M&A strategies and buying AI talent

Stage 2 Capital General Partner Liz Christo joins the show to discuss the disconnect between venture expectations and reality in the software market. The conversation covers the hidden costs of the new build versus buy debate, the structural changes happening within modern sales organizations, and whether traditional B2B SaaS go-to-market strategies and moats still matter when AI coding tools make software replication cheaper than ever.

Key Takeaways:

-The shift toward building internal AI tools instead of buying SaaS products overlooks long-term technical debt, as Liz Christo points out that "there's like a huge amount of cost buried behind the scenes that we're not really talking about today because it's still like sexy and fun."

-Founders are artificially inflating their Total Addressable Market to meet new venture capital baseline expectations, with Liz Christo noting that "pitch decks read like really ridiculous right now where everybody wants to tell the story of like a $10 billion outcome because that's the new milestone that got set."

-Revenue Operations is becoming the most direct path to the Chief Revenue Officer seat in AI-first organizations, which Sam Jacobs explains is "because as we use fewer humans and more agents, the sort of the half technical, the semi-technical capabilities of most RevOps people will translate into orchestrating armies of agents."

-Delegating analysis and writing to AI risks destroying strategic judgment across go-to-market teams, a trend Liz Christo summarizes by stating, "I think we are producing an incredible amount of content that's not getting consumed... I just think we're like losing the ability to think and we're not teaching junior employees how to do it."

Connect with the Hosts & Guests:

Host: Sam Jacobs - https://www.linkedin.com/in/samfjacobs/

Host: AJ Bruno - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajbruno3/

Host: Asad Zaman - https://www.linkedin.com/in/azaman1/

Guest: Liz Christo - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizchristo/

Topline is more than a YouTube Channel:

Subscribe to Topline Newsletter: https://toplinemedia.substack.com/ Tune into Topline Podcast, the #1 podcast for founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-podcast Join the free Topline Slack channel to connect with 600+ revenue leaders to keep the conversation going beyond the podcast: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-slack

Chapters:

00:00 Intro and Cold Open

02:41 The New Build vs Buy Debate

06:10 Engineers in Every Department

10:48 Pitch Decks and 10B Dollar TAMs

17:53 Venture Capital Funding Quiz

23:43 AI Memos and Critical Thinking

42:41 Software Moats and Switching Costs

47:46 Bulls vs Bears Segment

48:23 RevOps as a Path to CRO

51:25 The Future of SDR Managers

55:14 Is Clay Actually Undervalued

59:12 Odds of Hitting 50M ARR