okay I think you know we talked about three topics that we want to spend time on three people when you joined less than 12 months ago how many people are in go to market today and let's talk about a bit of how those people landed at the company yeah we're about 75 in the goto market organization today only three to 75 right okay so 3 to 75 like how did you grow the team so quickly yeah and I mean like for any I say for any founder listening to this like you hire a sales leader
that doesn't have four to six people they can basically text and get into the seat in like four to six weeks probably even sooner let's say four weeks then like maybe not ready to be a sales leader and if you want to be a sales leader and you don't know who those four people are say think about it so I mean a lot a huge amount I mean so much so much respect and admiration for my leadership team because well they are doing a lot of their direct recruiting like me them we have contracts with
a bunch of side recruiters and like this has been the case in everywhere I've ever been I think no one can sell the opportunity as well as you can if you're living it SAS bans welcome to another episode of cro confidential I'm your host Sam blonde today we have an exceptional guest from one of the hottest and most successful startups of the last several years so we have Graham Mareno he's VP of world wide sales at codium I'll talk a little bit about Graham I'll talk a little bit about codium and then I'll talk a
little bit about the show uh couple things about Graham's experience over three years at over five years at grafana we're only one year into codium but I suspect the trend will continue of several years stance again another really positive signal in one's career codium most recently valued at over a billion dollars when Graham joined around this time last year the company was 30 employees fast for to today we're at 150 we're going to talk about what led to that level of growth that level of success over the trailing 12 months Graham welcome to the Pod
and delighted to have you yeah thank you really excited to be here perfect I think we're gonna go some deep in three topics at least today few things that I'm excited to talk about recruiting 30 to 150 people at the company I don't know exactly what those numbers are in the sales org but let's talk about recruiting demand gen is something that you mentioned codium is is sort of world class app and so we're going to talk a little bit about that and I know you're passionate as am I about supporting roles that often times
don't get the level of attention that direct selling roles do these are things like enablement revops and more with that give us just a bit of cont text on what codium does and then we'll go from there yeah absolutely so codium is a generative AI coding assistant our first product which is basically a plugin that works across any IDE 70 plus languages on average generates 45% of the code written by the developers using it and then most recently we released a product called wind surf AI that is an agentic IDE and the numbers on that
are very early on but that is kind of The Next Step change in development where folks all who are not super technical by Nature are actually able to go in and build applications like it's floating around at LinkedIn I built Pac-Man being pursued by armadillos in about five minutes and then what we're seeing customers that are actually Technical and who are really getting into the weeds with it is hearing things like something that would have taken me four weeks is not taking six hours so just really really promising in terms of being able to hugely
accelerate developer productivity that's awesome it is a category that is receiving a ton of attention right now as is your specific company and product within this category and so certainly you know some right place right time influence and a lot of uh execution that has gone into building codium in a very short time to uh a uniforms um with that let's talk a little bit about the last year and what you attribute so much of uh the company and and revenue team success too so I think like helpful context if you can start by describing
the go to market environment when you joined which I think was around February last year like what did the team consist of how many customers existed just Ballpark and we go from there yeah so I the go to market organization was three people when I came in and it we had between self sered that was that's always been a really good channel for us and our annual contract Enterprise customers had probably about 200 customers total and low low single digit millions of Revenue perfect and so I I think the environment that existed is the sort
of stereotypical startup when you bring in your vpa worldwide sales which is the role that you occupy were three individual contributor Sellers and once those folks are successful and you're ready to continue scaling that that individual contributor team you bring in somebody to add process a and recruiting and managerial experience to sort of like facilitate the next phase of growth so many folks that are listening in whether you're founder early salesperson codium is like the exact environment that exists when most folks bring in their first vpf sales can you just describe what are the things
things that were working really well when you joined and then what were the things that you gravitated towards that were working less well yeah I like I have to give our Founders their flowers it's not at all just that they grabb three people inste go figure it out like our Founders did a couple million dollars with founder Le sales before hiring anyone and I think that was a really good thing so I think to that point what was working well was they had and like there you know there's this concept of conscious competence when you
know why you're doing something and can explain it step by step an unconscious competence where you're doing something but it's instinctual and you might not be able to coach someone else how to do it there was a huge amount of unconscious competence I got in and the team was like yeah so like these are the the types of companies we sell to here's why here's how it disadvantages our competition and I was like okay you're describing like ICP swim Lanes trap setting and just like very innately had kind of gravitated towards this by just looking
at patterns and how the deals were going and being able to say okay hey when we sell to financial services companies there's a a predictably positive outcome if we do these things when we go sell to defense and aerospace companies same thing just different set of behaviors and then these might be some Industries where it's a little bit harder for us to sell into right now and so I think that was really uh pleasantly surprising and to be fair I mean I've been I got the opportunity to advise codium for about a year before jumping
on board fulltime so I had some insight but actually getting into it and realizing how much they had fleshed Ed out that I was not expecting to be there and how how it appeared to be correct was really promising on the flip side of that there was no process and like this has been the impulse of every really motivated driven founder that I've ever worked with which is this incredible belief in the product and if we can just get someone to see it and look at it and touch it they'll want they'll get it and
they'll want to be a part of it and so I think at the time we were demoing really really early like pre prediscovery it was like get into a conversation and immediately show the product and I think that had worked and especially for the tental audience like when you have the founders on the line probably effective because they're both like amazingly compelling really smart and in their own way really really good at sales but I think for a rep to go in and like not do any Discovery and just show the product like opens this
can of worms that really doesn't allow you to qualify effectively learn about what the customer cares about understand their current situation you're getting right into kind of show up and throw up here's the product and that was something that we tightened up in short order like got some process around Discovery got some process around when to POV what had to happen before how we went and executed the process and like basically took a look at the average amount of time that everything took on a stage-by-stage basis and said hey I think we can cut two
weeks here three weeks here like really condense it and then we're going to go execute this for a quarter and if it's a train W we'll fix it and if things are working you we'll go and double down on them but just even having the intent for structure I think was really really helpful in the first quarter and it's kind of blending into the next topic I think but also like the first handful of hires that you make coming in are so so important right like they're going to set the tone culturally they're going to
set this little bar and I hired a couple of people who are some of the best humans and operators I've worked with in my career which I actually think was tough for our Founders because they were like why can't everyone just be like this but I think like between process and then bringing people in who immediately like yeah yep got it let see where you're going with it let me run with it that was a super super important first two steps in setting the tone several takeaways let's start with if you're a Founder listening in
I'm going to describe the type of environment that you want to create to attract the best talent in a sales leader like Graham if you are a sales leader you'll get a picture of the environment that that you want to do to join when you are considering a new company one is that there was existing Revenue in place that began with founder Le sales and progressed to being able to have non-founder individual contributor sales people that were closing revenue and so you already have some evidence of product Market fit and revenue growth I think the
other thing that you sort of signaled existed was additional demand coming in then you could leverage to close more deals and grow faster which is sort of a natural segue to in addition to like this really positive early stage environment that you described you also identified several areas of our opportunity so it's like you know you're a sales leader meeting with verun who's the CEO companies at a million plus dollars of ARR and it's like you know we're growing super fast and you're sitting there also going like ooh there also some things that like I
can tweak here and really inflect the growth trajectory and you potentially identified what those things were as you were like interviewing as you were just having initial conversations with Veron and I think socializing those things is really valuable for for both parties let's let's continue along this journey so you join beginning of 2024 were you sort of like outside of Revenue targets for the year were you explicit about what success in 2024 in your role looked like and what were the things outside of like we're going to go from X dollar of ARR today to
Y dollars on December 31st first like what did you sort of identify as Hero's success in 2024 yeah one of the things that I think our Founders are so unusual about in a really good way is that they are like wildly smart really opinionated on how to build amazing Tech and are doing a great job building an amazing company but they have a huge amount of humility where like when I came in and said hey I want to try this stuff they would push and they would challenge but they were ultimately like hey this makes
me nervous here's why but go try it if it works we'll do your thing if not we'll come back to the drawing board and have a discussion about it but I think that has always very much been the environment and part of why I was attracted to it and I think coming in yeah there was a revenue number but even more of it than that it was let's figure out like what the process is where our swim lands are like are we going to go scale midmarket really heavily is this a heavily strategic sale where
like 10 20,000 person companies and above once we figure that out then we can go build a scale plan saying hey like we know that our sweet spot is this type of company there's 10,000 of them in the world based in these places and based on that this is what the go to market organization has to go look like so look was there a revenue number yeah absolutely but I think the other piece of it was let's figure out what the right process is where are what the verticals are what type of rep we need
to go be successful here and what else we need but one of the things that we're doing going into next year based on all the data that we've seen this year is moving to a partner first model for Revenue I know but having a partner leader sub 10 million pretty unusual going all partner first to drive Revenue sub 50 to 100 probably even more so but we believe that's the best thing for the business and I think Brun and Asel and Douglas are both super involved in a really good way and also like very much
empowered me and the other leaders that we brought in to go figure out what we believe the answer was make suggestions and then action them Based on data super all right one thing that comes to mind and it is revisiting something that we talked about before which is the importance of founder-led sales entering this environment where there's already a lot of success but a specific area that a sales leader like you can and should add a lot of accelerant to growth when a company is successful through founder Le sales um it gives you data around
customers conversion rates retent some some you know semblance of retention or customer happiness depending on different characteristics that exist and so much of this data existed for you but the company wasn't doing very much with that data prior to you joining and so what you were able to do was take the DAT the data that did exist and you were able to um apply it to go to market and so it's just just um increasing the efficiency of the people and go to market organization as you sort of progress from this category where the company
is casting a really wide net and anyone that sort of like jumps in and is is willing to become a customer and generate some revenue does so you you then start to constrain that based off of learnings that you have from the existing set of customers so that makes a lot of sense and then you probably as you're doing this you're probably informing Veron and others within the company and they're learning things about their business that they didn't already know like we work really well here and less well here and this is like why I
have made that determination okay I think you know we talked about three topics that we want to spend time on three people when you joined less than 12 months ago how many people are in go to market today and let's talk about a bit of how those people landed at the company yeah we're about 75 in the goto market organization today yeah did only 3 to 75 right okay so 3 to 75 that is very vast tell us about the makeup and then tell us about just your approach like like how did you grow the
team so quickly yeah I mean I so the makeup of the team and these are approximate numbers we've got about 30 Enterprise sellers in the range of 10 mid-market sellers 10 SS then we've got a handful of folks two in enablement forign Partners couple of folks in like deales and revops a handful of sales leaders and SDR leaders and etc etc we've got I think eight we call them the deployed Engineers Solutions Engineers is probably like the normal the normal parlament and then two really great de leaders and that math might not exactly math but
it's about 75 people all in yeah so like kind of full spectrum from scr pre-sale postale oh that's one we have a like a wonderful postale leader who's in the process of building out what our our customer Journey looks like post sales and trying to figure out where sales needs to continue to be involved and where we can have like a dedicated post sale function that she and her team are going to own so not only has the headcount grown dramatically from 3 to 75 in less than 12 months it's also what I would describe
as a relatively complex organization made up of different personas sdrs AES of course you have leadership you have partner sales you have revops you have enablement and client services and more so like you know a bunch of different functions making up the to market organization in addition to the headcount growth and so that's just like the recruiting capacity required to get from point A to point B has to be fairly complicated I I guess just like tell us how that has has worked for you yeah and I mean like for any I say for any
founder listening to this like you hire a sales leader that doesn't have four to six people they can basically text and get into the seat in like four to six weeks probably even sooner let's say four weeks then like maybe not ready to be a sales leader and if you want to be a sales leader and you don't know who those four people are I'd say think about it so I mean a lot a huge amount I mean so much so much respect and admiration for my leadership team because we they are doing a lot
of their direct recruiting like me them we have contracts with a bunch of outside recruiters and like this has been the case in everywhere I've ever been I think no one can sell the opportunity as well as you can if you're living it and so like we have gotten a handful of folks from outside recruiters like 100 and unicorns in particular is one who we've worked with who I think are like really high quality when they send candidates along but 90% plus of that 7 73 people that we've brought in since I got here have
been sourced by recruited by us where are those folks coming from lot of folks that we've worked with before so like the initial cohort of people that joined had really heavy grafana and DNA and like but one of the things that I just say as a heuristic is like Sellers and go to market people in general want to go work at places and for people who they trust who they believe care about them who are going to make them better and who are going to make them money if you do those things then like people
are going to want to work with you want to follow you want to continue being a part of of whatever it is that you're building and I think not just myself but a lot of the people that we brought in early have have built that reputation and so you know I came in a handful of people who knew me trusted me joined me whether that was from or grafana we brought in you know a great sales leader on the west who kind of was like from the larger ecosystem but not someone that we had worked
with directly and like she's done a really great job building out her team and I think it was a combination of really really strong pulling from the network and like bringing people in who you know were coming in saying hey I have two or three people who I really trust who I would love to work with again and then we made a couple of great hires that were not folks that we knew well but were folks that we were able to back Channel deeply and so like one of the things that I think is super
valuable about the sales world is it is not it's a small community and so like if you look at codium a lot of our folks are from Air table great level of talent just like really and really amazing humans a lot of really good folks that had great runs at snowflake like we're talking four to seven year runs who want to go do it again a lot of folks that were at in the Heyday similar thing they know what fast looks like they know what process looks like they're really good at pipeline generation and then
grafana which you know again I think on the sales side had a lot of like appd DNA and there's people that like know how to run the Playbook that were running here okay so here are some things that come to mind and initial set of hires uh all should be personal network of the sales leader that you bring on and then what starts to happen is that snowballs and and and I can sort of relate where thinking back to the organizations at at brex and it at inits we weren't necessarily explicit about we want to
get a bunch of people from company X but what would happened is like you know I would hire somebody from company X and and they were like you know the top performer or something and then they would know like two or three of the other top performers bring in those people until you just naturally start to have these pockets of like three or four people from this company and four people from this company and several people from this company and I think that is that's like a pattern that I see seemingly universally with the best
sales organizations because it's like you pick off one of the top reps and people are very curious like well wait where did Sheila go like Sheila was crushing it here if she went somewhere it must be like somewhat interesting and then you said something you know you get to you hire 72 people they weren't all people that you personally knew that you texted cuz you you come with hor of six you don't come with 72 people that like you know immediately follow you so there are certain things that you have to do or not immediate
network but sort of like you know second network type candidates that make codium the most attractive place that they can possibly join something worth leaving snowflake or somewhere else for you mentioned one you want to pay people well any sort of like stories about things that you um really emphasize to potential candidates that make joining codium the most attractive option for them yeah I mean I think like that you know the the PG version of it is like who cares about your OT show me your comp plan it's like we have a very good comp
plan that I'm like very happy to pull up and talk people through in an interview and then the other thing like this takes time right early stage it's hard like you really really have to make sure that your early people are successful because we only have 10 sellers who've been here for more than six months so like the other 30 have arrived from August 1st on basically but of those 10 seven are already over their annual number with like two weeks ago in the corter so seven of the 10 are over their annual number one
having only been here for 10 months this year will like make into the seven figures we have another couple who are going to be over half a million dollars in W2 earnings and like this is like I started in February the first person who joined after me started in March they did a full annual number they closed $1.6 million in four months and became a leader so like they're not even in this toor because they became an RD pretty early on so I think we have a really good evidence of people that have been here
for a long enough time to tell cuz someone who's been here for 90 days if they have a lot of success there's a huge contributing factor that's luck right because no one comes in and builds a million dollar deal in 90 days and if they don't it's fully possible that they're building and they're going to have a blowout next year and we just like we're looking at the leading indicators but you can't go and like take that to people so I think that is a really big piece is like hey seven out of 10 are
over their numbers we have you know one in 10 at a million dollars plus three and 10 or well three others so four and 10 I guess total who will make over half a million and then the rest of the folks are in varying stages of accelerators over their otes so like that is a good story that's data driven I think another piece is like making money is awesome but being somewhere that's going to make you better and give you skills that you can carry through your entire career is really compelling and like that was
one of the things I mean when and they're still growing fast but like when we were growing really ridiculously fast at like 400 people up to 2,000 people people would say hey I know it's like a a me grinder here in terms of intensity and expectations but I also have heard that the enablement is so good it'll change the rest of your career which is why I want to be here like that is something that's very important to me I want people ultimately to come to codium to work at an amazing Company sell amazing tech
make a lot of money and work with great people but I also want them to say and I've heard that the enablement that you guys do is best in class and is something that will make me a better seller for long I'm in this game okay lot lots done back here let's start with what I would describe as like the habby path is you have a founder-led sales startup couple sales reps that are successful ready to bring in your VP of sales and this is you know the Playbook might be the wrong word but like
a bit of the the sort of like pattern that I have followed and reinforcing that pattern you know multiple times and now reinforcing that pattern with what you just described the VP of sales that you bring in brings a handful of exceptional sellers with them from you know their personal Network the reason that those people join is largely the leader and like a lot of trust that has been built there you want to on board those folks and create an environment where they can be successful and often times success in a sales role is defined
by how much money am I making like we you know sales is a commission driven role and that is something that you want salespeople to prioritize and one thing that is true here is look like if the product isn't selling if there's not product Market thit you have bigger problems than you know the like success of your go to market organization that said you can manufacture what I would describe as like a culture of winning or an environment where people are making good money and what I mean by that is like you said the quota
you decide what the commission structure is and if early on you want to be deliberate about cre creting an environment where people are making good money and think about that as like an investment in the future and being able to uh continue to attract the best talent you set Targets in a way that it it's like some balance between you know challenging but also high level of confidence that that the team will get there and that the individuals will get there and so you can sort of like manufacture this I'll describe it culture of winning
before it actually exists and today I think definitionally codium is winning when you joined it wasn't that clear and so you set Targets in a way that you know the early days we were hitting our Revenue targets well we set the targets people were making a lot of money well we created the comp plan and that just sort of snowballs into you know creating an environment where you know you get this reputation that while like codium is growing quickly sales people making a bunch of money and more and you want to be sort of like
deliberate about creating that versus the environment being created because sales reps are you know um bringing in way more than we thought that they would or or something like that second thing that that comes to mind is around enablement you know look I don't know if you experien this at all Grand but I have in my career where it was always very easy for me to be supported around headcount in direct sales roles specifically like SDR and AE where like you could tie Revenue directly back to the performance of that individual that type of employee
and then received more push back although you know like you I think there was a lot of trust that existed for me but I think Founders out there generally received push back around these supporting roles enablement Revenue operations and you know it was always this type of thing where it was like it is true that this enablement person that is $300,000 a year I don't know how much uh you know of course depends on leveling and so much more like you're not going to be able to say that they they are bringing in five times
the amount of salary that we are providing to them that said they're probably bringing in more like especially in the environment where we are scaling so aggressively it's like what if I can maintain the sort of 90day ramp period to a fully ramped quota rather than progressing that to uh I don't know 120 or 150 days where this function doesn't exist like this is how much more Revenue we generate as a business same idea in terms of like Revenue operations folks I don't know if anything comes to mind there or experience that you've had but
I think like you know one consistent theme on this podcast is appreciation for these types of roles that are becoming more and more popular over time and I think becoming more and more appreciated but it it's harder to tie Revenue directly back or impact directly back to their existence yeah I mean I totally agree I've seen revops be like a huge time suck and source of frustration and I've also seen it be a massive unlock for the business and be able to drive really really good results and generally my experience has been when it's frustrating
it's is at around 5050 to 100 million in Revenue someone's like oh maybe we should use data to make decisions and then it's like a multi-year process of unwinding a bunch of stuff that happened so we made the decision to prioritize it pretty early and it's one of those things that's hard right there's a ton of data everywhere you're moving really fast and I don't think that we have this perfect yet I think with revops it's just been a a more Labyrinthian problem than than we had hoped but the ultimate goal right is to be
able to use data to make sure that we're putting reps in books business that give them an opportunity to be successful that we are segmenting in the right places that we're putting resources where there's the maximum amount of Revenue and I think if you're not being data driven to make those decisions it's really hard all makes sense okay we've got just a couple minutes left let's let's just sort of fast forward to today so we're um 11 going on 12 months in we we've only scaled the team from 3 to 75 people but sort of
same question that that I had at the top of the show what what to day is working well now and and what are the areas that you think that there remains opportunity yeah I mean going well I think the team you know that people have probably heard or if not now you are like if you as a sales team if you don't own your pipeline then like it's really hard to be successful long term if you're looking at the SDR team or marketing or something outside of yourself especially in Enterprise and strategic sales I think
it's really really hard to say that you own your own come and so I think our team has done a really good job building a strong positive culture of pipeline generation you know all probably been around organizations where people did it but it seemed like a chore I think we've done a good job of having people that are bought in understand the importance and also understand that you can choose how you make something feel and so the team we do PG Wednesday comes in gets dialed in we do a kickoff and like makes it really
fun but it is a huge cultural focus and something that we celebrate and so I think us owning our number and owning our own outcome is going to be a really really critical driver of our growth in this next year I think the team has done a good job on that I'm really proud of how we've hired a scale like I think our our leaders are awesome in the sense that like my West Coast leaders are jumping on East Coast interviews and vice versa and I think there is just like a really awesome team ethos
and wanting to keep the bar really high not just for talent but also for culture and so I think like the amount of time that folks are investing in that even as you move really fast has been really amazing and I mean I think a third thing is that companies right now are looking for partners in Ai and like if we're not out here selling you know cans of water like it's it's very much a situation where someone a lot of these companies are looking for not just is this the right tool but how do
we deploy it how do we ensure success on it and I think that our team has done a really amazing job in terms of how we engage with our customers and I'm really proud of that areas for improvement I mean I've of alluded to this like when you're growing as fast as we are territory science is really really important and I think that like I would love to tell you hey man we can go from 40 to 200 reps and like I know exactly what territories are going to look like and we have a really
beautiful way to carve them we're not there yet like that's something that we are actively working on on like a multiple times a week basis with like a working group internally and looking to you know to bring some folks in from a hiring perspective that'll own that long term I mean you talked we talked a little bit prior to this about like how technical you have to be I think just continuing it's the hardest part about doing enablement isn't getting people in and having a strong onboarding program it's how do you continuously enable when the
entire Market is changing on a weekly basis and when the products are changing at that pace and so I think like our enablement leaders done an amazing job trying to grab that tiger by the tail but I think just at scale like that's going to continue to be something that we have an opportunity to improve on and the way that mean some of how we've done is like daily trivia games one of our Founders does a weekly enablement call ongoing enablement so like when you get out of boot camp it's not just like you get
sent off into the woods so like on a periodic basis we're doing re-enabled so people are making sure that they're staying on top of it but I think that's a problem like just like a a hard problem to solve at scale and then I think the final thing is and you've lived this twice it's just like how do you keep everyone in the right head space when you're growing so fast it's very easy to get freaked out and like communication transparency and just having people that are like culturally very in it but I think that
is just like something I think about a lot because I lived it at mango I lived at at grafana and it's a hard problem to solve all really helpful examples here's I think the big takeaway for me rather than going deep on each of these sort of areas of opportunity that you've identified it's like you know we talked about the environment that existed when you joined 11 months ago what was going well where the opportunities were you had this like awareness of these things we fast forward 11 months and the examples that you cited were
new and different you know here are things that are going well like you know the last 12 months we have crushed it on you know recruiting this really complicated sales organization that wasn't going well when you joined there were three people right so like you reflect on the prior year let's say and you really progressed the business forward in these areas that you mentioned as as things that are going well and the opportunities to improve are new each of the I think three things that you called out weren't things that existed you know 11 or
12 months ago and so folks listening in if you're if you're sort of thinking about like what are the the biggest opportunities that we have as a business today and shoot like all of the like or several of the problems or opportunities depending on how you want to frame them they're like the same ones that we mentioned last quarter or the quarter before like these things have persisted that's really bad and I think so one you want like you always want to have if you said things are going perfectly there's nothing going wrong like that
is a problem in and of itself then you're the problem if you believe it's going okay you're the problem you you should always be aware of what the opportunities are you should always have a PL and to address what the problems or or opportunities to improve are and they should be shifting they should be shifting over time and really hold yourself accountable and be intellectually honest around like shoot if I were to list our top two or three problems it's the same top two or three problems that we had like a quarter or two ago
that's not okay and so that was my big takeaway as as you were sort of like reans answering the same question through the the lens of today versus the lens of 11 months ago it's like this is what you want to see you want new challenges that are evolving over time and you know s sort of kudos to you with creating the the the type of um change that you want let's wrap there Graham thank you for joining congratulations on the success that you realized and I know that you're thinking about um your first 11
months at at the company is just the beginning and so I'm excited to see both you and the business continue on this incredible trajectory and you know if codium isn't yet a household name which I know it is for many that for folks that are listening in it is sure to be in the future so thank you for joining and and great conversation yeah I really appreciate it this was fun hopefully it was helpful to folks out there listening thank you so much for the time all right take care see you all bye
