Partner at @craft_ventures, alum of UPenn, @dropbox, @slackhq, @clearbit. Company researcher.
đź“ŤSan Francisco
Joined March 2013
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As a seller I am always doing discovery with the aim of finding (what I think of as) "leverage" I can use later on to ensure that a deal will close.
Ie, do they have actual pain, do they understand that pain, do they value that pain, do they buy into our product as a solution, is there a timing element/critical event at play, are there other products they find equally compelling, etc.
When I listen to sales calls, the number one problem I hear is a lack of leverage development. If you probe for this leverage, and it's simply not there, it's a great sign that this deal may never close. It's not your fault as a seller that the leverage doesn't exist, but it's your job to either find it or assess that it doesn't exist (both are fine outcomes.)
If you DO find that leverage, odds are you will get a scare or two in the sales cycle, and it becomes your only insurance policy.
One of the main tenets of good sales is to never trigger a defensive alarm in the buyer's head:
"Uh oh, I'm dealing with a stereotypical salesperson."
The best sellers act like consultants. Thus, I agree- I like the spiritual rebrand from "sales" to "go to market"
the old school sales reps out there will not like this post, but I am loving the new names for ppl in sales - some below that have stood out:
@MonacoGTM - "forward deployed AE"
Default - "member of the revenue staff"
Stripe/OAI/Anthropic - just "GTM"
I've recently titled myself "member of the GTM staff", or MGS for short
a much necessary re-brand. aioli, not mayo
Using Claude or Codex: the app can do anything you want with natural language.
Using a typical AI enabled app: not the case.
Incredibly noticeable difference at this point
Extremely excited for Craft to be able to participate in
@ElevenLabs' most recent round of funding.
They are an incredible example of what the next generation of AI native companies looks like: bottom up, creating a wave of developer & end user love, leading directly to b2b & enterprise adoption.
We just crossed $500M ARR and welcomed new investors to @ElevenLabs: BlackRock, Wellington, Nvidia, Santander, Jamie Foxx, Eva Longoria and more.
Natural, human-like communication will be critical to broad AI adoption - and these new investors help us accelerate that work.
More on why we invested here:
medium.com/craft-ventures/in…
To all soon to be parents thinking about naming their child: first they came for Claude and I did not speak out because I didn't name my child Claude.
Now- there goes Remy. Just be careful out there and do your due diligence that's all I'm saying.
Employees are testing a new "24/7 personal agent" internally called "Remy" that can integrate across Google's other services. bit.ly/4nlas4r
Yet again - the wording of these TechCrunch headlines on Microsoft Copilot usage are some of the funniest I've seen
Microsoft says it has over 20M paid Copilot users, and they really are using it techcrunch.com/2026/04/29/mi…
The rebrand from "wrapper" to "harness" is a great development
The term "thin wrapper" is either overused or misunderstood.
If ChatGPT could create the exact same results as your AI app, without any sort of workflow element, yeah that could be a thin wrapper.
But many AI apps with meaningful traction have workflows, collaboration elements, feedback loops, or admin controls that ChatGPT itself could not and would not provide. And thus, those are not thin wrappers.
What happens to productivity when the 1-2 mins per [somewhat complex] Claude code command goes to 1-2 seconds? Crazy to think about
>You're at work
>Getting your job done in a fraction of the usual time with AI
>Claude tells you that you've hit a token limit
>You're willing to pay pretty much whatever you need to keep going but literally can't
This shift makes so much sense.
Exclusive: Anthropic shifts Claude Enterprise to usage-based billing, raising costs for heavy users.
Read more: thein.fo/4ct88n5
To quote the great Ron Burgundy: "Boy... That escalated quickly..."
If I were @OpenAI, I'd be building picks & shovels features that could:
(a) hook into any SaaS product, (b) search the data repository within that product, (c) return relevant answers to queries, and (d) perform product related actions for user.
I'm sure this is in the works.
The word "insists" in this headline is diabolical
Satya Nadella insists people are using Microsoft’s Copilot AI a lot  techcrunch.com/2026/01/29/sa…
What is a "moat" in 2026? I would argue that to understand what a company's moat is, you must understand their customers' and prospective customers' evaluation criteria. The more nuanced, complex and rigorous the evaluation criteria is, the bigger the opportunity for a moat.
