Podcast Transcript
James Mackey 0:00
Scott, thank you for joining us today on Scale by Design! I've been really excited to hit record with you, based on the call that we did last week. I know this is going to be a lot of fun, as well as valuable for the audience tuning in. So thanks for joining me, man. I appreciate it.
Scott Barker 00:18
Happy to be here, man. Excited to chop it up with you.
James Mackey 00:21
Yeah, for sure. So I think the best way to start us off is if you could just tell us a little bit about you and what you're up to right now.
Scott Barker 0:30
Yeah, for sure. That's a loaded question. So right now, I'm a co-founder and partner at GTM Fund, which we've been building since January 2020. Previous to that, I spent four years at Outreach, which was an incredible time period and growth for that business, and learned an absolute ton. I was running partnerships, helping out with the Sales Hacker community, and doing a lot of evangelism work as well as helping us break into some of our top 100 accounts. So, super incredible four-year run, feel very blessed.
And then before that, I actually ended up at Outreach from helping Max Altschuler, my now partner, build up Sales Hacker, so I was running all partnerships and revenue for that media company before we got acquired. And then previous to that kind of got my chops up here in Vancouver, Canada, the very traditional path into tech, which was started as a BDR. And crawling, scraping my way up to team lead to manager to building up programs. And it's been a lot of fun. I feel blessed to be where I'm at today,
James Mackey 1:49
That’s cool, man! I didn't know you started off as a BDR. That's how I started my career as well.
Scott Barker 1:55
I did the whole 100 dials a day, it was a tech company back in the day, and we were still trying to kind of refine our ICP, so we would just get a list and rock and roll man, you know? Yeah, back then there wasn't, that was even before sales engagement and a lot of these things. Salesforce and a phone and a Gmail account.
James Mackey 2:20
Yeah, we had this. So I started it, it was staffing so it wasn't tech. But yeah, there was like a really shitty kind of CRM, if you could even call it that with a bunch of bad data. Obviously, no dialers or enablement or anything, you have the numbers in the system, they didn't even work but they were connected. And still, the metric was 100 cold calls a day and three meetings booked. So I mean, that's the environment I came up into. It's I think it's a good way to start your career. I think it just helps you kind of, at least for me, it made my brain shift to what I considered success, right? Like if 97% failure rate, 3% booking meetings, that was a success to a normal person that'd be 97% failure, for us it's like, hell yeah, that's a great day. Took some time to figure that out.
Scott Barker 3:15
Totally. And just the sheer kind of app that you get. And I feel fortunate that I was in office at the time, I kind of feel bad for some of these folks that are maybe starting their career as a BDR. And now fully remote environment, because I know I learned an absolute ton just by listening to a VP of sales and the different AEs like on that floor. But yeah, I guess we now have different enablement tools and stuff to help.
James Mackey 3:42
Yeah, I think there are more tools coming out. I'm blanking on one of them. That was a recent one coming out that helps with basically training remote SDR teams. Yeah, too bad I’m blanking on it.
Scott Barker 3:56
There are a few cool things. I mean, there's a new company called Rome coming out, it's going to kind of try and recreate that bullpen environment of like an actual sales floor. And there are some cool things that I think will come coming out pretty quickly. But yeah, that was the story, and GTM fund, we're incredibly fortunate. Our kind of model is we're an operator-first VC fund. So we took a lot of the learnings from the Sales Hacker days and then at Outreach, and we had just amassed this really incredible network of CROs, CMOs, VPs of Sales, VPs of Marketing, truly some of the fastest growing SaaS companies on the planet, Procore, Salesforce, DocuSign and Snowflake.
The thesis when we started it was - hey, why don't we go bring together 30 or 40 of the best operators that we know, who we know I've seen zero to IPO in many different flavors, pull some capital, go find some incredible founders, and then just give them the playbooks and be very real with what worked and what didn't. Hopefully, they can sidestep some of the mistakes that we all make because of course, you make a ton and help them with hiring, strategy, mentorship, you name it.
And call it network effects, call it momentum, but we were able to get into some really incredible deals very early with some tier-one firms. That accelerated our growth and we now have 250 go-to-market operators as LPs in the fund, which is super cool, and some backing from Bain ventures and Tiger global, and Now Foundation. And yeah, it feels like we're still in the first inning of this, but we're just about to go raise GTM fund 2, which we're super excited about. And yeah, excited to chat more about it. Particularly through the lens of kind of this new model that seems to be becoming more and more part of the venture capital landscape, which is this operator-first model.
James Mackey 6:12
It's a really cool evolution to see, I'm excited to jump into it as well. I would love to hear a little bit more about the founding story. When you get together that initial group of LPs to join your operator-led fund, the value and differentiators are clear to me and I could see why it's doing so well. Did your initial deal flow come through the LPs?
I think that you mentioned that one of the evolutions is that your LPs are actually helping you source qualified deals from people that they know in their network and trust. Is that how it worked from the beginning or was that more so led by you and Max? How did that start out?
Scott Barker 6:52,
Yeah, that's a great question. So we actually launched this while Max and I were still at Outreach. And kudos to Manny Medina, for having the trust and faith in us to kind of do this on the side. There were some compounding benefits for Outreach as well, you know, getting closer to CROs and CMOs was helpful, because that was their targeted buyers. But it started out and I'll give tons and tons of credit to Max, he had had a pretty remarkably impressive track record of angel investing. So he was seed in Outreach, seed in Gong, seed in Carbon Health. So Max had got a ton of deal flow naturally.
When we first started out, it was a lot of these operators coming to us and being like - hey, I want to diversify my exposure, whatever you two guys are doing in terms of angel investing and advising and getting access, I would love to have some of that. And when we were doing full-time roles, we didn't feel fully comfortable doing that. But then in January 2020, what happened was AngelList released rolling funds, you can go look up the structure of rolling funds, but it just makes it way easier to manage all of your back office and the admin part that comes with a venture capital firm. So we could really just focus on finding the best companies and supporting them, we wouldn't have been able to do it, had they not released rolling funds.
We've now since transitioned to a standard fund with all our own LPA docs and things but that was kind of how it started. And initially, yeah, the deal flow was coming from myself and Max. Either it was coming inbound, or we were doing a lot more kind of outbound at that time trying to get into deals, doing what we do best, which is we're pretty scrappy guys. And that's how we got the initial deals done. Since then, the community has grown so much, that we now have category experts in just about every sector of SaaS.
So these folks have spent 15-20 years in e-commerce, SaaS or security and identity or logistics, SaaS or prop tech. And over time, more and more of our deal flow has actually come from our LP base, who naturally get people reaching out to them because they've had such an incredible career in these different pockets of technology. And people want their feedback. They want them to be design partners. And so about 70% of our deal flow now comes from LPs which is pretty cool.
James Mackey 9:46
That's fantastic. I love that and it's really what I love about the operator model too, is that it really does seem like it helps at every stage of the venture lifecycle from sourcing to due diligence. I would love to dive a little bit deeper, and we've talked about the sourcing of deal flow, but getting into due diligence as well as if we could slow down on that aspect. And if you could probably articulate a little bit better than I did, I touched on it being that you know, obviously, it's relationships that they know and people they know.
And I'm assuming maybe the fact that they are experts in their respective industry sectors allows them to evaluate opportunities better. But can you tell us a little bit more about how the operator model is so effective for due diligence? Because I think that's a topic that a lot of VCs are talking about right now. Maybe it's arguable that not a whole lot of due diligence was happening last year. And now with the tightening market, we're seeing that topic come up a lot more on this show, and just my conversations with partners and how they're evaluating opportunities this year. How is the operator model correlated to what we're seeing on the market now and how does it help you guys thrive?
Scott Barker 10:58
Totally. Yeah, really Good question. And yeah, we've seen this operator-first model, really help at every single stage. So we talked a little bit about sourcing, and that's a big one. But diligence is another piece where having a group of experts that again, have spent maybe 15-20 years in a given category, it's kind of like having a cheat code or a superpower. So before we even see a deal, oftentimes our LPs have taken a serious look, they've had an initial meeting, and they believe that there's something there, they haven't done a full diligence, but they're like - No, this is a gap in the market. And I think this is the person who could solve this problem.
So we'll get six decks a day or so and of those, we'll go through and take a handful of meetings. And then we have our standard Deal Memo process. So if myself or Max, see a deal that we really like, we have a standard Deal Memo, where you're gonna get all the normal things that you would - ARR, growth, gross margins, net dollar, retention, CAC, payback, all those things that are kind of table stakes, we'll make sure that those are all looking good. We'll ask for a data room. It’s a big thing, if there are founders listening, make sure your data room is super sharp, I think that one of the biggest green flags for me is if I asked for a data room, and it's like they got it right away, everything I need is in there, how you run your fundraising process is a direct reflection of how you run your business. So make sure that's tight.
And then if we still like it from there, since we're not leading rounds, will oftentimes have a chat with the partner, who's leading the round, kind of share diligence a little bit, make sure we're seeing the world in the same way. And then the cool layer that we have, that I don't think all VC funds have is, once we've come up with our hypothesis, once we've come up with kind of our view on the space, we can then go get 3 or 4 experts in that category, share our diligence with them, and be like - Hey, what are we missing here? Is this a real demand? Would you buy this? Would your team buy this? You know, a perfect example of this is, we saw a deal in fintech and a big part of their strategy was channel partnerships. So we just asked them - Who do you think is your perfect channel partner?
They mentioned Square, and we happen to have the ex Global Head of Sales at Square as an LP in the fund. We went and asked her and said, hey, you know, this is everything. This is all the diligence we've done on this company, we think it's pretty cool. They think it'd be the perfect channel partner, why or why not? And she came back and said - Listen, this is on the roadmap, we wouldn't partner with them for XYZ reasons. And so we can go - Okay, perfect. Well, thanks for saving us, you know, a few weeks of diligence on this one, will probably pass. And we ended up passing on that one. So we can do these kinds of tier four, tier five layer questioning, that it might be hard for an analyst or even an investor who has spent a decade investing in a category to know from an operator lens if this is a true problem. So it's definitely a big part of what we do. And sometimes we'll even have an LP join kind of like a third call with the founder so that they can ask those questions that are super, super specific to the problem that they're trying to solve.
James Mackey 14:54
Yeah, the other thing that I really liked about that, too, is that that's really valuable feedback to actually share with the founding team that's pitching you. Because being that layered into and having so much access to ask the question that you just mentioned to a potential partner is something that they need to know too while they're building their business. Maybe they didn't have access to that company, because they don't have a relationship in place and you're able to give that value, which is actually really good for the tech ecosystem beyond just an operator-led fund having a great value in and of itself. It's the other value piece to the actual entire tech ecosystem and I think that that's actually a pretty cool example of that, which I really hadn't thought about before you just said that, so that's really cool.
Scott Barker 15:38,
Yeah, to that point, we will always try and share that feedback back. Because you're totally right. If that is a big part of your strategy, you should know that maybe you need to make some changes. Particularly when we look at revenue tech tools, which, you know, most people would think we're extremely bullish on and most of our portfolio companies are rev tech tools, they're not actually.
Of course, we have a number of great ones in there but yeah, oftentimes, we ask the founder - hey, this is going to be intense but do you mind if I put a parsed version of your deck into our GTM Funds Slack, and we'll get you some serious feedback. And I warn them, it's pretty merciless out there. And we'll drop it in and we can get 20 comments on a tool, what they like about it, what they don't what their teams, and what they're using already. And sometimes we'll just copy and paste and share that with the founder. And it's incredibly, incredibly valuable to have 250 CROs, CMOs, and VPs of Sales weigh in on your product.
James Mackey 16:51
Yeah, see that in and of itself, I feel like it's a great way to have deal flow, that's really valuable feedback too and it's like the value add starts before they actually close, right? It's like the value-add starts with just the initial evaluation. And you're right, for revenue tech, you have this great ecosystem of potential partners, and potential clients, but then also a feedback loop. As you're developing the product roadmap or just go-to-market strategy, what I mean, is all of that is correlated.
The other interesting thing is when we are talking about an operator-led model, I also kind of see it as a community-led model. And it's what we've already talked about, it feels community based to me, but then I'm also looking at the off-sites, I follow your content on LinkedIn. And I see, okay, we're having a company off-site with all of the LPs and founders from our portfolio. And that's an incredibly valuable asset in and of itself, when you're thinking about becoming an LP, or you're thinking about choosing your firm to be the backer, I see that as incredibly valuable to just from like a pure relationship community standpoint, that there's a value that you may not be able to directly attribute in many ways you will be able to, but there's also value that you're just, you're going to win business, build relationships be more successful as a result of being part of the community.
Scott Barker 18:24
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, you kind of teed that one up super, super nice. I think Max, and I kind of came at this from a first principles mentality of - hey, if we were starting a fund in 2020, as we did, and we scrapped all the old ways of thinking, how would we want to do it? And our thinking was, okay, we're kind of building a product or a platform. And that product is the flow of value from these incredible LP operators, into the brains of our founders and their respective executive teams. Okay, so if that is what we're trying to do, what does that platform look like?
Well, one, it's a fund, we need capital so these companies can get off the ground and we can get involved. Number two is how do we make sure that this community is valuable both to our portfolio companies, but also to our LPs so that they stick around, want to engage, and a cool part of the community pieces, we see all the Slack metrics, and there are so many conversations happening behind the scenes, we can see how many direct messages there are that aren't in public channels. And there are so many great things that are happening and they are knowledge sharing amongst each other, not just with our founders, which is really cool. So they're solving their own problems within their own business. And then I mean, the third piece and the third pillar of this product is we're now going back to what we know how to do.
We know how to do it well, which is to build a media company. And so we're now bolting on podcasts and newsletters and growing our social channels. And those three things, the fun community and media platform, sort of act as a flywheel to help us with deal flow and help us support our founders better. You know, if they jump on our podcast, we can help them with distribution, we can help them with their idea of category creation. And we learned early on that the power of distribution is immense. And if you can own sort of the narrative in a category, it can really help so that's kind of the model. And, you know, we pour a lot of our management fees back into the community side. So we do two retreats with our LPs. Every year now, we just did one in Scottsdale, we had 85 of our LPS come down during the weekend, come golfing, and come hiking, and knowledge sharing. It's pretty cool. And we just did a local dinner in San Francisco, and we have like, 70 people show up. So it's, it's cool. It's cool.
James Mackey 21:17
Yeah, I mean, it's just business aside, it's a lot of fun I'm sure
Scott Barker 21:25
We’re having a good time yeah!
James Mackey 21:26
Yeah, man, I consider myself super lucky, because I've gotten to a point with my company, where my primary role is content production and traveling. And so I go to dinners, different events. And I just get to hang out with really cool executives and see founders, CEOs, and really bright people in tech, obviously, we have similar interests. And so it's good for my career and for my company.
But it's also what I would want to be doing, I want to hang out with other people in tech, and just have a good time and learn from them. I mean, you're winning when you get both as you have, it's good for your professional development if you will. But it's also just something that you thoroughly enjoy, that does not even work. It's just fun stuff that you'd like to be doing, right?
Scott Barker 22:19
Yeah, I've got a life motto, that is I want to spend my life, solving interesting problems with interesting people. And I feel very lucky to be able to do that every day. And a lot of days, it is fun, a lot of days it's an absurd amount of hard work. But it's really cool to see the results that we've been able to drive thus far, 21 of our first 22 investments, every subsequent capital at higher valuations, which is an incredible hit rate. 98% percent of all funds on AngelList right now, which is, which we're very excited about it at this stage. And again, feels like it feels like the first inning.
James Mackey 23:07
Yeah, I agree. It's really cool. And just because you brought up a little something personal about what you know, your goal to solve interesting problems with interesting people, just to dive into your personal story and growth and we can spend as much time as we want, I know this wasn't really scripted as part of our show topics, but could you share with us, what are some of the biggest lessons learned? Since going all-in on GTM fund? I've just curious to hear how this has impacted your perspective and your growth.
Scott Barker 23:43
Yeah, big question. I think a lot of the learnings had been more maybe underscoring things that I knew or hoped to be true. And that was, with a give-first mentality and coming to the table with value with no strings attached, amazing things can happen. And business karma is most definitely real. And if you can show people that you're truly there to help them get to wherever they want to go, financial incentives aside, you will be successful over the long term, you'll end up having this army of people who have your back, who speak good things about you when you're not in the room. I think that a lot of what makes people successful is those conversations that happen when you are not in the room. And you know, an example of kind of a give-first mentality that we have is many times regardless if we're going to make an investment or not, one of the last questions I'll ask founders is, what are you struggling with in your go to market motion right now.
And they'll say, hey, we need to hire our first demand gen person, or our PLG motion is a little bit broken, or we need an SDR onboarding playbook. And we're fortunate that I can go ask those questions in Slack. Or perhaps I have some knowledge right off the get-go of some people looking for roles, or I have an old playbook and I can just share that with them. And it can have a material impact on their business, whether we invest or not. It sounds trite, but it's about up-leveling the entire tech ecosystem, and also, bringing more of the return I guess back to the people who actually created the value in the ecosystem, which are founders, which are operators. And I think that it definitely gets me out of bed in the morning, excited to make some things happen.
James Mackey 26:13
I could hear it in your voice, or I could hear the passion, actually, that philosophy reminds me a lot of Sam Jacobs over at Pavilion.
Scott Barker 26:23
Yeah, Sam’s the man!
James Mackey 26:24
Yeah, it's like the biggest I’d say, most successful community in Tech. Has added personally a ton of value to me and my company, as I know a lot of other founders, CEOs, and operators. And that's why it's my go-to, almost like this community-led fund is kind of where I go to it, when, when we talk about the operator-led fund, to me I feel like they go hand in hand. And I think it's really cool that you have a business model that actually enables you to have that, to implement that philosophy at work, and possibly a traditional VC, I don't know if that's always possible, but you get to be this, essentially value creating machine, that's probably going to add value to operators, companies that are beyond the value that you and Max you're ever going to really be able to know of.
There are going to be deals happening, there are going to be lessons learned, and there's going to be media dropped into Slack channels, you're not aware of it, as you said that business karma is something. I feel like once people make that shift if they're lucky enough to be able to be in a position to do business that way, or put themselves in a position to work for a company or create their own company that has that philosophy, you really do start to see the results. It's like by not keeping score, you ended up starting to see that feedback loop and deal flow come in and whatever it might be, you're doing. And then at that point, it sounds like, at this point, you're doubling down on that you're like - Oh, wow, this is so cool, it’s more meaningful, and then also like - Holy shit, like we're blowing up, we're taking this thing to the next level.
Scott Barker 27:59
Absolutely. Shout out to Sam Jacobs, I've been lucky to know Sam for many years, I started the Vancouver Chapter of Revenue Collective up here back when it was Revenue Collective. Sam Jacobs was our Sales Hacker podcast host and I've been lucky to be an advisor and we're actually investors in Pavilion as well. So incredible what he's done there. Sam is doing things the right way, that's for sure. I would encourage everyone to get involved in the Pavilion community. And yeah, it's about giving back. I think we're all very blessed to work in tech.
Obviously, it's strange times right now, there are a lot of layoffs, and a lot of things happening. But, I think if you do things the right way, a rising tide raises all ships as cliche as that is. And there are just so many great resources now, like this podcast that you host and all these communities popping up, and they've got the GTM newsletter, which you can check out which has everyone just giving their secrets away, and the GTM podcasts and kind of thing and the answers are there. The answers are easier to get more than ever now and lean into communities, lean into media, and have a great career.
James Mackey 29:17
And I think even in this market condition, it's even more critical to invest in a community for several different reasons. You know, there are a lot of challenges in tech right now. And it's been interesting to see from my seat, we've partnered with over 150 tech companies in the past eight years as an embedded recruiting resource for them. And so we're talking directly with founders, CEOs that are talking to us about what's happening in their businesses, and it's definitely a very uncertain time and a lot of companies have made the transition to survival mode. They've cut a ton of overhead positions, payroll being typically the biggest expense, so it seems that month over month, we have not hit bottom. And I think everybody's just - Okay, survival mode, let's figure out where the bottom is.
I was talking with a bunch of CEOs at a dinner in New York a couple of weeks ago, and one of the CEOs was like, I'm actually excited for 2023 because I want to figure out where the hell bottom is, at least at that point, we'll know. What's the base? Where can we start to rebuild again, no matter how that is, we just want to know where the bottom is. So I think as a final topic, maybe we'll find something to be a little more uplifting at the end. But just I guess one question for you is what is your take on what's happening now? Do you have any kind of, obviously, nobody knows but do you feel like you have a guess on where the bottom might be? Or like, what's happening right now, or how tech can rebound? I'd love to get your thoughts on this.
Scott Barker 30:58,
Yeah, it's a big one. And I'm not an economist by any stretch of the word. But, you know, we're extremely lucky to surround ourselves with a lot of talented folks on the operator side, and VCs, and get their take, and I've been talking to a lot of people. I had a conversation on our pod the other day with Mark Cranny who's a pretty prolific CRO, to say the least, out of the Valley. His take was, he's been through three of these cycles now. And these happen, this isn't the world ending. These happen every decade or so. And this is just another one of those cycles that we're going through. And every time we go through one of these cycles, I think there is a rush to call it safety, call it strengthening business fundamentals, maybe cutting some of the fat in areas where companies weren't growing as efficiently as they could before, there was kind of a throw money at the issue and we’ll grow.
And going back to the basics of having a really strong, repeatable, scalable, go-to-market motion, which focused on efficiency is just going to be good for innovation in the long term. If I were to put my Nostradamus hat on and try and guess when we come up the other side, I think we're probably in for, I don't see us going much further down, maybe a little bit more. And then I would give us about 18 months, and then we will start to slowly see a baseline of growth going back up. So I would certainly if you're a founder listening to this, keep that in mind in terms of runway and capital efficiency. And I think will take a long time to get back to where we were but we will have seen growth again, I would say in about 18 months and you know, go listen to the All In podcast, it’s great.
They do takes on this every week, and I think everyone's just trying to do their best guesstimate, my advice is to go back to business fundamentals. And, you know, the old and numbers are changing. So don't think you're doing poorly. Because you're only at 2.5x growth, you know, and maybe two years ago that was like - That's not, that's not great. But that is good now. 2.5x growth is good. gross margins of 50% are good. Net dollar retention at like 120%. That's good. So burn multiple of 1 to 1.5 is, is good. And so a lot of these things are just shifting and what may be used to not look as good is good. So stay alive, default alive, keep pushing, and don't give yourself these impossible goals to hit, and just focus on efficiency.
James Mackey 34:32
Yeah, I think just getting back to business efficiency, you’re right, the biggest times of innovation in my own career and my own company have really happened during COVID. I mean, before COVID happened, we did contingent recruiting. And I knew at the time that I wanted to switch to the embedded model because I felt like it was higher quality for my clients, but then also I freaking hated it, I did not like not having recurring revenue. I was like - okay, if I'm trying to scale a company, my expenses are recurring, but my revenue isn't, that's not a model that I want to scale ultimately. But the hard part is when business is going well, and you're growing, it's like you have this machine built and it's really hard to change course, particularly when you're in an aggressive growth market like we were seeing before COVID.
And so when COVID happened, our deals, basically, our pipeline got totally crushed. And so that was okay, this is a good opportunity to now rebuild in the direction, the overall long-term direction that I want to build the company. And we didn't really start scaling and being successful until we made that shift and business model, we started to scale well beyond, a million dollars in annual revenue, which was kind of like plateaued as a really small business. And so we went from 1 to 5 million in recurring revenue in less than 18 months, once we made that shift coming out of COVID. So, I think that you see this stuff on LinkedIn about how bad things are, and how hard it is, and it's hard for a lot of people in tech right now. But I think one thing we just have to remind ourselves of is that you almost kind of need to struggle, in order to grow.
And so you go to the gym, and you're pushing against weight, and that's how we build muscles, it's the same concept in life, you have to hit resistance in order to engage mentally to figure out how to solve the problem. And it's like to some extent, just having gratitude if we're healthy, and we have the ability to work hard and grind it out, then ultimately, we're going to come out stronger as a result of it.
So, you're right, I think it's every few years, it's almost sort of important to get a little bit of a kick in the ass and it's because that's what's going to enable us to grow as individuals and as companies. I mean, at least that's kind of my philosophical view on these things. I don't really shy away from these types of challenges. It's frustrating. And you are right, you have to adjust your approach on what looks good, what good is, but I mean, every time in my life where you hit that type of adversity is where you seem to grow the most, I think, personally, professionally, just across the board.
Scott Barker 37:15
100%, man, I mean, your back needs to be against the wall, sometimes to come up with the most innovative and creative solution and kind of going full circle to where we started this conversation where we both cut our chops as BDRs. And I remember my favorite, favorite day was the end of the quarter when I was running BD teams because something miraculous would happen. On the final day of the quarter, when people were just a few opportunities shy of hitting their number, all of a sudden, this innovation and creativity would come to light. And you know, people are creating videos back before everyone did videos, and going through super old ops and calling old bosses to see things and that's where the real thing is, in those final hours.
James Mackey 38:11
Yeah it’s like you remember - holy shit, I have a fifth gear I haven't tapped into, when you bring enough energy and passion to the table, what you can accomplish, you hit that fifth gear. And I think that's another element of great leadership, too. How do you help your team engage that fifth gear, right? This is a totally different conversation,
Scott Barker 38:31
We're gonna be in fifth gear for the next 18 months, I think you're going to be in a really great place to do this. And that requires taking care of yourself physically, mentally, you know, lean on mentors, get an executive coach or performance coach if you can, therapy, whatever it is, it's hard to stay in fifth gear for a sustained period of time, I think that's what we're gonna have to do to get on the other side of it. Some people are hardwired for this. I love times like this because I think it shows the character of the folks that you are surrounded with and yourself, and takes a lot to stay in that gear, but there are ways to do it.
James Mackey 39:26
Yeah, think about the quality of leadership leaders that are going to come out of this, think about the amount of innovation that's going to come out of this from just the amount of intense critical thinking over the next 18 months. That's gonna lead to such an amazing, interesting phase of growth coming out of this. So I think it's a cool time nonetheless to be in tech and I think, when we’ve come out of this thing, we're gonna see some of the most innovative products that we've seen in quite a while so great, great.
Well, hey Scott, this has been incredible. A very valuable conversation and a hell of a lot of fun. I actually forgot that we were recording for like half of this call, just talking shop with you. Thanks for coming on! And if people want to engage with you, engage with GTM fund. How can they find you online?
Scott Barker 40:19
For sure, gtmfund.com. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, Scott Barker. You can find me there. And then yeah, check out the GTM podcast and the GTM newsletter on Substack.
James Mackey 40:34
Good stuff, thank you, Scott.
Scott Barker 40:46
Thanks, brother. That was fun.
James Mackey 40:47
It was fun, it was fun! For everybody tuning in, thank you and we will see you next time. Take care!