@levelsio The problem that everybody ignores with Google is execution. Even if Demis literally cooks AGI next year, they'll still figure out a novel way to only make it available behind a subscription tier you can't access and times out due to low compute every second query.

The tech sales buying guide for Black Friday. While I would always recommend to save your money if you are happy with what you have, some items benefit from an upgrade. 1. Iphone 17 Pro Max / Samsung Fold 7. Whether you like it or not, smartphones are the most important devices that we carry on ourselves and serve many use cases throughout the day. The default should be the newest, biggest iPhone you can get your hands on and the new 17 Pro is the strongest release they've had in years. If you prefer Android it or you really want to optimize for space when traveling, the Samsung Fold 7 is an easy recommendation. Foldables are the best tech sales companion because the extra real estate for documents, calls and multi tasking is always useful. 2. AirPods Pro 3 / Nothing Ear (3). While over the ear headphones offer better noise cancelation, the trade-off in size and goofiness is a bit of a killer for tech sales. The AirPods Pro 3 are an easy recommendation in almost all scenarios (the main issue is if your ears don't fit them well). The Nothing Ear (3) is a great alternative with one very specific feature - they have a microphone in the case. This makes them very useful for taking calls in airports or crowded areas, as you can literally hold a microphone next to your mouth and communicate clearly. 3. Remarkable tablets. Writing notes during calls, brainstorming ideas and tracking deliverables is an essential part of the job. While we have great tools today to record exactly what was said in a meeting, there is something different about writing down specific ideas or phrases, as a way of thinking along. Remarkable tablets are dependable, come in a variety of sizes, sync across devices and are delightful to use. 4. ChatGPT Pro subscription. While everybody seems to have an opinion today about AI, many are also refusing to actually pay for the best frontier models, hoping that their job will cover it. Big corpo of course is behind the times, so it's unlikely you'll get access to the best (unless they are using Google Workspace, which has made it easy to upsell Gemini). ChatGPT Pro costs $200 but gives you a massive amount of deep researches per month, essentially unlimited vibe coding access and the ability to brainstorm with GPT5.1 Pro, i.e. the most capable model on the market today. Once you get used to having actual best-in-class intelligence at the tap of a button, it's very difficult to go back. All of the hardware recommended is also objectively beautiful and fun to use. Tech sales is a stressful job as it is, use tools that give you positive feedback on daily basis.

The playbook mafia in action, milking the AI natives for everything they're worth. For those who remember the distant past, Cognition bought Windsurf in a fire sale in July '25. Windsurf was a failing product that had been outplayed by Cursor, and its whole GTM team was made up of playbook reps from Grafana and similar companies. While Cognition's leadership was initially excited about it (they were PLG-only and partly acquired Windsurf to kick-start their GTM team), they soon realized that every single deal was deep in the red from a margin perspective. This led to the famous buyout offer to all the newly acquired employees. One year later, after allegedly leaking critical company information from Factory repeatedly while serving as an advisor (another playbook company, as upsold by PTP), Chris is joining Cognition as Chief Revenue Officer, and his very first post proudly announces that... his buddy Chad will be doing all the hiring. Chad, meanwhile, is busy moving reps from SpaceXAI (where he hired the initial team, which is now being kicked out by the new Rubrik/Zscaler-affiliated sales leadership) to OpenAI. We'll now see a stack ranking of reps being shuffled over to Cognition if they failed to get the right offer at any of the other playbook orgs. MongoDB, Snowflake and Grafana are also now officially the bottom feeders of the playbook pyramid. If it's not obvious, none of these people actually care about the technology or mission of the companies they are meant to represent.

@Hesamation Graduated on the pipeline of gamer to obsessive adult.

@unusual_whales But have they tried walking into an office, shaking the manager’s hand and ask for a raise that meets their personal financial projections?

@buccocapital It’s just a healthy 5% correction after the stock running so hot based on their amazing ramp up of AI usage to €500M of low margin “actions”. What’s there not to like?

Another 18% are oraclewinners on this day. The crying posts on LinkedIn will be overwhelming.

@ShitpostRock The conclusion is that you can actually catch them all.

I want to share an old story about my Salesforce interview in 2001. Salesforce back then was known for hiring Oracle refugees, Siebel washouts, and Stanford MBAs and putting them through eight rounds for the founding enterprise AE seat, including a final-round qualification gauntlet that they ran like a quant pod runs mental math. It was my seventh interview and my final round and I recall being slid a deal sheet across the table. "VP of Sales at a 2,000 seat manufacturer is your sponsor. His boss the COO told him to run an evaluation against Siebel and a homegrown system. Procurement rolls up to the CFO, who has not been looped in. Walk me through your Economic Buyer and give me a commit confidence on close by end of Q." They would toy with you and say "you can use the whiteboard if you want," but you knew that was an instant no. Painstakingly and as quickly as I could, I worked it. The VP was the Champion. The COO told him to evaluate, which made him the sponsor. I landed on the COO as Economic Buyer. "How confident are you that this is correct on a 0-1 probability scale?" the interviewer said. "0.95," I blurted out, not fully knowing how to answer that. "Are you sure?" After thinking harder for a few more seconds, I realized the COO had not asked for the evaluation, he had delegated it. The CFO controlled Paper Process, had not been engaged, and could kill the deal in legal review. I revised. CFO. It was correct. "0.95 huh," he chuckled. "Sandbagged your own forecast on a qualification question. Cute." That is when I knew I got mogged. A real Salesforce rep calls 0.9 on a deal he closes at 1.0 and 0.5 on a deal he commits next quarter. I called 0.95 on a question I was clearly second-guessing, which meant on a real deal I would walk into Marc's forecast call, tell him it was locked, and watch it slip three days before quarter end. The guy who got the seat did four years there, two Presidents Club rings, and is now CRO somewhere you have heard of.

New job search tech map just dropped.