Last week I was in SF, and a sales leader at one of the hottest AI natives pulled me aside and said, "man, it is tough to hire right now for top AEs.”
Keep in mind - this is a company with a HOT logo (on the Forbes AI 50 list, you’d know them), real PMF, and comp near the top of the market.
If they're struggling to hire enterprise AEs, everyone has to be struggling as well.
Then he said a funny quote: "I think we need to lower our hiring bar."
A second later, revises: "Actually, let me rephrase that - we need to take some bets on some experimental hires."
Not lower, but adjust.
Another mayo-to-aioli re-brand that I loved 😆
maybe I just re-cycle this same take each month to keep juicing the algo
The bottom line is this: everyone is struggling right now to hire the in-office/in-the-field Enterprise/Strat AE - this post below was one of my most popular ones ever:
the comments were spicy on this one
We did a deep dive into our view on the market with this video below, as well as this write-up here:
Everyone is hiring the same ~500 reps
Every AI native from seed through Series D has the same enterprise AE req open right now. And every one of those JDs describes the same person:
Verified attainment on a $1M+ ACV number
Ability to sell $100k+ deals
Has been at a top startup before
Can do more with less (aka their own demos, and/or are technical)
SF or NYC, in person (when not on site with a customer), starting yesterday
That's the on-paper top 2%. Probably only like 500 of these in existence. And half of that 2% is going to Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cursor - the comp, the logo, the inbound gravity, the fact that they're the center of the universe right now.
Some articles I found interesting as I did some research here:
OpenAI and Anthropic have hired close to 100 Salesforce sellers and marketers since the start of the year, and OpenAI's CRO (a decade-long Salesforce vet) now has 1,000+ people under her
OpenAI scaled its sales team from 10 to 500 in two years and is doubling total headcount toward 8,000 with sales as a stated priority
So I think that the big 3 (OAI, Anthropic, Cursor) will continue to get top talent through the end of the year.
Forbes described it as hiring into "the easiest enterprise sales environment in the history of software" - when buyers show up pre-sold, the rep's earnings story writes itself. This is specific for the big three mentioned above.
Or as Ben Horowitz says, order-taking - see my post here:
And honestly, I can't blame the reps. Choosing the right ship matters more than your skillset - it's a hill I'll die on - and the top 2% are simply following that advice.
one of those things where it shouldn’t be the way the world works, but is
The demand side broke the sequencing
Why is urgency so high? Because revenue is arriving before the sales orgs exist.
Some interesting findings:
Anthropic went from ~$1B to a $47B run rate in 17 months
Cursor famously crossed $100M ARR with ~19 employees and just sold to SpaceX for $60B
Traditional SaaS built quota capacity years ahead of the revenue.
AI natives got the revenue first and are building the org backwards - which means nobody has X months to ramp a maybe. They need the rep who's already done the exact thing, and they need them yesterday (as speed is everything right now with the brutal competitive landscape, in any market worth pursuing in software).
Except the supply of "already done the exact thing" is smaller than people think. Per RepVue (12,679 verified reps), only ~39% of enterprise AEs hit quota in the last 12 months, and median OTE sits at $275K. The proven, recent, technical, early-stage closer is a genuinely rare animal - and the labs already got to most of them (and are continuing to poach).
"Experimental hires" is a great rebrand + will provide arbitrage
So I get it, most won’t accept “lowering your standards.” But I’d advise to lower the parts of your bar that measure pedigree, and raise the parts that measure slope.
Here's what experimental hires actually look like for an enterprise AE seat:
The killer mid-market rep at Datadog, MongoDB, or Snowflake who already sells a technical product to technical buyers but hasn't carried the $1M+ number yet - taking a bet on them for Enterprise
The SE or forward-deployed engineer who wants to hold a bag. FDE postings are up ~12x - the GTM org chart is already mutating toward hybrid technical sellers, so could be an interesting role for them
The founding AE whose startup died for reasons that had nothing to do with GTM. That 0→1 scar tissue is the asset, not the liability + we need to stop falling into these logo traps
The bigger-co enterprise rep who genuinely wants to trade cash for equity and be at a startup - plenty of these coming inbound to us right now but some startups just aren’t having it
Brutal market we’re in right now, but wanted to write this post for some solace in case others are going through it.
If you're hiring enterprise AEs right now (or you are one, juggling four processes at once) - shoot me a LI DM or reply to this email. Happy to trade notes on what we're seeing live.
Thanks for reading, y'all.
Cheers 🫡,