Topline

Jaleh Rezaei, Co-founder and CEO of Mutiny, joins Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman to explain how she deprecated a thriving 8-figure SaaS business in November 2025, shipped a private preview in February, and GA'd an AI-native product in April that is now used by more than 3,500 organizations including Snowflake, Rippling, Uber, and GitLab. Topics include why running a scaled SaaS business and a zero-to-one AI bet at the same time proved impossible, how to price and defend AI credit consumption when a $5,000 design project now costs 50 credits, and the shift from sales-led outbound to product-led growth for enterprise go-to-market. Plus, why brand is one of the few remaining moats in B2B, an AI raccoon launch video that fooled (some of) the panel, and a bulls-versus-bears debate on quota attainment, AI note-takers, and whether salespeople will ever spend 85% of their time selling.
Key Takeaways:
- Make the hard decisions FAST. As Jaleh Rezaei, CEO and Co-founder of Mutiny, put it: "I definitely would've said the job of the CEO is you have to make the hard calls. But what I learned in that experience is that it's actually about making the hard calls really fast, which means that you're getting there before everybody else on your team is there." Her test for founders weighing a similar bet is a single question: "is there one really hard decision, maybe one that scares the hell out of you that you don't want to do, that you can make that would make 50 subsequent downstream decisions a lot easier for your company?"
- AI budgets get cut because vendors let buyers anchor on the credit bill. Instead, they need to help buyers see the value of the work the credits replace. Jaleh Rezaei, CEO and Co-founder of Mutiny, reframed it with her own before-and-after: "I used to have a designer that I paid $5,000 to, and it would take 2 weeks of back and forth, and I paid $5,000 to get to something that I was pretty happy with. But end to end took a month. Now in 6, 7 hours, I can build that in Mutiny, and maybe that does cost me 50 credits. That's really freaking cheap relative to what I used to pay that designer." She argues the vendor has to build the ROI case for the customer, per rep, or budget conversations default to minimizing every AI bill.
- Brand is a durable moat in B2B mostly because so few companies are willing to pay for it in risk. According to Jaleh Rezaei, CEO and Co-founder of Mutiny: "great brand comes when you marry deep customer knowledge and a willingness to take risk … a lot of times people that own brand they don't necessarily either have the deep customer knowledge or they don't have the ability to take that kind of risk inside of the company." Her internal standard is blunt: "anything we do on marketing, like, if it's not different, just stop doing it. It's just not going to matter."
- Quota attainment is snapping back hard, and the data has not caught up to the narrative. AJ Bruno, CEO of QuotaPath, brought Q2 numbers to the bulls-versus-bears round: "I just looked at Q2 numbers and they're trending wildly back up. We're actually, the average quota attainment for a QuotaPath customer was 76% in Q2." Asad Zaman pushed back that a jump from roughly 40% to 76% in a single quarter reads more like a bubble signal than a sudden improvement in selling, and AJ offered to run a comp study with Pavilion on the data.
Connect with the Hosts & Guests:
Host: Sam Jacobs, CEO at Pavilion - https://www.linkedin.com/in/samfjacobs/
Host: AJ Bruno, CEO at QuotaPath - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajbruno3/
Host: Asad Zaman, CEO at STA - https://www.linkedin.com/in/azaman1/
Guest: Jaleh Rezaei, CEO & Co-founder at Mutiny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jalehr/
Topline is more than a YouTube Channel:
Subscribe to Topline Newsletter: https://toplinemedia.substack.com/
Tune into Topline Podcast, the #1 podcast for founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-podcast
Join the free Topline Slack channel to connect with 600+ revenue leaders to keep the conversation going beyond the podcast: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-slack
Chapters:
00:00 Introducing Jaleh Rezaei
04:00 Can SaaS Era Companies Go AI Native?
05:01 From Gusto To Founding Mutiny
07:00 When AI Became A Reasoning Engine
11:28 Why Running Two Products Was Impossible
13:32 Shutting Down An 8-Figure Business
16:18 Winning Formula: Speed, No Backup Plan
20:17 The Hard Months After Deprecation
24:47 Acute Pain Versus Chronic Pain
29:17 CEO Has To Be The Bad Guy (Sometimes)
37:17 AI Margins And Credit-Based Pricing
40:10 A $5,000 Deck Versus 50 Credits
47:03 Sales-Led To PLG For Enterprise
50:37 Brand As The Remaining Moat
1:00:34 Bulls and Bears

In this episode of Topline Spotlight, Sam Jacobs sits down with Snehal Nimje, co-founder and CEO of Outdoo, to talk about one of the hardest calls an early-stage founder can make: narrowing focus when leads are coming in.
Snehal breaks down how Outdoo went from trying to serve every mid-market and enterprise buyer to getting much more specific about where the product was truly essential. They get into why usage dropped, what customer conversations revealed, how the team handled the internal shift, and what changed once they focused on insurance and finance use cases where compliance and ramp speed mattered most.
They also talk about:
why enterprise readiness starts with architecture, compliance, and security
how to tell the difference between interest and real traction
what founders miss when they chase every lead
where defensibility really comes from in AI
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:46 Meet Snehal Nimje and Outdoo
04:55 Why selling to everyone nearly derailed the business
06:51 Finding the customers who truly need your product
08:54 The hard decision to narrow their ICP
11:00 How focus accelerated enterprise growth
13:09 Advice for founders struggling to find product-market fit
15:36 What creates a moat in the AI era?
17:13 Why workflow, not AI models, is the real competitive advantage
18:51 Snehal's biggest business inspiration
19:38 Where to find Snehal and Outdoo
Try Outdoo: outdoo.ai
If you're building an early-stage company and trying to find traction without turning your product into a Frankenstein, this one's worth your time.
Subscribe for more founder stories, operator lessons, and go-to-market conversations from Topline.

Amanda Kahlow, Founder & CEO of 1mind, joins Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman to break down how an AI-powered solutions engineer named Nigel took 33% of the talk time in a two and a half hour enterprise meeting and produced a $278,000 deal. Topics include why AI aimed at efficiency gains misses real revenue impact, Amanda's prediction that marketing, sales, and customer success collapse into one function within 12 months, and why AI adoption has to be top-down instead of bottoms-up. Plus, the 15 agents running behind every superhuman, a 98% accuracy bar measured by live evals, whether agents will negotiate with other agents on the buy side, and a bulls versus bears round on Salesforce, sales dinners, and the health of the average go-to-market team.
Key Takeaways:
- Most go-to-market teams are pointing AI at the wrong layer. Better forecasting, faster research, and cleaner dashboards make the people you already have marginally more productive, which is not where the revenue is. As Amanda Kahlow, Founder & CEO at 1mind, framed it: "My thesis is that buying and selling happens in the conversation." Everything built around the conversation to enable a seller is, in her words, yesterday's workflow.
- Trust, not novelty, is what moves an enterprise deal. Amanda flew a red-eye to Austin for a second meeting with a CPO and CMO, brought a superhuman named Nigel on screen, and watched the room turn to the AI for depth even she could not provide. As she told it, "the CPO was like, Amanda, shut up, basically. I wanna talk to Nigel." The meeting scheduled for an hour ran two and a half, and produced "a $278,000 deal from one in-person meeting going through procurement in one week". Her read on why it worked: "People say people buy from people. You buy when you trust."
- The human face on an AI agent is a click-through device, not the value. Amanda's verdict after a year of selling them: "The face is a novelty." 1mind drops the face entirely on live calls because the movement distracts. The important part is the conversational AI, where "each superhuman has roughly 15 agents working behind the scenes." One handles small talk, another loads the live demo, another builds the perspective slide a human seller would normally take a week to produce.
- Bottom-up AI adoption is where the value leaks out. Amanda's pushback on the idea that people who use AI will simply eat the people who do not: telling every individual to go be more efficient produces slop and no measurable gain, while the real impact, in her words, "is going to come at the top down when we think about restructuring the org".
Connect with the Hosts & Guests:
Host: Sam Jacobs, CEO at Pavilion - https://www.linkedin.com/in/samfjacobs/
Host: AJ Bruno, CEO at QuotaPath - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajbruno3/
Host: Asad Zaman, CEO at STA - https://www.linkedin.com/in/azaman1/
Guest: Amanda Kahlow, Founder & CEO at 1mind - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandakahlow/
Topline is more than a YouTube Channel:
Subscribe to Topline Newsletter: https://toplinemedia.substack.com/
Tune into Topline Podcast, the #1 podcast for founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-podcast
Join the free Topline Slack channel to connect with 600+ revenue leaders to keep the conversation going beyond the podcast: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-slack
Chapters: 
00:00 Introducing Amanda Kahlow
00:59 Building Superhumans At 1mind
03:24 Why Efficiency Gains Miss The Point
06:04 GTM Functions Collapse In 12 Months
08:48 The Ghost Note Debate
15:20 Nigel Takes 33% Of Talk Time
20:41 The Face Is Just Novelty
22:27 Fifteen Agents Behind One Superhuman
38:46 Compute Costs And AI Margins
41:19 How Accurate Are AI Agents?
47:08 Positioning An AI Company
52:13 When Agents Negotiate With Agents
53:54 Will CSM Jobs Survive?
57:56 Bulls and Bears
1:06:15 Boards, 6sense, And Burnout

AI isn't just changing sales. It's completely rewriting how revenue teams operate.
In this episode of Topline Spotlight, Sam Jacobs sits down with Justin Shriber, CEO of Terret AI, to break down how modern revenue organizations are using AI to improve forecasting, shorten sales cycles, ramp reps faster, and operationalize winning sales behavior in real time.
Justin shares:
Why traditional sales enablement is broken
How AI helped reduce rep ramp time by 40%
The "answer-to-action" engine powering modern RevOps
The hidden dangers of decentralized AI adoption
Why companies are struggling with inconsistent AI-generated data
The real debate: build your own AI stack vs buy from vendors
How leading teams are using AI agents today
One of the most interesting conversations in GTM right now.
If you're a CRO, RevOps leader, founder, or GTM operator trying to understand where AI is actually delivering value, this episode is worth your time.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:40 Meet Justin Schreiber and Terret
04:17 How AI is changing sales productivity
06:07 The biggest problem in revenue execution
09:37 Why great strategies never get executed
11:01 Building AI that's secure, accurate, and scalable
13:32 Buy vs. build: The future of enterprise AI
16:25 Why AI needs centralized governance
17:35 Jurassic Park, AI agents, and organizational chaos
20:15 Justin's biggest inspirations for building great companies
22:58 Where to find Justin and Terret
Try Terret: terret.ai

Tim Rutten, CMO of Backbase, the €2.5 billion Amsterdam tech company whose AI-native Banking OS powers 120+ banks worldwide, joins Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman with the clearest AI ROI numbers we have heard on the show: double the pipeline on 25% less budget. Topics include the custom go-to-market operating system his team built on the Vercel stack, why real bank deployments are 99% deterministic, the 90% cost reduction banks are finding in customer care, and why most enterprise workloads do not need frontier-model intelligence. Plus, where the AI bubble breaks, what happens to judgment and taste when anyone can generate output, and a bulls-versus-bears round on LinkedIn, banking apps, and sales spiffs.
Key Takeaways:
- Backbase's marketing org runs on GTMOS, a custom go-to-market operating system built on the Vercel stack and wired into Salesforce and the company's finance tools, and the numbers behind it are specific. As Tim Rutten, CMO at Backbase, put it: "Double the pipeline, 25% head cut on my budget... So with 25% less budget, I'm actually still doubling the pipeline." The unlock came from rebuilding how the team works rather than layering tools on top of it.
- Shipping AI into a regulated industry means using AI more narrowly than you might expect. On what real bank deployments look like, Tim Rutten said: "the actual implementations are almost 99% deterministic, and there's this one little percent that actually gets them to gain, to reason at the right moment in time." That same architecture caps the bill, because most banking workloads are repetitive and rule-bound. But the same rigor can net fantastic results from AI in broader applications as well.
- Backbase treats AI slop as an architecture problem, containing content generation inside hard boundaries. Per Tim Rutten: "You have tone of voice, you have guardrails that we don't have AI slop. There's like 22 rules that are applied. If they don't check out, the agent needs to rewrite and continuously learns to rewrite." The human half of the risk is harder to engineer around, as Asad Zaman, CEO of Sales Talent Agency, framed it: "a lot of people that didn't have a skill are using AI for that thing. And if you didn't have a skill in an area or judgment or taste in that particular area, you have no mechanism to stress test the quality of what is coming out."
- On how the AI bubble pops, Sam Jacobs, CEO of Pavilion, put the risk on the business model sitting underneath the capex: "if everybody presumes the way that all these companies make money is selling tokens… and then all of a sudden it turns out selling tokens is a really terrible business. Well, then that's a thing that would compress." Tim Rutten lands in a similar place on timing while staying long on the outcome: "a little bit bearish on timing, massively bullish on the future… it will happen nevertheless, but it's going to be a very rocky ride."
Connect with the Hosts & Guests:
Host: Sam Jacobs, CEO at Pavilion - https://www.linkedin.com/in/samfjacobs/
Host: AJ Bruno, CEO at QuotaPath - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajbruno3/
Host: Asad Zaman, CEO at STA - https://www.linkedin.com/in/azaman1/
Guest: Tim Rutten, CMO at Backbase - https://www.linkedin.com/in/timrutten/
Topline is more than a YouTube Channel:
Subscribe to Topline Newsletter: https://toplinemedia.substack.com/
Tune into Topline Podcast, the #1 podcast for founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-podcast
Join the free Topline Slack channel to connect with 600+ revenue leaders to keep the conversation going beyond the podcast: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-slack
Chapters:
00:00 Introducing Tim Rutten
03:11 Inside Backbase And 120 Banks
09:42 90% Cost Cuts In Call Centers
12:04 Why The Application Layer Wins
15:23 Europe, The US, And Regulation
21:50 Where The AI Bubble Breaks
27:24 Why Banks Skip Frontier Models
34:34 Bank Budgets Shift To AI Native
38:23 Real ROI At Lloyds And JPMorgan
44:31 Quiz Pro Quo
49:37 GTMOS, The Go To Market OS
52:02 Double Pipeline On 25% Less Budget
53:53 Judgment, Taste, And AI Slop
1:06:15 Real Time Marketing By Christmas
1:09:30 Bulls and Bears