213. “We Will Die”: Why QuotaPath Is Betting Everything on AI-Native Services ft. AJ Bruno (QuotaPath)

Don’t, don’t worry about how we do it is like that there’s an immense amount of trust that has to go into this process.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So, so tell me like, if QuotaPath does not make this move, then we will die.

AJ Bruno:
If we do not make this move, we will be a forgotten SaaS tool like everyone else and no one, no one cares. And you’re not even getting 1x multiples on SaaS tools right now.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight Podcast Network. Subscribe to our Substack at unchurned.gainsight.com, where we go deep on every episode, like how one post-sales team at Cloudbeds built over 150 AI agents. That story and more at unchurned.gainsight.com. Hey everybody, welcome to this week’s episode of Unchurned. I’m your host, Josh Schachter, senior vice President of Strategy and Go-to-Market Development at Gainsight. And I’m thrilled to be here with AJ Bruno. AJ is the founder and CEO of QuotaPath. AJ, welcome to the program.

AJ Bruno:
Josh, it is so good to be here. Seriously, we were just in New York, what, 2, 3 weeks ago hanging out, and now I’m here. Your hat was a little bit more forwards last time I saw you, and I’m not wearing a hat this time.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So I’m in a backwards hat type of mood with you, which is like, it’s an indication of my temperament.

AJ Bruno:
The final times, man. The final times.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Well, you know, um, my wife tells me that she likes the hat backwards, so I gotta go with the hat backwards. Um, you, you know what you didn’t call out, AJ? This is like, I don’t know why I’m just confessing this. This is just neurosis, I guess, at its finest. Um, this is the first time ever on my podcast and only second time in my life. The first time was last week at Dreamforce. the first time that I’ve put bronzer on for a podcast.

AJ Bruno:
I could tell. I wasn’t going to ask. I was like, hey, are you wearing bronzer today?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You could not tell.

AJ Bruno:
Bullshit.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Could you really tell? No.

AJ Bruno:
Also, I appreciate that you admit that. And I’m trying to figure out what is your intention by telling the audience that you’re wearing bronzer? So they go to YouTube and watch it?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Oh yeah. Yeah. Go here. Everybody go to my bronzer info site, whatever. He’s got 5%. Uh, use the coupon.

AJ Bruno:
These ads are getting crazy for podcasts these days.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I don’t want to know, dude. No, no, there’s no attention. It’s pure, like, compulsion. Like, I just can’t control compulsions and I’m like, oh, I’m going to tell everybody that I’m wearing bronzer. So I just told everybody that I’m wearing bronzer.

AJ Bruno:
Well, Josh, I appreciate this and I know how much audience loves small talk, which they don’t. We’ll get into it. But you have a way to change your look so well because you like seeing you with glasses and no hat versus a backwards hat and no glasses. This is a— and bronzer apparently is just throwing me for a loop.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Yeah. You know what it is? My prescription is -1, so it’s a little bit like kind of optional unless I’m driving at night. It’s kind of one of those optional things.

AJ Bruno:
I’m also, I’m also -1 and I am similar and I fly planes without my contacts and glasses, so.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Oh wow. Okay. We won’t tell the FAA. And then where were we going with this, man? I don’t know. We got, we got 2 eggheads here literally. And, and, and—

AJ Bruno:
Well, we got, we got a lot to talk about and we got a short amount of time, so we better jump in.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I know we’re on the, ’cause you gotta get to Top Line. You’re the host of Top Line. Pavilion’s Go-to-Market, uh, Revenue Podcast, which has, uh, 50,000 downloads a week. Thank you, thank you. That’s what it has.

AJ Bruno:
We’re gonna try.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Um, what is QuotaPath?

AJ Bruno:
Uh, QuotaPath. Oh man, this is this little journey that I started 10 years— I’m almost at 10 years for this company. Can you believe that?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What does it feel like in today’s world?

AJ Bruno:
I’m exhausted. Uh, we could talk about that. Everyone’s so exhausted. Yeah, so we had this challenge with commissions and compensation at my last company that I co-founded, Trendkite. And every time, every quarter, a rep would come up to me like, AJ, WTF, man, you’re the founder of this company. Can’t you pay me correctly? What is your problem, bro? And I was like, well, you’re right, this is a problem. And I’d go and I’d talk to my CFO, I talked to a RevOps leader.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
To be clear, this was not a cash flow problem. This was not no money in the bank problem, or was it?

AJ Bruno:
No, no, this was a spreadsheet problem. Okay, this was an Exactly problem that we were using, and it was like messing with us. And look, they’re a competitor of ours, uh, whatever. They’re like enterprise. I don’t even deal with them that much. But, um, we were just struggling to pay our reps on time. And I was like, I gotta start a company that fixes this. You know, it’s morphed.

AJ Bruno:
Obviously everyone wants to be AI native, and I’m sure we’ll talk about services and AINs and all of the fun stuff. But what I’ve realized is that it’s like, at the end of the day, if you don’t match company objectives to incentives, Reps and reps don’t have visibility to it. It’s just like, it’s a mess. It’s a total mess. And so why are you even paying a variable commission comp if you don’t actually have a behavior that you want to incentivize? Didn’t make any sense. It was madness. So does that answer your question? I think that answers it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, kind of. It really intrigues me though. I mean, I know your product just from knowing you, but I don’t know it intimately because that’s not my department. But like, it feels like, is it? Is there a lot of psychology in your—

AJ Bruno:
That’s what it always started as. Like, we wanted to gamify it for the reps more and make it really visible. What we actually found is that a lot of companies actually purposely make it ambiguous and like make it hidden, obfuscated from the rep’s view because they don’t, they know it’s so confusing. What you see is in older companies, I’m sure you’ve been there, Josh, you see rep, you come into a company and you have reps that are there for like 20+ years. And they have these Frankenstein grandfathered plans and no one understands them. And it’s sometimes not even about the plans. It’s actually about the data and the data hygiene. It’s about the CRM that they’re using and how messy it is.

AJ Bruno:
It’s about, they were a roll-up from PE and there’s 5 different Salesforces that were combined.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And also they don’t want to, they don’t want to input their data, right? They don’t, they don’t want to spend the time in the admin stuff, correct?

AJ Bruno:
Well, they just, yeah. And, or even worse, they didn’t even put their data. So what do they do? Well, the RevOps leaders go and use just a spreadsheet anyway. So it’s like, It’s like becomes a massive cluster. Um, and it just sucks. It sucks for everyone involved. Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So I love it. I mean, it’s, it’s relevant for Gainsight too, because we, like so many other SaaS companies, are going through our own transformation of, of product and pricing. And so I can only imagine that right now you’ve got lots of companies that are doing that. You’ve got like consumption pricing, outcome-based pricing. Has, does all that stuff kind of figure into or factor into the value that you’re creating for your customers?

AJ Bruno:
Yeah. I mean, that’s, and that’s part of the challenge. That’s the The opportunity and the challenge is when we started this, we actually started as like a product-led growth company in PLG because we thought reps were going to just take this on and share it with them. Well, it’s kind of sensitive data, so they didn’t do that. But we found is that not only is—

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You thought that a rep was going to sign up, be like, hey, I can keep this in my pocket here to track my own growth.

AJ Bruno:
It’s my own calculator. I’m doing shadow accounting. I’m going to share this with my team and get enough conviction, bottom-up swell to move up to the manager level and then up to the finance level. Well, It turns out those two are actually pretty disconnected. You have the CRO who’s like, I just want my team to get paid correctly. It’s a distraction if it’s not. You have RevOps who’s doing all the plumbing in the backend architecture, and then you have finance that’s actually just doing the payout and thinking about it from a cost analysis of the business. Well, all three of those, they don’t— there’s a translation problem to all three of those.

AJ Bruno:
So you have like this kind of Venn diagram of where they intersect. And then on top of that, the market’s moved is exactly what you said. Pricing is a part of that. that’s changed as well. But then you have companies that are like, well, we pay by cumulative quotas, we have these type of draws, and we have this multi-field earnings rule that is quirky. So because we didn’t start as spreadsheet software, we actually took it as a workflow in terms, in terms of building plans as components. So there was visibility at the deal level, which is a big differentiator for us, but also causes a lot of challenge when we have to actually continuously build to the market where a spreadsheet could just be if then, if then, if then, if then. We’re not that.

AJ Bruno:
We just took a totally different point of view and approach to the market.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. You’re 10 years in, you’re still happy you went down this path?

AJ Bruno:
I am happy that I’m a founder and an entrepreneur. I sometimes am like, man, I look at AI harness companies and cybersecurity companies and observability, and I’m like, dude, I should have started those companies. It must be nice.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
All you had to do was be an Israeli defense, you know, cybersecurity company. That’s it.

AJ Bruno:
Yeah. I think that that’s, and that’s something that in ’21 and ’22, we actually thought about it. It’s like, there’s, is this a massive pivot that we just want to take and do what, um, Allbirds did, which is, I don’t know how that’s working out for them.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Wait, wait. I’m actually, I’m way behind. What did Allbirds do? Are you?

AJ Bruno:
Didn’t you hear this? Allbirds went from a shoe company. Everyone knew they’re a shoe company. And then they had an announcement that they were building data centers. No joke. They like literally went and pivoted and they’re building data centers today. And they got like $50 million in investment overnight because of this announcement.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
But also, I don’t know how they’re doing.

AJ Bruno:
I don’t, I know, I think they got, I think they’re getting rid of their shoe business. I think this is all, all on.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Have you heard of a company called Corgi? I think it’s a startup that sells insurance to startups.

AJ Bruno:
Wait, is it C-O-R-G-I or C-O-R-G-Y or G-Y-Y?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
G-I.

AJ Bruno:
I’m just kidding. I know I have not heard of any of those Corgis.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So It’s corgi.ai, right? No.

AJ Bruno:
Okay, corgi.ai, got it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. No, no, no, it’s not. But I don’t think so. I was in SF last week, like I said, for Dreamforce. Now that I’ve given the timestamp around it, now we gotta release this episode soon.

AJ Bruno:
Good. Timely. That’s all that matters.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And I go, long story short, not probably gonna be worth it, but we see a cafe and it’s this like corgi cafe. And I’m like, wait, there’s a cafe for like dogs or whatever? And there’s all these people working in it. And it’s, and, and, and it’s the startup, I believe, ’cause I haven’t vetted this yet, but I’m pretty darn sure it’s a startup that’s like, we are going to start and operate a coffee shop. And it like, just so that we can get all the startups and the solopreneurs inside working out of this coffee shop. And it’s a legit coffee shop that they operate. And it’s got like, like, like, like phone booths for people and like this like office simulator machine and stuff like that.

AJ Bruno:
Yeah. You know, it should have started that. Yeah. I mean, I do, I do think I, and I’ve, uh, being in San Francisco, I wasn’t in San Francisco for Dreamforce. I was there, uh, last week for in Boston for Unbound, but there’s something in the water. I was walking back from dinner at 9:30 at night after our dinner, actually. Uh, we had a dinner, you know, you and I had dinner in New York and then I flew to San Francisco and had a very similar dinner in San Francisco. And so I’m walking back.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
By the way, I really enjoyed our dinner. I usually don’t enjoy those dinners, but it was a great group. You got together. The food was great. Le Pavillon, right? Or something like that.

AJ Bruno:
Yeah, yeah, little small portions. I would, I would, I, we got a lot of feedback that the portions could have been a little bit bigger and I tend to agree, but whatever.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It was free to me, so I’m not going to complain.

AJ Bruno:
The conversation was awesome. And similar, similar conversation with Kyle Norton in San Francisco. And I was walking back, it was 9:30 at night and I’m staying at the W and I look across the street. The W was like very like half price, by the way. I didn’t realize it until I got there that it was under construction. So it was just like your jackhammers in the middle of the night. And I look across the street and the Harvey office is right across from me. And it’s 9:30.

AJ Bruno:
I look up and there’s like 40 people in the office, Josh. 40. And they’re all, you know, drinks in hand. There’s 3 of them at their desks. And like one of them was funny because he was clearly waiting on a deal to come through because he was just like knees shaking, like leaning in. I was like, where are we right now? This is so 2018, 20— probably ’15 at that point. And I don’t know, it gave me this like enthusiasm and energy of like, okay, cool. Now look, I’m 41 years old, I’ve got 3 daughters and I like all the activities in the world.

AJ Bruno:
I can’t be in an office at 9:30 at night, but I appreciate those that can. And it did give me a throwback to the 2015 when, you know, my sales team, 150 people were on last night of closing night, last night of the month, and we’re all like waiting for deals, 11:00 PM, and then we celebrate and go out. to the bars on 6th Street, 36th, for those that know Austin.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It’s back, man. In-office is back. The AI natives, the ones that are high-flying, they’re back in the office. And I respect that. Like you said, it’s—

AJ Bruno:
Respect it. You respect it. You’re like, well, I’m good.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. I mean, listen, to me, honestly, like 2 to 3 days a week would be ideal.

AJ Bruno:
Yeah, I agree.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
But, you know, listen, if you’re going for that IPO and you’re cruising at 300% year over year, then Then, you know, that says a lot.

AJ Bruno:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What are you guys doing? So you’re not— you’re 10 years, so we’re not going to call you AI native. You could maybe slap—

AJ Bruno:
I say 10 years for the record, 2018. So we are coming up on year 9. So let me correct my—

Josh Schachter [Host]:
8 and 3/4 rounded to 10.

AJ Bruno:
Like every good CEO does, rounds up on things.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Well, that makes you kind of almost AI native, but you weren’t born in this AI native era. At least we didn’t call it that at the time. You’re going through a transformation right now, I believe. So tell us a little bit more about like the S-curve or the lifecycle of your company and where you guys are at.

AJ Bruno:
Yeah, we have great customers and I have just over 1,000 customers. We started, and as I mentioned, we were product-led growth and that meant we were pretty downmarket. There were a lot of smaller customers. We were figuring it out. We were learning and growing and we weren’t we weren’t handling all the use cases. Of course, over the years, 8 years, a lot of time to work on product, you start to really mature and pick up those things and work on things like ASC 606, which is an accounting RevRec ledger principle. So like you’re doing pretty complicated things for our customers. And as that maturity curve started to hit and AI native started to launch, and by the way, our AI native tool is called Atlas.

AJ Bruno:
Oh, shocker, Atlas. Where have I heard that name before, Josh?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, same as ours.

AJ Bruno:
It’s a name, uh, it’s a good name. And what we realized is that our customers are from a jobs to be done, were starting to say like, look, we, we’re, I’m CFO, I have a $150 million business. Our RevOps team was 15. And in this downward push in automation and creating leverage for my team, uh, commissions is just one of those things we just don’t wanna handle anymore. We don’t wanna deal with it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

AJ Bruno:
And at the beginning of the year, I started to, to say like, okay, to the team, like, let’s go create a tiger team and like actually figure out if this is something that we should be doing and just taking on hands-on. So we started that, took on a few design partners. Obviously those deal sizes started to expand quite a bit. And as we worked backwards and took on the operational cadence of commissions, we realized there’s a lot of repeatability, but there’s also a lot of tasks, pieces of it that we could take on. Some of it was binary in ones and zero, and some of it was creating more strategic leverage and not as binary. So we needed much more humans in the loop around, and that’s still the case today. We officially launched this October 1st. So by the time this podcast comes out, I’m sure we’ll be right around the launch time.

AJ Bruno:
And—

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I think I missed the punchline a little bit on this, AJ, though. So just to be very clear, you’ve Well, I’ll ask you, you’ve pivoted, you’ve pivoted the whole business, you’ve created a new product line.

AJ Bruno:
Like what’s the punchline? Yeah, we did. I think there was a bit of a crawl, walk, run, Josh. Like I think, you know, we haven’t pivoted the business in terms of what we’re doing for our customers. And I want to be clear about that. But when, you know, the crawl was building the product, then building the platform in our AI native service tool, which is called Atlas, which has all of our benchmarking of our customer data of our 50,000+ reps that Use QuotaPath every single day. So we have all of the interesting benchmarking data. The run is how do we combine those 2 things and just take this off of our customer’s plate in an AI-native service way? And that’s, that’s what we’ve been able to ultimately see the power of. The challenge with it is that—

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And previously you were selling seats, is that correct?

AJ Bruno:
Yeah. Yeah. Previously we’re selling seats. And so the question around, have we pivoted the business? Fully. Well, not yet, not as of today, but in the next 6 to 12 months, we will 100% have pivoted the business to more of a— I, the question will be of an out— whether outcomes-based pricing for us actually makes sense.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What’s the outcome that you’re selling when you sell the outcomes?

AJ Bruno:
You think about, um, think about a sales team and their incentives and their incentives. Are they actually aligned to company objectives? Typically not. And so if you’re, you’re like, I need to hit 80% GRR this next year, what do your incentives look like to actually be able to do that? What we’ve figured out is that if you can actually build those and align those, you have, let’s say that there are 70%, you have a delta between 70 and 80% of GRR. Can we actually help an organization go from 70% GRR to 80%, uh, GRR by building the right incentive structure and using an AI native service backing to help strategically guide that month over month, quarter over quarter. That’s the, the $100 billion question that we’re all trying to answer is, can we actually change the outcome similar to what you all are thinking about of like, if you, if you, if you said, AJ, Gainsight can take your GRR from 86% to 95%. I’d be like, okay, prove it. And you’re like, okay, we will. I’m, and you won’t pay a dime until we prove it.

AJ Bruno:
That would be amazing. We’re thinking about that in the same way.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I mean, that is what we’re saying. I don’t know the exact numbers, but that is what we’re saying for the long tail for big customers, right? We’re going to take your GRR from X to Y.

AJ Bruno:
Well, long tail customers don’t have 90% GRR. I’ll tell you that much.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Okay, fine. You know that ours do. Or will, uh, uh, no, no, but, but, um, but well, honestly, that’s why it’s low-hanging fruit, right? That’s why this is like a no-brainer of like, let’s go and, and, uh, and take these unassigned accounts and assign some, some, uh, some AI human in a loop to them and get them going.

AJ Bruno:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
But what we’re doing is we’re running all of that renewal playbook process motion end to end. Through Gainsight. And, you know, don’t worry about how we’re doing it. I mean, we are using our AI, right? It’s AI with humans in the loop. But at the end of the day, what we’re saying to our customers is like, we got this. You sign on the dotted line. We are, we are owning your end-to-end renewal.

AJ Bruno:
But that’s the hardest part though. Don’t, don’t worry about how we do it is like that there’s an immense amount of trust that has to go into this process.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yes.

AJ Bruno:
Which is something that we’re both thinking about.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And that’s the thing that we’ve built over years, right?

AJ Bruno:
Right.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And, and so that’s one of the, that’s why there’s a little bit of a, of a privilege to being able to run these AI native services. So, so tell me like, what’s the, um, what’s the, I don’t know, maybe it’s not end to end, but like, what’s the, what’s the thing that you’re running, uh, for, for your—

AJ Bruno:
For comp. Yeah. Literally comp commissions. Like we hand you the payroll. Yeah. Like, I mean, QuotaPath as a tool sits in as a connective tissue between CRM and HRIS. It’s enriched by ERP data, all of that stuff. But ultimately you’re handing over the keys to some of your data and tech stack because you trust us similar to Gainsight.

AJ Bruno:
And we know your comp plans and we’re literally running your comp and giving you what the payout should be at the end of the quarter. And then on top of that, ’cause it’s all about for native AI native services, I think, or services in general. So what’s the extra stuff that you gave us that I didn’t expect? And a lot of it is potentially on anomalies or these, you know, your BDRs are being paid out 2x the the benchmark. Here’s what this would actually should look like, or your, uh, your new business cost of sale contribution is 30% of the total deal size. That’s insane. Like, how do you fix that without pissing off the sales team? It’s a, that’s a big question.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So, and just like how we’re not, for our Atlas, we’re not going to be selling based on the job to be done. We’re not selling based on, uh, we made X number of phone calls and, and ran this play for, for, for Y number of customers. We’re selling on, hey, we renewed this guy, right?

AJ Bruno:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re selling, uh, you’re not selling on, hey, we delivered this, this comp package to so-and-so. You’re selling on, hey, we, we, we improved this overall top line metric, right?

AJ Bruno:
Yeah. And that’s, that’s the big pivot. So that’s where I want to be clear about for us is like the crawl, walk, run is like, look, let’s just prove out that we can do this and save our customers money on a flat We’re going to call it a platform fee. Once we’re able to do that, we can go back and look at that, look at the data for those customers and then say like, look, let’s do it this differently next year. Let’s test this out. We could potentially even save you even more money. And if I, it’s always about, it’s always been about comp as a performance driver. Oh, if I said, how much would you pay for a commission tracking tool, Josh? You’d be like, oh, I don’t know, $10, $20, $30 a seat, whatever.

AJ Bruno:
If I said, how much would you pay if we literally increase the amount of revenue you’re gonna grow by from 20% to 30% next year? You’re like, well, I’d actually be really interested in that, but I don’t believe you. So you gotta go prove that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Or, and/or decrease costs, right? You said it before, like what if people aren’t being comped properly and it’s costing you more money? How do you think about like causality of it? So how are you gonna see, ’cause there’s so many factors into You know, increasing, um, your, your close won and your, your sales cycle and whatnot. It’s, it’s not just a comp thing. It has to do with, uh, your, your playbooks, your outbound, your inbound, your quality of salespeople, all that stuff. Yeah, of course.

AJ Bruno:
You gotta, you have to isolate the variables to that though. Like you gotta come in with this hypothesis and say, here’s where you are. Here’s the 3 things. This is the control group.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

AJ Bruno:
So we are going to look at these 3 things and not go out of bounds from those 3 things.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So you’re running control groups with your design partners for this?

AJ Bruno:
You have to, like you absolutely have to, because otherwise there’s just too many metrics and too many numbers out there and too many people process all of the things that are going to potentially change that. And at the end of the day, you don’t want, I mean, with outcomes, the biggest challenge with outcomes is no one wants to pay for it because it’s almost like getting a meal. You sit down for a nice meal, La Pavilion, and you sit down and you get this like really itty-bitty steak. And then you get it and you get the bill and you’re like, what did I just pay for? You don’t want that feeling for services. And we gotta, you know, make sure that that’s not the case.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. I don’t want to pay $10 everywhere every time I wear my pair of jeans. Right. Uh, yeah.

AJ Bruno:
So did you just pitch a subscription model on wearing jeans?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Yeah.

AJ Bruno:
Probably not going to work. Not going to fly.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Uh, so, and then, and then from a, from an operating perspective, how does this change for you? Because now you’ve got human in the loop and that sort of thing.

AJ Bruno:
I mean, I’m building a startup within a startup. it’s a product-market fit conversation. It’s an ICP. It’s back to the early days. It’s the, uh, 10 years slash 8.25, 7.5 years ago situation where, I mean, I’m a founder at heart and I, I do love that. So I’m going out and meeting customers. I’m having those dinners and flying to different cities. I’m on the road 7 outta 8 weeks and just having these conversations with CFOs to see if this is gonna work.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I, I know you’re excited about all this. I’m very excited for you as well. What’s the one thing that you are You know, a little anxious about hitting plan this quarter.

AJ Bruno:
You know, like there’s the challenge we have when we both have boards is that you still have to keep your short-term. We still have to hit plan. Like we can’t do any of the things we want to do without hitting our growth plan. And that’s what’s so frustrating is like we are Gainsight and QuotaPath are in a different scale, of course, but we’re both in an era where 30 to 40% growth was good enough and great actually. But now if you’re not growing 3,000% day over day, apparently you’re like not, you’re out of sight, out of mind from some of your board members. So the only way you earn the trust is to go out and excel at what you’re doing and make progress and go out and say, hit expectations. And it’s hard. That’s what keeps me up at night.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I want to wrap up with 2 sentences. I want you to finish them for me. First one, if QuotaPath does not make this move, then—

AJ Bruno:
We will die.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Okay. Elaborate? No.

AJ Bruno:
I mean, I think it’s pretty clear. Like we, we don’t have a choice. You thrive and survive at the same time. But if we do not make this move, we will be a forgotten SaaS tool like everyone else and no one, no one cares. And you’re not even getting 1x multiples on SaaS tools right now.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
When my company succeeds in this new motion, QuotaPath will have transformed into the premier ANS company in the market. AI native services, to be clear.

AJ Bruno:
AI native services company. We will be viewed Second to Gainsight. By all of the SaaS companies. Second to Gainsight. Second to Gainsight, except that maybe like we are creating a category. Gainsight created a category way back in the day and did it very successfully. Uh, gain— we need an all boats rise kind of mentality on this. So like Gainsight and QuotaPath, even though we’re not competitive at all, we’re in this together to get everyone to buy into this new world era.

AJ Bruno:
And, you know, Jake from Emergence Capital would say the same thing. This would be his plug for his book and what he’s working on. But it’s true. It’s like our old school SaaS mentality needs to change and must change for us to survive. And there will be only one winner in each category going forward in this world.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
All right, man. In It Together, AI native services unite.

AJ Bruno:
Here we are.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Here we go.

AJ Bruno:
Hey, Jay Bruno.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Thanks for being on the program, man.

AJ Bruno:
Thanks, Josh.