Recapping Angular’s first sales kickoff
David Peterson

I attended my first sales kickoff back in 2011. For an event I still can’t believe was approved, Google flew thousands of people from all over the world to Las Vegas for a week. On the second night, we took over the stadium at UNLV. Bruno Mars and will.i.am performed. It was, in the most classic sense of the word, a boondoggle.

We must have talked about sales at some point, but I honestly can’t recall.

Since then, I’ve attended many sales kickoffs that did a better job of balancing skill-building with shenanigans, while, most importantly, getting the team aligned and energized for the year ahead. And last week, we hosted a “sales kickoff” of our own in NYC for the founders of 25 of our early stage portfolio companies. While we like a boondoggle as much as the next VC, we kept this one super tactical. Sales leaders, RevOps tacticians, PLG practitioners, and experts in pricing and negotiation came together from all over the US to go deep on building go-to-market strategies from the ground up.

Bruno Mars, I’m sorry to say, was not in attendance. But it was still a blast. And I wanted to share a few of my favorite lessons learned from some of the sessions.

First, your BATNA is killing your deals.

This insight comes from Aaron Thacker, negotiation expert and former general counsel of Medallia. Aaron came recommended by Scott Davis, who took Medallia public as CRO, and is now an advisory partner to Angular for everything enterprise sales. Scott will tell you that a big part of Medallia’s sales success was excellence in negotiation, and that was in no small part due to Aaron’s excellent commercial acumen.

Like most people who have taken a negotiation class at one point or another, I am well-versed in the idea that you shouldn’t enter a negotiation without first knowing your BATNA (i.e. best alternative to a negotiated agreement). However, Aaron argued, persuasively, that you should throw that BATNA out the window.

Why? It’s all about psychology.

First, procurement teams want to know that they’re getting a “good deal.” Specifically, they want to be confident that they’ve gotten every concession they can get.

Second, sellers want to know that they aren’t getting a “bad deal.” A BATNA provides that comfort. As long as the deal isn’t worse than your best alternative, it’s not bad, right?

But this dynamic creates something Aaron calls “concession theater.” You know that the procurement team will ask for a bunch of concessions, so you anchor the negotiation in a way where you can give a lot of concessions. Now you’re going back and forth…they’re pushing, you’re conceding. You’re playing their game, and they’re loving it.

One is reminded of that old George Bernard Shaw quote: “Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”

Instead, what Aaron argued is that you need to identify your “value target” (which is essentially the value you’d realize from your “best opportunity on your best day”) and anchor on that. By anchoring on the best possible outcome, rather than the best alternative, you’ll be much more likely to escape concession theater and start talking about what really matters from the very beginning.

Second, you probably picked the wrong value metric.

Kyle Poyar, former operating partner at OpenView, pricing expert, and author of the excellent newsletter Growth Unhinged, shared a lot of wisdom on pricing. My favorite was his riff on value metrics.

A value metric is the way a company measures the per unit value of their product for sale (e.g. per seat pricing for most SaaS companies).

Value metrics are important to talk about because most companies choose their value metric almost “by default.” (e.g. if they’re a SaaS company, they charge per seat, without really considering alternatives.)

This is a bad idea both because value metrics are extremely hard to change (you don’t want to get stuck with the wrong one), and also because they’re a clever way to differentiate from your competition.

They are being massively disrupted right now because of AI. Among AI-first startups, seats are no longer the default value metric. This is one of the key ways that AI-first startups are able to differentiate from their incumbent competition.

In other words, there’s a lot of invention going on in the world of value metrics right now, and buyers are willing to play along because AI is enabling the creation of so much value. So take advantage.

Lucky for us, Kyle has some advice on identifying a good value metric:

Third, focus, focus, focus.

This last bit of wisdom comes from Alex Rosemblat, early employee and former CMO of Datadog. In my opinion, Alex is probably one of the ten best enterprise marketing leaders of this generation. (How many marketing leaders last for more than 2 years? How many last more than 10 years? Alex did it for 12 years, and grew with the company from 11 employees to 5,500+).

He is convinced that marketing is simple (not easy!..but simple) and everyone is doing way too much.

Alex will tell you that his job was simple. He had a number of leads that he had to generate every month. That was it. (Most marketers hide from this sort of accountability. But that sort of easy-to-understand goal is critical, in Alex’s mind, to make a marketing function succeed.)

Once he got his number, then it was just a matter of figuring out how he was going to get there with any sort of predictability.

This is the moment when most marketers panic and start throwing everything at the problem. But Alex’s advice, again, is to focus. He chose one channel and asked himself a simple question: what would need to be true for this channel to work?

Alex described how they decided to bet big on events in the early days of Datadog. That sounds like a strange fit for a virally adopted bottoms-up product like Datadog, but it worked amazingly well. The reason is because Alex thought about events like a system. He figured out the conversion rate from in-person demo to qualified lead. Once he had that, it was a simple matter of figuring out how many demos he needed to give per hour, and how many hours he’d have on the exhibition floor.

He could then boost the value of an event by increasing the number of demos per hour (by running concurrent demos, or shorter demos, or training his greeters to be more outgoing on the floor) or increasing his time on the exhibition floor (doors tend to open a half hour earlier than advertised, so he’d show up an hour early and get another few demo slots in at the beginning of the day).

Now, your approach to events might look different depending on your conversion rate (or ACV), but the principle is the same. Think about it like a system. Then wring every ounce of value out of it.

It sounds so simple to hear Alex describe it, but in all my years doing growth and marketing, I’ve never come across someone who was able to bring this level of data-driven optimization to any channel outside of paid marketing. And it’s truly inspiring to see.

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ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

AI comes to Paris (again). According to a Bloomberg report on Monday, “France is set to announce a total of €109 billion ($113 billion) in investment in artificial intelligence projects in the country by companies, funds and other sources over the coming years, President Emmanuel Macron said on the eve of a two-day AI summit in Paris.”

European AI regulations under fire. Techcrunch reports that “as the AI Summit got underway in Paris on Monday, some 60 European companies — from incumbent industrial giants to AI startups (including France’s LLM-maker Mistral) — signed up to an initiative to help establish Europe as a leader in AI. But the fact that they felt the need to sign up at all highlights the widely held view that Europe is not close to being a leader in AI in the current circumstances….Ziv Reichert, partner at Phoenix Court, home to LocalGlobe and Latitude funds, also said: “The EU’s AI Champions Initiative builds on discussions that have long been taking place at both national and enterprise levels. As an early-stage investor, I’m increasingly concerned that founders and startups are being left behind in these conversations — especially as change accelerates.”

How durable are these AI revenues? The Information covered the boom in AI-native revenues, and raised some questions on how durable those revenues will be. Bolt’s recent $700M valuation on $20M in revenue is cited as an example of both sides of that question, with some funds rushing in and others holding back on doubts around defensibility. “Enterprise buyers “aren’t just buying AI apps in light of their software budgets,” said Vas Natarajan, a partner at Accel who focuses on enterprise software. “They see it as a potential displacement for headcount or labor,” one of the largest costs for most companies.”

The sad story of Intel’s acquisition of Habana. Calcalist covered how Intel’s $2B acquisition of Israeli AI chipmaker Habana Labs ultimately failed to help the global giant take on Nvidia. “Sources who spoke to Calcalist about Habana’s downfall unanimously agree that Intel mismanaged the acquisition by pursuing multiple competing AI strategies without fully committing to any. Some believe Intel acquired Habana simply to cover up Nervana’s failure and signal to investors that it was investing in AI—without necessarily intending to challenge Nvidia through Habana. This was evident in Intel’s organizational structure: Habana was not placed under Koduri’s GPU division (AXG) but instead under the data platform group (DPG). Koduri, a high-profile hire at Intel, wielded significant influence and reportedly received the bulk of development and marketing budgets… Until 2022, Intel pursued both strategies simultaneously, selling Gaudi processors while also developing its competing GPU, Ponte Vecchio. However, with the rise of ChatGPT and other generative AI models, Nvidia’s dominance became undeniable, and Intel once again received negative customer feedback. Ponte Vecchio was discontinued in 2024, just two years after its launch, and later that year, Intel announced it would not develop new Gaudi generations. In 2022, following Koduri’s departure, Intel attempted to consolidate its efforts by merging Habana and its GPU division to develop a new AI processor, Falcon Shores—a hybrid chip combining a GPU (like Nvidia’s) with a CPU (Intel’s specialty). At Habana, the move was met with skepticism and wry humor: "Suddenly, they remembered us," some employees joked.”

Trump policies impact R&D globally. Even in Israel, the effects of Trump’s NIH budget cuts are being felt. “Prof. Nachman Ash, chairman of the National Institute for Health Policy Research (NIHP), outlined the potential impact on three levels. "First, there’s the immediate effect, creating uncertainty for researchers with active grants or those planning internships. I don’t know how many are affected in Israel, but I’m sure there are quite a few. Many Israeli doctors spend part of their careers in the U.S., forging important professional connections." The second level, according to Ash, concerns the broader impact on Israeli research. "Israel is deeply influenced by changes in U.S. research priorities, particularly regarding restrictions on certain topics. If specific fields lose funding, this will inevitably affect us professionally." The third, and perhaps most concerning, is the risk of political interference in Israeli medical research. "I lead a research institute funded by the Ministry of Health. While we have a good dialogue and maintain our independence, there’s always a fear that, one day, political interference could seep into professional and research activities here as well. This is a significant risk. I hope the professional community remains vigilant and knows how to resist such pressures."

HOW TO STARTUP

The keeper test. This excerpt from a book by Netflix founder Reed Hastings on how to think about team management (specifically, when and how to prune a team) is outstanding. “If a person on your team were to quit tomorrow, would you try to change their mind? Or would you accept their resignation, perhaps with a little relief? If the latter, you should give them a severance package now, and look for a star, someone you would fight to keep.”

HOW TO VENTURE

Advice for aspiring young VCs. Eric Reiner from Vine Ventures wrote a helpful piece for young aspiring VCs. I love his advice on the “hustler approach” to entering the industry: “Do the job before you get the job, and build a network of VCs by adding value during "networking meetings". A few suggestions could be actively sourcing investment opportunities that could seem to be relevant or exciting for the individual you are meeting with. This is of course much easier if you are financially able to actually make a few angel investments, but generally founders are extremely busy and appreciate hustlers who are willing to help with fundraising processes and similar. Write and publish content that is valuable for founders and VCs. Organize meet-ups and events. Try to make a name for yourself. Be valuable to a VC by building a network and audience of people that could be beneficial to the VC. Provide valuable and differentiated research or opportunities for existing portfolio companies. Some examples could be specific research on a category that the VC has invested in via direct outreach, as well as finding potential customers or partners for companies in the existing portfolio.”

Firebolt announced former Oracle and Confluent leader Hemanth Vedagarbha as President. In this role, he will oversee global Go-To-Market expansion and customer-facing operations.

Aquant
Enterprise Customer Success Manager (Boston)

CruxOCM
Advanced Process Control Engineer Lead (Remote)

Firebolt
Head of Global Sales Development (Remote)

Paradime
Product Engineer - Backend (Remote)