Founder & CEO of @repvue | former SaaS CRO | sales metrics | TMT alt data | software insights | sales transparency | not investment advice | CLT to RDU
Chapel Hill, NC
Joined April 2008
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Excited to announce we've launched a dynamic RepVue Cloud Index, publicly available and updated daily.
You can browse key metrics by sub-vertical, including 12 month future outlook, percent of quota carrying sellers that hit quota, AI impact, product market fit sentiment, and much more. Couple quick hits 🧵:
Here's a view of some material improvement over the past few months of the sellers' 12 month future outlook, specific to the cybersecurity vertical. This started moving a bit before we got crazy here on X (remember: sellers know).
Finance and ERP sellers getting a little freaked out by the 'build vs. buy' paradigm happening with the big LLMs + some new AI native players.
Check the index and let us know what you want to add next: repvue.com/cloud-index
Here's a view of the overall tech landscape in terms of quota carrying sellers able to hit target (TTM) broken out by smb/mm vs. ent/strat.
5. (probably should be point 1): Get appropriate cyber insurance, and understand what it covers and how to use it if you need to.
Patch or Die!
Today we sent the following out to the CEOs in our portfolio regarding the widespread vulnerabilities that have been detected by AI agents:
The previous week should make it obvious that things have changed. Vulnerabilities are being discovered and exploited at a rate that has never been seen before. While there has been a flood of new vulnerabilities AI agents are being adopted at scale multiplying the potential risk. Agents not only help automate the attacker lifecycle, every ai agent is an insider threat. Your environments are designed to withstand attacks from the outside, not from within. As such, we are suggesting company leaders consider the following changes:
1 - Ensure you're sufficiently staffed for security. The average enterprise allocates roughly 10% of its tech spend to security. Consider doubling that. There are likely thousands of vulnerabilities that need fixing in your environments. Security through obscurity no longer works, all that can be exploited will be exploited.
2 - Establish a zero tolerance policy for secuirty bugs in new features and product releases. Re-examine launch and release schedules and consider delays to ensure all vulnerabilities are patched before deploying new features or products.
3 - Double tap the zombies. Find all old legacy environments that have been neglected and turn them off. Labs, test environments, zombie CI/CD projects etc. Turn it off for now. If it isn’t tied to revenue, kill it.
4 - End the risk acceptance process. Over the last 10 years the risk acceptance process has morphed from a way to accept risks to enable the business, to a way to justify never fixing security issues. Adopt a zero tolerance policy for security issues and risks.
This hasn't shifted too much in the past couple months although we're starting to see some new vendors move up the list of where thelabs are showing up more. On LinkedIn I sahared a summary of 168 comments from traditional software sellers who share strategies of how they are winning against this new competition. TLDR it's really the enhanced build vs. buy paradigm.
Braze has a very solid gtm profile. 48% of sellers hitting quota and future outlook up 8% last 6 months.
We signed a definitive agreement to acquire @Braze, a leading customer engagement platform that helps marketers build deeper customer relationships by responding to customer behavior in real time and coordinating personalized experiences across channels.
Following close, Braze’s real-time engagement and AI decisioning capabilities are expected to complement all four layers of Salesforce’s architecture — Data 360, Customer 360, Agentforce, and SIforce.
Learn more: sforce.co/4eKxONJ
Top 5 Github (from MSFT) competitors as ranked by their sales team based on how often these competitors show up in deals:
1. Gitlab
2. Anthropic
3. Cursor
4. Atlassian
5. OpenAI
New on our Engineering blog: Creating in-house source control.
In May, we merged around 2,500 code changes per day. In September, we merged more than 30,000 per day. As a result, we became bottlenecked by developer infrastructure built for human (rather than agent) scale.
Here, we share how we built a new version control system—and fully migrated our monorepo from git—in five months: anthropic.com/engineering/re…
In terms of Airtable, many sellers there were reasonably optimistic about turning things around, right up until the end. There are so so many potential targets for Bending Spoons right now.
We've got a list of 58 VC funded software cos with >250 FTEs, and at least 300 RepVue submissions.
Today we’re laying off a large part of the Airtable team.
This is not a reflection of their work but a reflection of our deep belief that small teams ship more and better.
For Airtable, better is about to look like:
- A new Core team shipping your top requests monthly (already 30+ shipped in 3 weeks)
- Upgraded Omni, Airtable Canvas, a stronger MCP, and BYO agents, coming soon
- New Performance and Infra teams focusing on speeding up bases and increasing limits on records, fields, and syncs
To everyone leaving: thank you. If you’re hiring, these are excellent people and worth a call.
It wasn't software but I spoke with a very well educated white collar friend in a fairly sophisticated industry over the weekend and he didn't know what a harness or an MCP was. We're VERY early.
This is US consumers? I'd be shocked if it was really 4.5% (I touch grass sometimes). Many of these 'consumers' are buying subscriptions on their personal card for work related purposes, I suspect...
We took the Jeffries software sentiment ranking and re-ranked it based on quota carrying sellers' future (n12m) outlook (from the RepVue dataset) of the performance of the org. A lot of consistency with a couple deltas each way.
Company future outlook (N12M) sentiment (1-5).
Quota carrying sellers only.
Sample only from US submissions.
Only Q3 2026 data.
Any surprises that I can comment on?
Tech AE pay is up. Every year. Guess what will happen in 2027... Yes, it will go up. For ent, for smb, for govt, etc, etc.
They’re actively getting disrupted.
xitter.cf/ryan_c_walsh/status/21…
Keeping an eye on who sellers are seeing in competitive deals and the delta from Q2 to Q3 ("which companies are you coming up against in your deals?"). OpenAI in the top spot... Big growth from Q2.
I mean going through an entire interview process while on the board of a top competitor is wild at the C level with this much capital at stake.
Really disappointed to see this. Here are the facts:
-You did not terminate me. I resigned from my advisor position on Monday and told you I was going to Cognition. In response, you asked me to consider a full time role at Factory. I told you I wasn’t interested.
-You claim that I sat through a board meeting while ‘confiding’ in executives at Cognition. The last board meeting I attended was weeks before I had ever spoken to Cognition.
-Cognition has never asked about information on Factory, nor would I ever give it.