The Science of Sales + Why Founders Hire Sales Too Early w/ Mark Roberge, Stage 2 Capital

Mark Roberge is co-founder and Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital, a VC firm backed by roughly a thousand LPs who are go-to-market operators, including the founding CRO of Snowflake and revenue leaders at Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, and GitHub. He was the fourth hire at HubSpot and its CRO, taking the company from zero to 100 million in revenue through its IPO. He teaches entrepreneurial sales at Harvard Business School, a course that had 550 students last year and 70 sales coaches on staff, and he is the author of The Sales Acceleration Formula and The Science of Scaling. All proceeds from the new book go to mental health causes.

Timestamps:

• (00:00) Welcome to the Crew podcast

• (00:58) The keynote that became the book

• (02:06) The pattern behind the IPOs and the bankruptcies

• (04:01) Hiring sales too early, and the VC treadmill

• (05:52) Assessing the blitzscale risk of your category

• (06:19) AI customer support versus software for airports

• (07:02) Set a hiring pace, not a lump sum in January

• (08:38) The dilution trap

• (10:02) Twenty bets a decade versus your one

• (12:24) Nobody agrees on what product market fit is

• (13:26) Value creation, not revenue creation

• (15:06) Slack's real North Star metric

• (16:04) Go-to-market fit and unit economics

• (17:16) The revenue velocity formula

• (21:33) What is broken in venture capital

• (26:12) How his Harvard sales class found product market fit

• (29:39) Why he would hire MBAs right now

• (30:41) Scorecard versus vibes

• (33:42) The biggest hiring mistake founders make

• (38:26) Hiring the startup person

• (41:36) "I want them to cheat with AI"

• (46:51) Selling time: 12 hours a week to 25

• (48:29) Paying HubSpot reps 25% more instead of hiring

• (57:37) Why the book proceeds go to mental health

About The Crew Podcast

The Crew podcast interviews GTM leaders and investors at top AI startups and early-stage companies.

Every week, host Chris Balestras, partner @ Crew, talks to the people actually building go-to-market motions in real time, not in retrospect.

About Crew

Crew is a recruiting, investing, & media firm for seed through series D AI-natives & fast-growing SaaS startups.

This Episode Is Brought To You By

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Where to Find Crew

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/crewgtm

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thecrewgtm

Website: https://www.withcrew.ai/

Blog: https://www.withcrew.blog/