I sat down with @samdblond, founder of Monaco, to talk about to talk about the future of sales and GTM in the AI era. He's an incredible GTM leader and founder and I get new ideas every time I talk to him. Hope you enjoy. Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (1:26) Sam's sales journey (3:11) EchoSign learnings (5:28) Building Zenefits GTM (7:02) Parker's 0 to $10M thought exercise (9:51) Creating a demand-rich environment (14:20) People, brand, and revenue ops (21:19) Why Sam went to Founders Fund (28:00) Starting Monaco (29:40) Salesforce’s innovator's dilemma (31:40) Going straight for the system of record (34:30) Disrupting labor (41:10) Pricing in an AI-native environment (44:28) The Monaco GTM playbook (50:06) The $60,000 plane experiment (54:21) Creative campaigns vs. paid advertising (1:00:06) Monaco’s product approach (1:03:13) Advice for founders just starting to sell (1:07:58) Abundant pipeline and the right to say no

Using only Monaco cold outreach, my start-up closed up to $40M in contract value within 5 months of starting the company. Monaco is the Tesla Roadster of CRMs and a daily joy to work with.

Red pill: an army of agents working your pipeline 24/7. Blue pill: another quarter of “just bumping this to the top of your inbox.” Glad @mantisVC took the red one with @MonacoGTM

Nobody we'd rather enter the Matrix with than @samdblond and @MonacoGTM

Today Monaco is launching Agent Matrix. Monaco unleashes countless agents working together, goal seeking, with one outcome in mind: accelerate revenue growth. If you don’t have an army of agents working 24/7 to accelerate revenue growth, you’re living in the past. Apply for early access now.

We are starting a new trend.

S Tier outbound from @samdblond

one of the people in this photo has the craziest GTM brain on the planet

. @samdblond putting his 💰 where his mouth is!

well done @MonacoGTM excited to see what trend this kicks off in sf

“Is this still the latest spec?” Your PRD is most up to date when you know the least about what you’re building. Then the product improves.. and the spec falls behind. Products need a living spec, connected to conversations and code.

2 weeks from today is the greatest Sales Leader event of all time. The best VPs of Sales and CROs in the world all at the Julia Morgan Ballroom in SF competing for $100,000 in the no buy in Monaco Invitational poker tournament. The expense for the event itself is significantly higher than the cash prize - the best venue in San Francisco, a food and beverage program The White House would envy, celebrity guests, entertainment, and so much more. Attendance reserved for Monaco customers and prospects.

Hard to believe 8 months ago we were still in stealth. Today, LinkedIn named Monaco one of the top 50 startups in the US for 2026, alongside @AnthropicAI, @harvey, @SierraPlatform, and @perplexity_ai. linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-…

@MonacoGTM just hosted its first agents hackathon. For 4 hours on a Friday, our engineering and GTM teams collaborated to ship 23 sales-focused agentic workflows in our product. I have always believed that building a world-class AI sales platform requires not just world-class GTM or world-class engineering in isolation but bringing both sides to the same table to draw out the best in each other. If building vertical AI platforms sounds like your jam, we're hiring! DM me!

looks like i misunderstood the entire discussion around the 'huge runway'

Most epic fun event coming up.. Lmk if you are interested. Invites for @MonacoGTM customers and prospects.

Fired up for this year’s Fleet Week

Announcing the $100,000 cash prize startup Sales Leader poker tournament. No entry fee. In addition to giving away $100,000 to the winners in the free to play tournament, we'll have celebrity guests, an incredible food and beverage program, and the coolest venue in San Francisco. This will be the event that sets the gold standard for startup events. Invitations are reserved for @MonacoGTM customers and prospects. Who is the best Sales Leader poker player in the world? We're going to find out on Thursday, October 29.

Opinionated software > platforms that just hand users a box of Legos to let them "figure it out". Most new AI “platforms,” or AI-native versions of legacy products, give customers primitives: data objects, a wiki to populate with context, memory files to maintain, a skill library to assemble. Then they bolt an agent builder on top. “Now go build whatever you need.” Candidly, I think this is the Salesforce philosophy repackaged for AI. The customer buys software to do a job and inherits a "project" to make it useful. The hard part of building a product is being opinionated. You have to understand the job deeply enough to make decisions on the customer’s behalf. And take responsibility when those decisions are wrong. Giving an agent access to all the data doesn’t solve that. Which context matters for which decision? What should it remember? When should it act, and when should it leave something alone? Those questions don’t disappear because you gave the customer an agent builder and somewhere to write instructions. A customer should tell a sales product who to sell to and their discounting philosophy. They shouldn’t have to teach it not to cold-email a buyer already negotiating with a teammate. And when a buyer spends three calls asking “Why should we switch?” then says “Too expensive,” the product should know that a discount doesn’t answer their question. We debate this daily at Monaco. Our guiding principles are: 1/ Packaged for USE, not CONFIG. Customers should start with agents that do the job, not a blank agent builder and a setup project. 2/ Customers should teach us what’s different about their business. They shouldn’t have to teach us how sales works. 3/ If a good salesperson would know better, our product should too. When it doesn’t, that’s a gap in our product, not a missing paragraph in the customer’s wiki. “You can build that on our platform” is not the same as “our product does that.”

SF Tech Week, by invitation only. A rooftop. A data center. A racetrack. A $10k final table. Three are closed. Thursday's poker tournament still has a few seats. partiful.com/u/JrMXNYK7kspia…