-friction adoption. But the reality? High churn, small deal sizes, and a brutal need for GTM efficiency. Many small businesses…
AI at Scale: How Socure booked more meetings with fewer SDRs using AI
Company background: Socure is a Series E company selling identity verification and fraud prevention software to enterprise customers in financial services, ecommerce, healthcare, and other industries. GTM strategy: Socure uses an account-based strategy to target named accounts in distinct verticals…
The Scale Sales Development Framework
Sales development is undergoing a revolution, inspired, in part, by the waning efficacy of traditional strategies: indiscriminately blasting prospects with non-personalized messaging just isn’t cutting it anymore. At the same time, advancements in AI co-pilots are starting to pave the…
Sales compensation for early stage startups
Sales compensation is more of an art than a science, with a system that balances risk and reward. I sat down with Ryan Azus, former CRO at Zoom and sales leader at RingCentral and Cisco WebEx, and a small group…
Compensation matters
Jump to the tools: Compensation guidebook and spreadsheets This is not a complete guide to compensation for venture-backed companies. That would be beyond my zone of competence. Instead, this is a guide to help a venture-backed company efficiently and effectively…
2025 Whisper numbers: The era of efficiency is here
Whisper numbers for 2025 signal a new chapter for startups: growth is reaccelerating, but this time with a sharp focus on maintaining—and in many cases improving—operating efficiency. Just two years ago in 2023, growth rates hit a period of rapid…