BRUTAL Truth About Startups, VC Pressure & Scaling to $3M ARR with Max Greenwald

Let's face it. Y'all, hiring sales talent is a real pain in the ass. Getting A-players is key to bridging your go-to-market gap, but it's harder than ever. If you're not actively engaging passive talent, you don't stand a damn chance. That's why at Revenue Reimagined, we trust our partners at Pursuit to help our clients find the best talent fast. If you're looking to strengthen your sales team, go check them out at PursuitSalesSolutions.com.

Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagined Podcast. We have, I guess we'll say, a friend to the show today because Warmly is definitely a friend of RR. We have Max Greenwald, who is the founder and CEO of Warmly, which, if you don't know and you're living under a rock, is an AI sales platform that generates warm leads. He's a first-time founder who spent time at Google, didn't know anything about sales when he started Warmly five years ago. After we'll say a few pivots, they've actually hit their stride. They have over 300 paying customers who want to use AI and automation to land more sales. We'll talk about this year of growth that you've been doing. I've been following along with you. Max is an avid skier and ultramarathoner and triathlete, so I'm just going to go eat my ice cream in the corner because you're in much better shape than I am. But welcome to the show, Max.

So great to be here. Thanks for having me, guys. Max, welcome to the show. And let's start off a little bit differently. So you're an ultramarathoner, you love skiing. What's the parallel between ultramarathoning and founding a tech company?

I mean, I think I like that one. I think it's pretty much there, right? It's just the idea that it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. Probably an ultramarathon. It can take a lot longer than you think it's going to take. And the other fun analogy that I'll draw is that it's not a race about your endurance. It's a race about your nutrition. Basically, what that means is as long as you're learning as much as possible every day—and I'm going to equate that to eating right during this race, eating the goo and the gels and the bananas and whatever it takes to make it to the finish line—you're going to be able to sustain and endure throughout the distance of the race.

I think a lot of people think that it's more of a strength race, right? It's all about if I did enough push-ups, which maybe you could equate to, you know, did I come from the right background? Or did I practice enough of my swimming laps, which you could equate to, you know, did I hire amazing people who've been there and done that? But at the end of the day, I think it's more about just learning. I'm a first-time founder, right, so I'm biased, of course. But I really think it's about nutrition. It's about feeding yourself knowledge day after day.

And also not dying is another big one, I think. You know, the classic saying is that the most common way that startups go under is they commit suicide, which basically is the idea that if you give up on yourself, if you don't think you're going to succeed, if you let sort of negativity get you down when things aren't easy and never go well—which things never are easy and never go well—then really you're going to fall on your own sword. But if you just keep at it, pound the pavement, eat the next banana, eat the next goo or gel, you'll be able to get to the end.

How do you rationalize that with investors or people that are trying to put money into the company or pushing you at growth at all costs as a founder where you're like, no, it's a marathon, it's not a sprint? And you have people trying to push you towards that.

Yeah, I don't really think the needs and desires of founders and VCs are aligned. That's one of the hardest pieces to it. I fancy myself a bit of a contrarian, and I don't mind telling VCs that. One of the things that makes my blood boil a little bit is that any VC, when they give you advice, they're coming from a perspective of wanting to make their fund successful. You might think, "Oh, well, they invested in us. If we're successful, they'll be successful, so we're all winning." But remember, a VC has 30 investments across her portfolio. The way their portfolio construction works is they want 23 of those companies to die. They want four of those to break even or make a little bit of money, and they want three to be huge winners. To say that again, they want 66 to 70 percent of their portfolio to die trying to be a unicorn.

And I am not diversified. I have one business, and I don't want to take a 70 percent chance that my business is going to die. I want to take a 90 percent chance that it's going to be moderately successful to maybe a unicorn. And yeah, I'm not here to build a small business. I'm a first-time founder. I'm very lucky in that I don't have, not yet at least, kids, a house, a mortgage. I'm not in debt. I can take risks, so I am taking a big risk. But I'm not going to drive myself off the edge of a cliff the way that I think a lot of VCs will push you to.

So in the analogy that we're talking about, they're expecting a sprint race, and I'm expecting an endurance race. You just have to have an honest conversation with your VC about what that looks like. I think they've helped me see that I'm not running an ultra-ultramarathon. Maybe it's just a marathon. But it's not a sprint. It's some sort of distance.

We're five and a half years in, and I am really grateful to my VCs who came in early. While we had our Series A, we preempted it for three and a half years. We pivoted around. You know, we had a lot of skepticism. A lot of our VCs' patience was tried as they were like, "We put a lot of money into you. Like, where's your revenue?" And we're like, "Oh, we have to get revenue? Like, that's weird?" I'm saying this in the Revenue Reimagined Podcast.

Yeah, I mean, for us, Revenue Reimagined in the early days was no revenue. That was the reimagine part. But eventually, we figured it out. I think, as I know, we're in a very great and lucky position that the last two years we went zero to one million on ARR, and then one to three. So we just tripled this past year, which was exciting.

We finally figured it out, and I recently posted this on LinkedIn: Warmly is the classic overnight success story if overnight means 1,861 days. Because it's been five and a half years, and that's classic. People don't realize it. They're like, "Oh, you guys like all of a sudden became a success," and you're like, "Yeah, after I had blood, sweat, and tears on this thing."

So let's talk about that for a second though, because I've been following Warmly for a long time. I've got 1,675 days, not quite that long. But the product today is not what the product started out with or what the product iterated to or what the product went after that. How did you get Max from where you were to where you are now while at the same time, for lack of better terms, keeping the VCs off your back? Right, because, again, like, give me that revenue or you're out? And you're not out. You're still there. You made some great pivots. I'd love to hear a little bit about that.

Yeah, so I think, keeping in mind that like every pivot we were learning, if I were to draw a graph of like time and learnings, it's an ultracrazy graph up and to the right. My learnings are up and to the right from day one. My revenue curve stays incredibly flat for a very long time and then pops up. My product trajectory curve is just all over the place—ups and downs, pivots, turns, backwards, forwards. I mean, we've tried B2C, B2B, B2B2C. We've tried PLG, we've tried SMB sales, mid-market sales, enterprise sales. Just any which way you can imagine, we've gone after and failed at all of them.

Really, we just tried to find a path in the space. One of my favorite phrases by Eric Torenberg, the founder of On Deck, was the idea maze. He says you're lost in the minotaur's maze, and it's going to take a long time to get out. You're going to sound like kind of a crazy person because one week you're going to be talking about this one idea and the next week this other idea. You kind of have to navigate it all, and I have a couple of classic tips that...

# Transcript

I give first-time founders advice on how to navigate the ideas and figure out the space you want to be in. Warmly, because we're warm and we want to be about connection. We've always been in the space of helping connect sales and marketing people to their best customers. So we've always been in the revenue space. But yeah, we pivoted a whole bunch of times.

I mean, the very first idea for Warmly—this is not a joke—was Tinder for co-founders. So my problem was I couldn't find a co-founder. I love it. And so I was the CTO to start. Built this swipey app where it was like, "Do you want to be my co-founder? You know, left swipe, right swipe." And it's a terrible idea for so many reasons. But it got my co-founders now to Quick Google and start the business. So it was a good leap of faith. And knowing what I know now, that's the dumbest idea in the world. No one should ever start that. But at least I was too naive then to really know that. So I left my cushy job to start this thing, and then it snowballed from there. And we just tried to figure out what's the best way to connect people. And it turns out that finding more warm leads for salespeople is something they'll pay money for.

And I think it's important for a lot of people that are potentially listening to this. I would say this as I learned through my sales and leadership journey: I would always ask the founder when I do an interview, "How many pivots do you have left with the funding that you have?" Because the problem is you're gonna have some pivots, and if you don't know how many pivots you have left, you're gonna end up committing, and you're gonna die somewhere along that line. Because what ends up happening a lot of times is—and Adam can probably vouch for us as well—you get brought in to like one or two pivots left. And then it's like, I don't have enough time to pivot. Or they think, "Hey, you've done sales before at other companies and you've been successful, so you can come in." And then you look at what the pipeline looks like, what the conversion rates are, what all these metrics are that you're running, and you're like, "I can't get there in six months. It's going to take us six months to just build that foundational piece to get you to 25% conversion rate from demo to close."

Yeah, they don't understand that. For my founding sales and marketing leaders out there who like to come in at the really early stages and get involved with the company, I think you're asking a very important question here, which is that you should be asking, "How much runway do you guys have yet left? And where are you in your product-market fit journey?" And being savvy, because a lot of founders will be like, "Oh, we figured it out. We know everything. We have these great customers." Like, no, they haven't figured it out. And that's okay. But it is important to talk through basically how many pivots left do we have.

And knowing that if you only have one bullet left in the chamber, maybe that's okay and maybe you're willing to take that risk tolerance. But coach that founder to say, "Please don't try to pivot us halfway through. And if things aren't looking good, this is do or die. So we're really going to push it and push through."

And you know, some of the best companies in the world have been founded with one bullet left in the chamber. And honestly, one of my VCs once told me, "You know, I'm bummed when you guys have as much money as you do, because it doesn't make you as hungry as you could be. Because if you're on your last leg, you're going to come hell or high water. You're trying your hardest."

Yeah, I've heard that. It's funny. You talked about product-market fit, and sadly, the majority of founders that I've spoken with—long before Revenue Reimagined—they all think they have product-market fit, but they really don't.

From the eyes of a founder who has not had product-market fit and who now clearly has product-market fit, how would you describe product-market fit? Because it means so many different things to so many different people.

I'll give this credit to our seed round investor James Currier, who describes product-market fit as somebody taking their two fingers and shoving them up your nostrils and yanking you forward. And if you aren't being yanked forward with two fingers in your nostrils, you don't have it. It's some version of like, "If you know, you know. And if you don't know, you don't have it."

But really, I think you've gotta break down product and market. Market's easier to figure out because you can basically understand: Is this a growing space? Are there competitors in there? One of the big things that I think a lot of people shy away from is they're like, "Oh, there's too many competitors in this space." Hell yeah, this is a great space to be in! That means this thing's working. It means a lot of other people figured out all the problems before you got there so that you can be successful. And rarely ever is first to market the one who succeeds. It's almost always more like "hardest working to market"—which is somebody who puts in the most time and grinds the hardest. But anyway, market's easier to figure out. Product's tough.

And I was actually a product manager at Google, and so I thought that I was good at product. I suck at product. I am not a product person. And one of my personal journeys and evolutions as a human was realizing that I'm a sales CEO and not a product CEO. So I am really happy that I delegated product to my other co-founders who are much better at product than I am.

But I think I tried for a long time to just sort of go by my gut and be like, "These are the features that are going to win. And oh, if we just built this thing, then we're going to be successful." But product fit in the product-market fit typically is in the form of: How simple can your product be? And can your customers describe what you're doing in a very easy way?

And also, especially for B2B, I like the simple mark of: "If you had to get rid of 40% of your tech stack today, are we making it or not?" And that's just like a pretty easy barometer for, you know, when things get hard, do I stick around?

If on the product part of product-market fit, you're sticky enough that you're sticking around when the budget gets cut—people buy from people. That's why companies who invest in meaningful connections win.

The best part is gifting doesn't have to be expensive to drive results. Just thoughtful. Soso's intelligent gifting platform is designed to boost personalized engagement throughout the entire sales process. Trust me, I led sales for Soso's competitor, and I could tell you, no one does gifting better than Soso. If you're looking for a proven way to win and retain more customers, visit soso.com.

Well, I think that leads back into value, right? And I'm sure you're seeing this a lot. Like, if I buy you today, how fast can I get the value? And so too many—we'll call them zombie tech companies now—have built, call it, 75% of the tech that overlaps with other things. Kind of like what you're saying: if I gotta get rid of 40% of my tech, do you guys still stick around? Do I derive value based on what we're selling to make that successful?

One of the really good analogies here, and again, I'll quote James Currier, who's our seed round investor, in FX. When we were talking about what kind of product we wanted to be, he said, "There are two kinds of products. You're either a supermarket or you're lettuce. Bear with me for a second."

The idea is that the supermarket is something you go to every week. You kind of have to go to the supermarket to get food. Now you don't have to buy lettuce. You choose to buy lettuce because it's good for you. But if that lettuce is brown or you know it isn't there or it doesn't look good or it doesn't taste good one week, you're going to go for something else instead.

And the equivalent in product is basically: you're essentially a system of record. You're something that just kind of has to be there. Like, you kind of need a CRM. And whether your company is amazing or terrible, you still have to have a CRM. And if it's a bad quarter or a bad year, you're going to keep your CRM. But if it's lettuce, you have to have fresh lettuce delivered every single week.

Warmly is kind of both. And one of the things that we struggle with, actually, is this idea that we have to deliver fresh lettuce every single week. If there's a single week where I don't deliver you warm leads, you're gonna cut me, right? You're gonna say, "Well, why would I pay for this thing? I didn't get the fresh lettuce."

And so we have to kind of have this balance of—and we're moving more toward being this orchestration platform where you set up all your...

Workflows for your go-to-market motion—you connect a bunch of stuff, you like orchestrate these leads, etc. And by doing so, even if you have a bad month, you're still going to keep warm because we're kind of this like core of your revenue and go-to-market motion. And so it's definitely better to be a grocery store than to be lettuce.

It's often easier as a first-time founder or just any founder building a business for the first time to start with lettuce because you can basically find a quick hit feature that's just like, "Here's quick value, here's quick value, here's quick value." But be careful because if you don't deliver quick value every single week, week over week, year after year, then you're going to get cut.

I actually love that analogy. Candidly, I'm going to steal it.

Steals? I'll take credit for it.

Yeah, I think the way it works is I gave the other guy credit for it, but if you take it, you can take it. I get credit for it. But I think it holds very true. At the end of the day, the number one thing we hear from people now that they're concerned with is top of funnel and how do you build pipeline. And like, sure, you might have a shitty quarter, but are we bringing in the leads that we could identify? The leads—maybe you need to change your messaging, maybe you need to change your process. But at the end of the day, are we getting you the information you need so that you can act on it?

Yeah. Max, you compete against some of the I'll say most well-known names out there. I don't want to say biggest, I'll say well-known—people who are prolific on LinkedIn. I believe I read the other day that you actually met in real life with one of your biggest competitors. Why such a competitive space with people who are so prolific in their brands?

So it was something funny to me because about a year and a half ago, we decided that we'd go pretty hardcore on a LinkedIn social strategy and just be very vocal about what we do and we're taking a unique approach. I think we—I do the MYO and clear things, so I basically transparently share all of our metrics and numbers on LinkedIn and share what I'm learning because I want other people to grow from that. And not other people in our space do that, but they do post on LinkedIn all the time. But I think it just—I don't know what it is, but it's some sort of like everyone caught the bug of "I think we can make money on LinkedIn," and so let's all go into it. So I think that our space in particular, mainly because the number one place that sales and go-to-market people hang out is LinkedIn, all started going pretty deep on it.

I think I've been surprised at the number of personality-type founders that have emerged. I think that by nature, a lot of founders aren't very kind of forward in their brand and their presence and try to hog the spotlight because they're more like maybe geeky, right? But actually, you know what? Okay, I'm going to change it for a second. Here's my hypothesis. I don't know if this is true, but my hypothesis is that the founders of the 2010s were more product nerds because technology was really important. But now that technology is ubiquitous and we have AI and automation and it's really easy to build tech, I actually think that sales-focused founders are coming out of the woodwork. Sales and go-to-market kind of more social-type founders are coming out of the woodwork in the 2020s that are here to take advantage of the ease of creating software. And their strong suit is something that's yet to be seen, which is just an absolute dagger of an ability to crush it on the sales and marketing side. So that's my hypothesis as to why we might be seeing that. But otherwise, I would just say we're in one of the hottest spaces in our revenue technology, and I think that if you're starting out today, why wouldn't you build in the red hot ocean of where things are frothy and where people are putting money toward?

Yeah, I think like every batch—every YC batch I look at the list of companies and there's like six companies whose tagline is literally our tagline and they're doing exactly what we're doing. And yeah, I mean, you know, it's getting easier and easier to get started, which is maybe good for the world but bad for sort of competitive advantages and moats in starting companies. And so where are you going to win? Well, you're going to win on brand, which means I can kind of understand why some of these people are trying to build and develop their brand. And you'll win on just hustle and hard work. So yeah, I'm in a very crowded space. A lot of those people are also posting on LinkedIn. I respect them, I read all their stuff, I hit follow on their things. And yeah, it's my morning coffee. I wake up in the morning, I roll out of bed and look at what freaking Robinson's posted next and it's like, "Damn it, you know, I should have posted something like that." And yeah, I want to be friends with them too because I don't know. I'm one of those rocking chair people where it's like, when I sit back on my rocking chair and I'm like 100 years old—maybe 150 if we can live that long with all the advancements in health stuff—but I want to look back and like be kind of amused that I went to war against some of these great people that I respect and admire and feel like it was a fight worth fighting because it was fun in the arena.

I'm with you, man. Some of the people I'm closest to are direct competitors. And there's times where we might not be the right fit and we'll send them business and vice versa. But at the end of the day, there's enough business out there that I don't need to be an ass to you just because you compete with me. Yeah, like let's compete and may the best person win.

I mean, Dale and I started by us competing, and me winning. I have to bring that up every chance I get. But here we are. He dodged a bullet, I will say. I say it every time.

Respond to that, man. He just outflanked me.

Hey, look at—I'm not too proud to say he outflanked me. I was not getting on a plane to fly all the way out to where you need to be.

But you won in the long run.

I was not getting on a plane. Is this like a tortoise and the hare thing where Adam came out fast but, you know, the tortoise won in the long run?

Well, it's funny because I started doing fractional consulting like two years ago. And then like, when after this whole thing happened, Adam had—it was the same thing. Six months in, 11 million in Series A funding, no product, 16 million selling VAP. Literally selling fig. We'd go in and we'd be like, "This isn't going to make it." So I just told him, like, "You know, come outside and do what you do best, but do it for more than one founder." And that's kind of how it all started off.

But one of the things that I've been curious about—because Melissa's a big, you know, we're friends with Melissa Gagnon and I saw the video that you guys did in Tampa or wherever you guys did that video—so I'm curious, like, where's the cowboy, the hat, the whole process? Give the audience a little bit of the background.

Yeah, I mean, I think it was an explosive conversation where we wanted to figure out what our brand was and kind of stick true to it. I think that there's a rebel spirit within Warmly of never giving up, of being a bit of the outsider, of kind of watching and waiting for a moment to strike. And I think everyone wants to root for an underdog story. And there's just something about cowboy energy that I think embodies that really well. You know, the cowboy thing was first brought on by our head of revenue, Keegan Otter, who dubbed himself a software cowboy, which I love.

I grew up in Colorado.

Was that pre-Warmly or because of Warmly? So when we first joined, we said that we were going to be changing our names on LinkedIn to include a couple more words to just stand out, like in the text. You know, some people put like an emoji or whatever. I lowercased my first letter of my first and last name to kind of throw people off a little bit because it stands out a little more.

That automation really well.

Yeah, so I changed my name on LinkedIn to "Maximus Greenwald Sales Founder," and then I needed to get verified. I knew that was going to improve my stats, so I had to get—they were like, "Unless your ID says Sales Founder on it, you can't have that." And I was like, "Oh, fine." So I like removed that. And so now I'm just Max Greenwald. And then Keegan was able to get verified, I think through his school ID or something.

So he didn't need the... okay, if he had a longer name, so he made his the Software Cowboy and then it's sort of stuck ever since. And then, yeah, we were just looking for a social outing. Once we were hanging out in person, and there was a place that did branded cowboy hats. So now every seller on the Warmley team has a branded cowboy hat, and it's just kind of our marker.

I think that, you know, it's the people who are our customers. You know, the diffusion of innovation curve where you have your early adopters and your late majority, whatever. So I think we're still exiting the early adopter phase. But I think our first couple hundred customers are these kind of Rebel Cowboys that are just like China Cowboys and Cow Gals who are just trying to change up how they do their go-to-market motion, think a little bit differently, lean more into automation and AI, bring a warmer way to sell. And so, yeah, I think it's just sort of our ethos now that we're rolling with.

I love it, Dale. I would pay anything to see you sport a cowboy hat all over. By the way, I'll leave my comment to myself. I travel a lot, and this thing's tough to bring on an airplane because you can't put it in a suitcase because it'll get ruined. And then I'm sitting there on the airplane, and I can't lean back because it's got this thing on it, so it's on my lap. Or then I put it in the overhead bin, and then someone tries to shove a backpack in there, and I'm like, "Nope, nope. I need it for my cowboy hat." And then, you know, we have teams in Europe and in Israel and Brazil and stuff. So I'll touchdown in like Tel Aviv, Israel or whatever, and they'll be like, "Oh, haha, American Cowboy," and I'll be like, "Howdy, y'all."

So yeah, I love that. Max, with all the pivots you've made and where you guys are now, looking back with hindsight is 20/20, but what are the top two things that you look back and you're like, I should have done that differently?

Yeah, pretty much every pivot that we made, there's gone on to be a huge company in that space who did great with it. And that's what's crazy to me, right? I thought when we pivoted there's no way this is going to work, and yet time and time again, you know, we were proven wrong. Except for Tinder for co-founders. No one's ever done that. It's a shitty idea. I maintain, don't do it.

And so there's something about timing, which is out of your control. There's something about grit and perseverance, which is in your control. And I think the hardest founder problem is this: pivot or persevere, right? Persevere means you just sit in your filth and you suck it up and you keep iterating and growing. And then pivot means you just thrash around until you get lucky and you jump on a gold mine. And I think that's just a really hard thing.

So, you know, when I look back, I would probably just tell myself, whether you pivot or whether you persevere, you're believing in yourself and you're going to make it. And that is just sort of a self-confidence thing. I mean, I remember weeks on end where I was just paralyzed with this guilt and shame and anxiety. I had this dry heaving problem. Like every morning I'd wake up, and the first thing I'd do is run to the toilet and just dry heave for a couple hours. And I just like, I wasn't sure: Should I pivot or should I persevere? Why isn't it working? I thought I'd be Elon Musk by now. You know, but it's like two years in, and I haven't made a dollar for my company.

So, yeah, I think lesson one is just more of a self-care one, which is just like, believe in yourself. You're going to figure it out. You'll keep iterating. And as part of that, also tell yourself it takes a long time to really understand your space. Now, I'm a product person coming into a sales and marketing world. I didn't know anything about sales and marketing. So you have a leg up if you've been an SDR or an AE or a head of sales before. But it can take like two years to really deeply understand your space.

I remember the first time somebody told me what an SDR did, and I was like, "That's a real person? Like, what? Like, weird. Like, why would they do that?" And then, even a year later, I still didn't really get what it meant to be an SDR. And I started cold calling myself, and I'm like, "Okay, now I understand what this stuff is." So it takes a while to understand your space, and understanding your space is very key to more quickly iterating through, cutting through the noise and all that, to see if you can build something.

Though being an outsider is good too, because being an outsider allows you to look at things differently. Like, I came into sales and marketing and was like, "Why are we cold calling? You know, why don't we just use the warm leads? Like, what? You know, what's up with that?" And so that, you know, snowballs you in a new way if you can bring in that outside perspective. So it's pros and cons there.

What's my second hindsight is 20/20 lesson? I think it's just probably like, never stop taking customer calls or prospect calls. I think that often times when things get hard or no one wants to buy you, you retreat into your shell and you're like, "Well, I'll just work on the product for a couple weeks, or I'll just get a patent on my cool idea, or I'll buy a latest domain name because A is hot," and it's like you're just working on stuff that's not really moving the needle.

But you can move a lot faster if you're constantly on the phone with prospects, customers. Like, I try to jump in on five customer calls a week. I try to jump in on five prospect calls a week. I listen to our outreach Kaya recordings. I listen to our Fathom recordings. Like, you just got to hear the people talk, and like you get new ideas every single time. And you'll always surprise yourself at what you can learn. But you just got to keep that ear to the customer. I think that's one of the most important things. Like, it's said in the podcast, like too many founders or revenue leaders or whoever it is, they're like, "I don't know whether they think it, they're too good for it or they think they don't have time." But back to the excusing, like, yeah, you have to prioritize that just like you would, like you're training for a marathon. You got to do the same thing.

Yeah, here. Well said. And I think the thing that I've realized is, as scope and complexity scales, you believe that you—whether you're a revenue leader, marketing leader, whatever—you're trying to be a lot more strategic because you can't do everything, right? You used to be able to write every social post. You used to be able to review everything. And then there's just so much. There's people, process, tools, ads to manage, SEO to manage. There's so much going on that you're like, "Okay, I need to be more strategic." And then you say, "Okay, well, if I'm being more strategic, I can't take these little meetings that are like not really going to move the needle because they're not strategic." And so you take a step back, and you're like, "Well, I just need to do things that scale."

But like the classic founder lesson is: do things that don't scale. And part of that should be like three, you know, prospect meetings a week, 25 cold call dials a day. Like, you know, these don't scale. They're not. But they're interestingly very strategic because it allows you to keep your ear to the ground to figure out what's going wrong within your org. And so, yeah, I think that's a lesson for really anybody that I even got to remind myself, which is like, yes, you can be very strategic in your role while also being very on the ground and getting tactics done too.

Yeah, I love that. I love that, 100%. All right, let's move to some rapid fire as we wrap it up here. Ton of cool knowledge dropped. Totally probably going to post tomorrow about a supermarket or lettuce. That one's going to stick with me.

All right, Max. Early bird or night owl?

Night owl.

If you weren't in tech, what trade or other industry would you be in?

I love Middle Eastern politics. I'd like to work for the UN and solve Israel-Gaza.

Someone has that? That might be the best answer we've gotten so far. That's a good one.

What's your favorite guilty pleasure snack?

Candied pineapple.

Nice. Yum. And the follow-up on this question—because I bet when you're doing ultramarathons, you're training really hard and you're watching your diet really closely. But when you get done, what's the first cheat meal you go hit?

Oh, good one. Chick-fil-A.

Chick-fil-A. Nice. Sandwich or nuggets?

Always sandwich.

Spicy or regular?

Regular? You go spicy?

I do. I do go spicy.

Chick-fil-A does have the best milkshake on the planet. By the way, his spice is like barbecue sauce, okay? But that is not true at all.

Let's go look at the Hot Ones take we did. Yeah, stop. Max, what's the most used emoji in your work Slack? I don't think you're going to be surprised to hear that it's the cowboy emoji. You guys, the cowboy hat. I love it. Awesome.

Last one, let's wrap us up. Dream vacation destination? Iceland. Iceland. Nice. Very cool, very cool.

Max, thank you so much for joining. It was great to chat with you. Y'all go check out Warmly if you want to get those warm leads and actually convert them. Warmly.ai. Check it out. We use it, our customers use it. It actually works, which is pretty damn cool.

Great to be here. Thanks, Adam. Thanks, Dale.