Automate Portfolio Pipelines & Coaching in 5 Minutes
My colleague at Stage 2 Capital, Mandy Cole , is using this #Claude skill to automate each portfolio company's pipeline and translate the analysis into coaching priorities. The skill generates: 📊 A pipeline health spreadsheet (stage conversion rates, velocity, at-risk deals, rep breakdown) 📈 An interactive dashboard (funnel visualization, coverage ratios, quota vs. actuals) 🎯 A coaching priorities doc (the 5 deals most likely to slip + specific talk tracks for 1:1s) 👇 It takes 5 minuites to setup. Full guide linked in comments.
Donating Book Profits to Advance Mental Health Awareness
Why I'm donating the proceeds of my recent book, The Science of Scaling, to mental health This wasn't a marketing decision; it's a continuation of a cause I've supported for over a decade, and a starting point for a new...
Don’t Scale Until Real Product‑Market Fit Exists
One of the most common failure points I see in startup scaling isn't running out of money or losing to a competitor. It's scaling before the business is actually ready — and not having a rigorous way to know the...
AI Hype Fades; True ICP Hinges on Retention Metrics
This week I had the opportunity to join the Topline podcast with Asad Zaman , AJ Bruno and Sam Jacobs — we covered a lot of ground, but three things stuck out in this conversation: 1) The AI Bubble: Why...
Human Connection Still Beats AI-Driven Cold Calling
Is cold calling dead? With the rise of AI agents across go-to-market, we’re seeing an interesting countertrend. Buyers are craving proof of humanity. They want to know the voice on the other end actually understands their world, not just an...
Early LLM Search Adoption Yields Disproportionate Revenue Gains
It’s shocking how well LLM search is driving conversion. We’re seeing portfolio companies generate real revenue from LLM traffic, even though these platforms represent less than 1% of search traffic. It reminds me of the early days of search and...
Scale Revenue Right: Data‑Driven Timing in AI Era
The Science of Scaling started as a series of talks - just like the one I'm giving at SXSW in two weeks. Those talks became frameworks that underpin how we work with portfolio companies at Stage 2 Capital , and...
Hire Coachable, Curious Sellers to Scale Growth
In #TheScienceOfScaling , I emphasize that the type of seller who thrives in PMF is not the same type who thrives in Growth & Moat. Early-stage success often comes from process builders. Scaling success comes from process executors. A rigorous...
AI Uncovers True Reasons for Lost Deals, Bypassing Bias
Every quarter, management teams walk into the board meeting with a “Closed Lost Analysis” slide. It typically shows the top 5 reasons deals didn’t close. Pricing. Missing feature. No budget. Chose competitor. The problem? Much of that data is incomplete,...
AI Will Return Sales to Full‑Cycle Sellers
In the 80s and 90s, most sales reps were full-cycle. They found their own meetings. They ran the process. They renewed and expanded accounts. Then we specialized: --> SDRs (thanks to the “predictable revenue” era) --> CSMs and post-sale roles...
Momentum.io Showcases Enterprise AI's True Work System
Congratulations to Santiago Suarez Ordoñez , Ashley Wilson , Moiz Virani , and the entire Momentum.io team. It’s been a privilege to support you on this journey. Momentum embodied several themes we consistently look for in native AI companies: -->...
Listen First: Buyer‑Centric Sales Beat Product‑Centric Scripts
Most sales processes are built backwards. They are product-centric (inside-out), not buyer-centric (outside-in). And yet, almost every research study shows that top-performing sellers listen more than they talk on the first call. Bottom performers do the opposite. A product-centric sales...
AI Will Shift Sales to 80% Selling Time by 2026
As the AI era evolves, one of the most difficult aspects of predictions is how quickly humans will be abstracted away from today’s “point of work.” Take something as simple as building a toy. The first level of abstraction is...
Startups Should Ditch Annual Plans for Quarterly Reset
Annual planning is one of the most over-copied “big company” rituals in startups—and it quietly creates a lot of bad decisions. In large companies, annual planning makes sense. They’re hiring hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people, mobilizing new strategies, changing systems,...
AI Turns First Sales Hire Into Pure Discovery Role
Nailing the first sales hire has historically been one of the biggest hurdles in kicking off the scaling process. They’re a unique breed: half Account Executive, spending all week in conversations with prospective customers, and half Product Manager, distilling those...