-
Resource Center
Discover enablement best practices and more in our resource center.
-
Blog
Read the latest on enablement, learning and training trends.
-
Podcast
LEARN from the top leaders in SaaS.
-
Videos
Watch videos and gain actionable insights from leading experts.
Why Traditional Sales Fall Short With Sam Jacobs, CEO & Co-Founder, Pavilion
With only about 28% of sales reps hitting quota these days, the traditional outbound sales model is clearly losing its edge.
Sales teams must adapt to a more efficient way to sell that meets the demands of the customer.
Join us on this week’s LEARN podcast as Sam Jacobs, CEO & Co-Founder of Pavilion, uncovers the flaws in today’s sales model and explores with Ted Blosser why it’s time for a change.
From social selling and personalized outreach to leveraging AI and data, we cover a wide array of strategies that can help you transform the way you sell.
“Marketing creates demand, and then you hire a bunch of SDRs to generate opportunities, and then you hire a bunch of early to mid-career AEs to take those opportunities and turn them into revenue. And that's all supposed to yield results in a compelling way. It’s working less and less. Only 28% of reps are hitting quota right now. This means one out of three is hitting quota, and two out of three are not. Two-thirds of the money we spend is not productive,” says Sam.
“So, how do you think about more efficient investments, more effective investments so that you can generate better returns? That's the conversation.”
Tune in to hear Sam explore:
- His fundamental business philosophies.
- More efficient and effective investments to generate better returns.
- Techniques that have shaped the growth of Pavillion’s thriving community.
Plus, more.
Take a listen and gain valuable insights!
Timestamps
01:38 - Sam Jacobs Intro & Pavilion
04:50 - Kind Folks Finish First
11:24 - The importance of community building
19:11 - Value of content & deliverability
24:01 - Business efficiency & why traditional sales must evolve
29:21 - Rapid-fire round
Resources
Book recommendation:
Podcast recommendation:
Transcript
Sam Jacobs: Does their understanding of the traditional model of outbound sales, is it still practical? Is it still effective? Marketing creates demand, and then you hire a bunch of SDR sales development reps to generate opportunities, and then you hire a bunch of early to mid-career account executives to take those opportunities and turn them into revenue. And that's all supposed to yield results in a compelling way. And the answer is, it's working less and less well. So for example, only 28% of reps are hitting quota right now. Which, one out of three are hitting quota, that means two out of three are not hitting quota. Two-thirds of the money that we spend is not productive.
Buyers themselves are becoming tired of this model of being passed along the supply chain of the sales team in a way that works for the selling company, but doesn't really work for the buying company. And the proof is in the unit economics. The proof is in the math. The proof is that they're not generating results that warrant the investment. And so how do you think about more efficient investments, more effective investments so that you can generate better returns? That's the conversation. It's not that there's a silver bullet, and it's not that anybody has a perfect answer, but that's the conversation that's happening.
Ted Blosser: Hi, I'm Ted Blosser, CEO and co-founder of WorkRamp, where we're redefining the corporate learning space with the world's first all-in-one learning cloud for employee and customer learning. Welcome to the Learn podcast, where we learn from the biggest leaders in SaaS and hear what makes them successful. Hope you enjoy the show. Everyone, welcome back to the Learn With podcast. We have an amazing guest on today. Sam Jacobs, the co-founder and CEO of Pavilion. Sam, thanks for joining us today.
Sam Jacobs: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Ted Blosser: Hey, we have a lot of topics, but I'd like to start with an elevator pitch on yourself and Pavilion. And I'm sure you could go hours on that, but let's just start there and we'll go into the topics.
Sam Jacobs: Well, yeah, I don't have a pitch on myself. I'm the CEO, like you said, of Pavilion. Pavilion is the world's leading community for go-to market executives and CEOs. And we're focused on, it's a paid membership organization. We're focused on helping our members unlock and achieve their professional potential, which is just a way of saying we're trying to help people get where they want to go in their careers, help them build great companies, help them lead successful and fulfilling lives. And we do that in a lot of different ways, but that's basically why we exist, to help go-to market executives and CEOs achieve their professional goals.
Ted Blosser: That's great. And in terms of the elevator pitch on yourself, maybe a little bit of background on your career before Pavilion, where you came from, maybe one or two big learnings too, and then we'll jump into it.
Sam Jacobs: Well, I've been in New York for the last 20 years. Originally investment banking, then I started a record label. Then I started working on startups 20 years ago. And the first 15 of those 20 years, I was a VP of sales and chief revenue officer at high growth companies. And I was trying to navigate the world in an uncertain time when the playbook was constantly changing. And that's why I created Pavilion, because I needed a community of people that were going through the same thing to help me figure out how to solve difficult problems, to help me find the next opportunity, to help me learn how to negotiate effectively. So I am, just like they say, not only am I the president of the hair club, but I'm a customer too. So I am a user of Pavilion as much as I am the founder of Pavilion, because I needed it.
Because every functional area in the modern world has the job description changing every single day, and people need community and they need peers and they need help and support to help navigate those uncertain worlds. And that's what we try to do. And so again, my background is I'm the prototype for a Pavilion member. I was a VP of sales at a bunch of companies. Most of them didn't work out, one of them did and I was just trying to figure out how to do this job. And then I started working on Pavilion full time about five years ago in 2018.
Ted Blosser: Cool. We'll deep dive into how you built the community, your learnings from building the community. But where I'd love to start first is more understanding you a little bit more in terms of your personal philosophy and then we'll jump into the Pavilion years. You actually published it, was it your first book?
Sam Jacobs: Yeah.
Ted Blosser: Okay. Your first book.
Sam Jacobs: My very first book.
Ted Blosser: And you're best-selling.
Sam Jacobs: Perhaps my last.
Ted Blosser: Tell us what you thought about writing a book too.
Sam Jacobs: Yeah, exactly.
Ted Blosser: But you wrote a book called Kind Folks Finish First, and it's actually done really well on the charts. And I want to hear a little bit more about your thesis around writing this book. And give us a little background on it, what the experience was like and the key takeaways you wanted people to take from it.
Sam Jacobs: Yeah, sure. So the thesis is effectively in the title, but the idea is first of all, these are the ideas that form the foundation of Pavilion. So be putting aside the skills that you learn or that you need to be a great VP of sales or how to negotiate. There's a fundamental belief that underpins most communities, which is that giving is not a sacrifice, but is actually a reward. And the point of Kind Folks Finish First is that it articulates a business philosophy that I've tried to embrace, which is effectively summed up in, look to help others before you ask for help. Build long-term relationships, not transactions, and play a big long game versus a short, small game. Which is just a way of saying that helping other people can be... We've been taught, I think sometimes in the world that the only people that succeed are cunning and are ruthless and are only out for themselves.
And what I try to do in the book is say, "Hey, there's a different path." We live in a world of dynamic regulated capitalism, at least in the United States and most of Western Europe. And within that framework, there's an opportunity to succeed professionally by helping other people. And that's what I try to do. Again, those are the ideas that form the underpinning of Pavilion. And when I was writing the book that the publishers came back and they said, "You sure you want to call it Kind Folks Finish First? You sure you don't want to call it The Kindness Principle or something like that because it's not really about winning or losing, it's just about the virtues of being kind?"
And I said, no, that's incorrect. That is not true. The point of the book is that these are strategies that you can employ to be professionally successful, to achieve your professional goals. And that's what the book's about. That's again, what we're trying to teach people within Pavilion, go forth and help other people and offer assistance. And yes, it makes you feel better and it's a better way to live, but it can also be a formula for professional success. That's why it specifically says finish first, because it is the mechanism I have used to build Pavilion, which has achieved some modicum of success over the last couple of years.
Ted Blosser: I've been approached to also write books too. I'm like, I don't know if I have anything to say. For people who are looking at writing books as a great, again, top of funnel tactic, it's great to get your thoughts on paper. Sometimes people do it for their legacy. Was it for you all about amping up the kind of impact on the community of Pavilion, or was there another motivation behind it when you decided to? Because this is, it's a hard journey. You have to tell me how many hours you put into it. I always hear people underestimate it. But yeah, give me some background on deciding to do it and why.
Sam Jacobs: Well, it's funny, so I have a coach. I talk to my coach every Saturday from 12:00 to 1:00. He was really the person that pushed me to write the book. I was in your boat, Ted, so I was thinking, I don't know that I have that much to say. And he said, "Well, your business grew 4x during COVID. Not everybody's business was that successful." Now again, hindsight, maybe part of that success was a result of interest rates more than necessarily my special branded genius. But the point was that community was something that I think had become really important to a lot of different people all over the world. And he thought maybe it could be helpful to people that had, because the book is really about overcoming a lot of challenges, most of which start within yourself, within your own mind and your mindset. And it was about my background being frustrated as a sales executive, being fired a lot of times, and also really telling myself a narrative about a lack of success that ultimately impacted my likelihood of achieving success.
And so he thought, hey, maybe we can share these ideas and help some people along the way. And that was the primary motivation, was that I thought, I don't know that I have anything particularly special to say, but I think the ideas, if they find their way into the world, maybe can offer a little bit of reassurance to people. Maybe there's people out there that aren't sure that, I don't know, being a good person or at least trying to. I'm not saying I'm a great person, I'm just saying maybe there's people out there that are worried that they're being taken advantage of, that by them trying to do the right thing, they're sacrificing something professionally. And again, the point of the book is to say, "Hey, there's lots of different ways to succeed, and this is one way." Doesn't mean that jerks and selfish people don't end up succeeding professionally, but this is another way that you can succeed if you want to.
And of course there's probably definitely a little bit of pride, a little bit of ego involved, in like, "Maybe I can write a book." I'll tell you, the process was a lot of stops and starts. I would love to tell you I just sat down and I wrote for two hours every weekday from 10:00 AM to noon. That's not what happened. What happened was I got a coach and I started drafting and we sort of worked backwards. And first he said, "First you need a title, then you need the insight jacket, then you need a table of contents. Once you have the table of contents, you can write the book." So we started doing that.
But then I would come to these weekly meetings and I wouldn't have written anything. The thing that ultimately brought the book into creation and into existence was a deadline because I talked to Wiley, the publisher, and they said, if you want to have it ready by this conference that you're doing in November, which was last November, we need it by June 1st. So that was like, "All right, well, it's cool. It's cool. I better do it."
Ted Blosser: That's a great point. I remember I was doing a coaching session with my coach and she said, "Hey, who do you look up to?" Most people probably answer Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. And I was like, Michael Dell, who's like, "Play nice, but win." And John Chamber is like the nicest southern CEO ever, but it's right. It's your main point of, hey everyone, there's a different path for everyone. You have to choose one that resonates with you, and I love how you got yours on paper.
Okay, let's shift gears a little bit into Pavilion, the community-building aspect of it. You recently did this LinkedIn post on the top 10 truths of building a community. Because everyone wants to build a community, not just, let's call it professional communities, but in our world for example, we sell a product that helps around customer education. So doing a lot of SaaS community building as well. So give us your tips on community building. If you had to choose your top two to three tips, which ones resonated with you the most or even, I don't know if they've changed in the last few weeks, but resonate with you right now?
Sam Jacobs: Well, it's all a distillation. I think the whole point of the book, Kind Folks Finish First, not the whole point, but one of the points is the same secret to building a community, which is that there's a world of transactionalism that we see so many people embody that maybe you and me, Ted, on a day-to-day basis, maybe at times we embody that ourselves where you need something and so you immediately go to somebody and ask for that thing as a transaction. And when I think about building a community, when I think about embodying the principles that I articulate in the book, it's about how do I put my needs aside and put the other person at the center of my focus and attention? And so how does that translate to building a community? It's not so many SaaS businesses or any company that's trying to build a community, you do it so that you can sell more of your stuff.
Well, when you do it with that explicit intention, your members, the members of the community know that that's why you're doing it. And they are less likely to trust you. And so you really have to do it, you have to believe in karma. You have to believe in the long term. You have to believe, "I'm going to do a bunch of stuff, I'm not going to charge for it. I'm going to deliver way more value than I am extracting. And I'm just going to trust that I am getting a bunch of IOUs from the Bank of the Universe on things that will pay off over the long term." And that's my number one piece of feedback, which is what the instinct will be to over-instrument attribution, to over-instrument ROI in the near term, to over-instrument revenue generated from the community.
That stuff will all come, but I think what you got to focus on first and foremost is, is it a valuable place for people to congregate? That's the first one. And then relatedly, which is if it's you talking to a bunch of people, that's not a community, that's an audience. That's okay, audiences are great. I have an audience on LinkedIn. I wouldn't call the people that follow me on LinkedIn a community. The thing is called followers. And I wouldn't consider myself part of a community because I listen to somebody's podcast. If the people are talking to each other, that's when it's a community.
And so your goal with the community is not to over-architect it so that it's a top-down hierarchy where you're controlling everything. The goal of the community is how do I empower and enable the members of the community to interact with each other? And that starts, again, that's why the first thing I say, it starts with a long-term perspective. It starts with, "Yes, over the long term, I want to sell more of my stuff. Everybody knows that, I don't need to beat people over the head over with it in. The way I'm going to get there is by helping and providing value and support." Those are my tips.
Ted Blosser: One problem I hear a lot about is the chicken and egg problem of, all right, how do I actually get active members helping other active members? I'm curious, in those early days, was it fully bootstrapped by you or your team as the primary kind of community member offering that value? Any tips on the early innings of community, whether that is a professional community or even a product community, like a trailblazer for example?
Sam Jacobs: Well, my tip, yeah, so this is more than... Bootstrapped, it to a certain extent implies there was a point of view that revenue would be made at some point. But I was doing these things, I've been doing this working on Pavilion for about 10 years, so it's been a long time, about a decade. And the way that I got people to communicate and help each other is by modeling that behavior myself and really trying to just put as much work as possible into demonstrating this is what it looks like when you help somebody and don't ask for anything. And then as a consequence, other people saw that and they started doing it for each other. And then it's about articulating the values and saying, "Hey, this is the expectation. We expect you to be helpful. We expect you to be responsive, we expect you to be supportive and engaged and encouraging." And if we can do all of those things, then maybe it can work.
Ted Blosser: Let's shift into one of the core pillars of your community. So even when I was doing my research, I was actually shocked on how many courses you do offer, but had known Pavilion personally from a lot of the great courses you had on offer. Question around what have you learned from the learning or training aspect of the community? It's a core pillar of your offering, but I'm assuming you've gone through many different iterations. I even saw your teaching a course here, you're the dean of a upcoming course in CRO School. What have you learned in terms of either delivery, content? The main question I want to ask is, what's the killer thing you need to do to have great kind of training within a community if you're looking to offer that type of offering?
Sam Jacobs: Well, I certainly think having some quality control around the instructors and the people that you work with is important. But I think the main thing, to the point of your question, Ted, the main thing I would say would be to have a point of view on the world. What is it that you think? You can imagine two different kind of universes. In one universe, anybody that wants to be an instructor can be, maybe they're still good, but maybe one person says that the sky is blue, and the other person says that the sky is green. And that can be pretty weird if you're a learner within that journey where basically, it seems pretty clear that there's no underlying perspective on the world that this online system is designed to teach you. It's really just whoever happened to raise their hand.
I think the other world that's a more compelling world is saying, "Hey, we believe in a specific way of running a business or negotiating, and these are the things we believe are important to you. And we're not going to have a bunch of different courses that contradict each other. We're going to try and line it all up into a coherent, cohesive curriculum." And that's one of the big things that I've learned over the last couple of years, which is, let's make sure that when we're teaching people stuff, we're teaching them aligned against a point of view. And we have a point of view within Pavilion.
What is that point of view?
It's really about building efficient, durable, long-term businesses as opposed to pursuing growth at any cost, no matter whether you have tons of capital or a little bit of capital. That's our perspective. And one of the things we're doing as a consequence is actually building an open operating standard that specifically says, "These are the principles that you're going to find within the content that either we work with or our partners work with when we're thinking about teaching people how to build companies." And again, all of that comes from a point of view on the world. That's what I think is the most important thing that you know need if you're starting an online educational system.
Ted Blosser: Did you teach all the courses to start and then bring in additional?
Sam Jacobs: The very first thing that we did was, the first program we ever did was CRO School, and that was in the fall of 2020. And what I would do is I set up a weekly cadence and I would just bring in people that I respected, and that became the format for a lot of our schools, which in CRO School is a 12-week program. They're not 10 week programs. But no, I didn't teach everything. I found people that I thought could reinforce the ideas that I thought were important. I teach some things, but not most things.
Ted Blosser: And that's why I was looking at CRO School has 10 sessions, I think in this next batch. Did you find a good length of value delivery, how much time people wanted to spend on top of their day jobs? Did you play around with that or experiment with it?
Sam Jacobs: Yeah, I mean, we experiment. We still experiment with it. These schools are 10-week programs. They're 90-minute sessions once a week, plus the 60-minute cohort meeting. So it's a lot of time during the week. And so we first experimented, we only had live sessions and we only had these 10 week programs that we called schools. We then introduced much shorter courses, which can be only two or three sessions and can be only 60 minutes. And we also, of course introduced on-demand or async so that if you want to take it live, because there's benefits to feeling that sense of accountability and urgency around being live, you can. But if you also want to do it on your own time, you can do that as well. Of course, as you would expect, completion rates fall pretty dramatically when it's async versus live, but nevertheless, it's about their ability to work with what's going on within their schedule and their calendar.
Ted Blosser: Yeah, that's fascinating. Our listeners are a cross-section of sales professionals and learning professionals as well. So I think tinkering with the format, even in a traditional sense in, for example, sales enablement, is important as you continue to progress your training program. So love to see that you've tinkered with it. All right, I'm going to transition outside of Pavilion directly and actually asked you about a few things that you've actually posted about recently that I think were actually really interesting topics. You said you traveled, I think you just came from a huge trip. You traveled 22,000 miles in four weeks and you said, "Hey, there's a big learning I'm getting here around outbound sales, and I think sales in general." Do you remember the post you posted?
Sam Jacobs: Yeah, of course. I just wrote it, yeah.
Ted Blosser: Give a little bit of background on what did you feel like, "Hey, this is a huge shift I haven't seen since COVID," for example. How big of a shift is this recently for you?
Sam Jacobs: I think it's pretty seismic. So yeah, again, the thing that I wrote, I was in San Francisco, then went back to New York, then Austin, then back to New York, then San Diego, then London, then Zurich, and then back to New York. So I added all of that up and that's about 22,095 miles. And we have members in all of those places and I had conversations with all of them. And again, this is the topic that came up, which is, their understanding of the traditional model of outbound sales, is it still practical, is it still effective? And the answer is it seems to be less and less effective. And what is that traditional model? That traditional model is marketing creates demand, and then you hire a bunch of SDR sales development reps to generate opportunities, and then you hire a bunch of early to mid-career account executives to take those opportunities and turn them into revenue.
And that's all supposed to yield results in a compelling way. And the answer is, it's working less and less well. So for example, only 28% of reps are hitting quota right now. Which, one out of three are hitting quota, that means two out of three are not hitting quota. Now I don't know what we need to do about quota, but if you think about what that means, it means we're spending a tremendous, two-thirds of the money that we spend is not productive. And it's not that the traditional motion doesn't make any money at all. It's that relative to the cost structure of businesses, it's not proving to be an efficient path to market. So what are the new paths to market? Well, one of them is, hey, maybe we don't need the other two-thirds of people, to be completely honest.
Maybe we just need a smaller sales team of people that we have much higher expectations can actually close business. Maybe it means we need to invest in partnerships, which is what Pavilion has done. We've invested heavily in partnerships and we have partnerships with Winning by Design and Insight Partners and True Executive Search and the Harbinger Institute. So we've got tons of partnerships and maybe partnerships are a way to get to a customer with a higher close rate, with less money spent on outbound.
And so again, the big idea is that buyers themselves are becoming tired of this model of being passed along the supply chain of the sales team in a way that works for the selling company but doesn't really work for the buying company. And the proof is in the unit economics, the proof is in the math. The proof is that they're not generating results that warrant the investment. And so how do you think about more efficient investments, more effective investments so that you can generate better returns? That's the conversation. It's not that there's a silver bullet and it's not that anybody has a perfect answer, but that's the conversation that's happening.
Ted Blosser: That's what I was going to ask you. The natural next question when I was reading your post was, "Hey, where is Sam leaning?" When you advise your clients and the CROs you're working with, as an example, or maybe it's different per business, but is there a general lean that you're seeing which is, hey, fewer reps probably, right? That's probably what this market is saying.
Sam Jacobs: The general lean is to accept a slightly lower growth rate for a more efficient, profitable business. And yes, fewer reps, with the reps that you do have being highly incentivized too and feeling like they have a good job and you're sending all of your best leads to a smaller group of people that you have high confidence will close them.
Ted Blosser: I was talking to CRO Lori Jimenez, and what I was saying is, hey, in this market for everybody, you need to get more wins under your belt. And fewer reps and more leads to go around, produces more wins. And hey, people in this industry want to keep getting a constant stream of wins. And so you got to figure out ways to do that. I will close off with one question, then we'll go into the Learn rapid fire round, which is actually around your, I would say, prolific growth on LinkedIn. I know even internally here at WorkRamp, we set targets for followers for all the efforts we're putting into LinkedIn. And you had a huge jump that you had mentioned. You went from, I believe it was about 22,000 to 62,000 followers in 12 months. And I was telling my wife, she didn't have any concept of followers. I was like, that is a hard feat to do in 12 months. It was like an Instagram influencer going from 50K to, whatever, 5 million in 12 months.
Sam Jacobs: Wow. Well, thanks for saying that, Ted.
Ted Blosser: Give us the secrets. I know you put a list together, but similar to the previous question, give us your top two or three secrets you would say. Or not even secrets. The things that you consistently did to get you there.
Sam Jacobs: So the first thing is... Well, there's a couple. I guess I would say distilling it down, it's very similar to a marketing exercise, which is where you start with is, who am I? What do I stand for? And importantly, perhaps. Who am I against? And it's a messaging exercise that you go through to figure out these are the topics I want to talk about. It's useful to have a foil. If you think about Justin Welsh, I think he's at over 400,000 followers on LinkedIn.
He's against people working for big companies. So it's useful to have an opposition to set something up against, but you go through this message. So the first thing is figure out what you want to talk about. That's sort of like the headline, but the details of it are figure out the topics that you want to talk about, who you're for, who you're against, what the themes you want to consistently hit on and what your point of view is on the world.
That's thing number one. And then thing number two is, and then get to work writing every day or as near to it as you can. So I put out stuff twice a day on weekdays and once a day on weekends, and that's 12 posts a week. Now, once you get a body, you can sort of recycle some of the old ones and it's still fascinating to watch that happen. But I think the secret to the growth is consistency coupled with an interesting point of view. If you have an interesting point of view and you can just find a way to be consistent, I think you'll see growth.
Ted Blosser: What's your take? It's funny; I think the last Justin Welsh post I saw, a variation that's just said, big screenshot says, "Quit your job," or something similar to that, and start something new. Do you feel like being controversial is key to being successful on LinkedIn too? And this might even tie back to your book, do you need to actually be controversial or put someone else in a bucket and you elevate it out of a bucket? What's your take on that to actually have this unique point of view?
Sam Jacobs: I think I'm just reading this book about the history of transistors and chips and so that's on my mind, but there's this guy-
Ted Blosser: Do some investing there, maybe.
Sam Jacobs: No, just trying to understand a little bit more about the world. But there was this guy, Claude Shannon, that invented, he would call it modern information theory. And I guess the point is, I'm sure if you've got some science buffs out there, they'll correct me, but paraphrasing information is information because it's unexpected. And so I don't know that it's necessarily about being controversial, so to speak, but I think that fundamentally, something is interesting if it's not the same as many other things. If all you have to say is the same as many other things, it's just going to be more difficult for you to stand out.
That doesn't necessarily mean that you should be clickbaity or you should say things that you don't believe because you find them to be more engaging from an audience perspective. But I think fundamentally, you got to say, okay, the way, by definition, if I want to stand out, the way to generate engagement and to generate interest is to be different.
And now I don't think you should be different for its own sake, but I think you do have to be different and you have to figure out what is it about what you believe that is different from the rest of the world. Again, we might consider that to be controversial and maybe there's an element that sort of distills complex ideas down to sort of simple polarizing us versus them analogies, which gets people worked up and engaged and excited. But fundamentally, I do think you're going to have to figure out, okay, what is it that I believe that's interesting or unique that other people don't believe? Because otherwise by definition, you'll just be saying the same stuff and people won't find it interesting.
Ted Blosser: It's like Dr. Huberman telling us all to stare at the sun every morning. That was unique. Unique and interesting, and I started doing it. And so talk about the power of interesting insights too. Well, Sam, this has been great. I'm going to close off with the Learn rapid-fire round. This is a round where we just give you a few questions and give us a one or two line answer back for each. First I'll ask you, what's top on your podcast, book, blog list right now that you recommend to the audience?
Sam Jacobs: It's a bit cliche, but I really do find a lot of value in the All-In podcast with Chamath, David Sacks, David Friedberg, and Jason Calacanis. I don't necessarily agree with them all the time, but I learn a lot about the world by listening to them and how they think about the world. So that's kind of top-the-line for me.
Ted Blosser: Yeah, actually that last episode, I called my CTO, the way they explained the analogy of how AI will change search. I was like, where the client-server model's actually reversing to you are now the server, everyone else is the client. Like those insights, I never had never thought of until.
Sam Jacobs: Yeah, 100%. And the way they explain the capital markets is just sort of like a fundamental primer on how to think about asset allocation, and I just find it...
Ted Blosser: Yeah, we're all fake day traders now after.
Sam Jacobs: Exactly.
Ted Blosser: All right. If you could learn from one person, dead or alive, who would you learn from?
Sam Jacobs: I guess I like Sam Grant. Ulysses Grant. I guess I'd learn from him. I just want to hang out with him. I want to hang out with him and I want to hang out with Lincoln because I find them to be great human beings and inspiring people, particularly because I'm a fan of late bloomers. I consider myself a late bloomer and they were the quintessential late bloomers.
Ted Blosser: That's awesome. I think we had Lincoln on a couple episodes... Lincoln as an answer a couple episodes ago, so that's amazing. Okay, last one I'll leave you with here is one topic, imagine you're retired, you could hang out and you can learn about one new topic. What would you go learn if you could have all the time in the world?
Sam Jacobs: I want to learn about, I do want to reverse aging. I'm 45 years old and I still have-
Ted Blosser: You look very young. You do look very young, and it's hi-def. What filter are you using there?
Sam Jacobs: That's the filter of life, my friend. And I want to have kids still, and so I'm going to start late. So I got to live a long time. So I want to learn as much as I can about anti-aging technology.
Ted Blosser: Awesome. That's why we're all doing our moisturizer at night now. Look younger.
Sam Jacobs: Exactly.
Ted Blosser: All right, Sam. This was a wide-ranging episode. It was super helpful to get your insights on many things, from sales to community to LinkedIn brand building. So thanks for joining us today. This has been an awesome session.
Sam Jacobs: Thanks for having me, Ted. Great to be here.