Hey there, Freedom Fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I'm the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses and joining me as someone who I first interviewed in 2013. That's about 12 years ago. And back then, there was this feeling that if you had good software, or frankly, if you were a software maker, if you were a tech company, you would never sell. And this guy comes walting onto the stage and he goes, not only will you sell, you're going to want to outsource your sales to my company and businesses that we know that we know of were outsourcing their sales to him. Then he got really good at it and he said, you know, there needs to be better software CRM to enable this type of process. And then he went out and he created it. And that software is called Close.

We are doing a follow-up conversation. And there are a few things that I want to cover here today. First, now that we're no longer trying to be persuaded to sell, he's a guy who's seen people sell so many times on his platform. We're all eager to find out what's working that would give us an edge in selling, human to human selling not human to web page buying the second thing i want to find out what's working that would give us an edge in selling human to human selling,

not human to web page buying. The second thing I want to find out about is how he made the switch from services to sales when so many people who are in the service business just get so stuck

down in that. And then there's one problematic thing that I don't know how to talk about when that

is that his competitors, two of them specifically, are way bigger than him. I don't know how he's going to catch up, and it feels a little disheartening to know that we're in a world where the giants are much harder to take down right now. And maybe he doesn't need to take them down, but I still feel disheartened. We'll talk about that. And of course, we'll talk about AI and how AI is going to impact sales.

Steli, you know the first thing I'm going to ask you. What's your revenue right now? You guys have really grown a lot. Yeah. As you were just saying, you know, the first thing I'm going to ask you, I was like, what was the first thing he would always ask? like oh yes yes i remember people founders would shake in their boots like everybody was nervous

to talk to you uh And now I'm like, oh, yes, yes, I remember. People founders would shake in their boots.

Like, everybody was nervous to talk to you.

What a great throwback.

So for us, we're, we just surpassed $45 million in revenue.

So we're probably going to end the year the 50 million mark plus in terms of revenue.

Dude, the other thing that I remember about you was at some point you raised money, but you said,

we do not think like a venture funded company. We want to make a profit. I wonder if that

attitude helped or hurt you. Like, there's a period there where I thought maybe your pride in

that was keeping you from spending money

that would allow you to grow. What happened with that?

So we actually, we raised a tiny angel around when we were doing something completely

different. And then we wanted to raise more money when we pivoted to Elastic Sales

as a service

agency and then when we pivoted

to close and nobody wanted to give us money

nobody wanted to compete

...