A rep says "follow up on that" on a call, then buries it under five more calls and a late-night inbox. Three days later the deal's gone cold, but the CRM still says it's live. The manager forecasts off that.
The CRO forecasts off the manager. The board asks the CEO if anyone actually has a grip on the number. The whole thing was built on a promise nobody kept.
Adam Liska worked on the early Gemini models at Google DeepMind before leaving to close that gap. His company, airspeed, just raised a $20M Series A on a bet that "revenue execution" is the next real category, not another tool that logs calls and calls it intelligence.
Sam Jacobs traces the full arc with him: DeepMind to founder-led sales to the unglamorous work of turning a founder's instincts into a system a team can actually run.
What we get into: Why "follow up on that" breaks the forecast chain from rep to CRO to board What "revenue execution" means, and why it isn't revenue intelligence with a new label Whether you own the interface or hand it to a chat model and live as middleware The Nashville lunch that became airspeed's first six-figure deal The real sequence from founder-led to scalable: capture the data first, then build the playbooks Owning your data instead of renting Salesforce's architecture The modern Turing test, AI-native orgs, and where the back office is headed
Chapters:
00:00 Intro 00:44 From DeepMind to airspeed, and the $20M Series A 01:30 "Follow up on that" — the execution gap that breaks forecasts 04:00 What category is this? Revenue execution, defined 05:40 Headless vs. owning the interface 08:00 The origin story: leaving DeepMind in 2022 11:39 Founder-led sales and the Nashville lunch that closed a six-figure deal 13:18 The hard part: turning founder-led into a repeatable system 14:14 Why they recorded everything from day one 16:35 Owning your data, and where the source of truth lives 19:03 The playbook: data first, then hierarchical playbooks 20:52 Influences: the modern Turing test and AI-native orgs 23:37 Where to find airspeed Try airspeed: goairspeed.com
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