How to get hired as an AE at a VC-backed startup | Matt Stinson (CRO at Starbridge)

Carter (00:05.089)
Hey Matt, okay yeah, give the people a quick intro. Who are you? What do you do at Starbridge? And then just one line about what Starbridge does.

Matt Stinson (00:13.07)
Sure, one line that's hard for a guy of many words, many words like myself. No, no, I'm making fun of myself. Yeah, so I'm Matt Stinson. I am the chief revenue officer at Starbridge. My background has been in selling and leading sales teams in the government and education sector. So any companies that sell software or services into K-12, higher ed, government, like that's my background.

Carter (00:15.085)
Or give it a couple lines is fine.

Matt Stinson (00:41.154)
And at Starbridge, we basically are building a tool, like the dream tool that I would have loved to have when I was a VP of sales in a past life. And essentially what we do is we aggregate a bunch of data about these buyers and we use our AI agents to help companies figure out who they should be reaching out to with what messaging and when to basically book more pipeline and ultimately increase revenue if you sell to education or government.

Carter (01:10.765)
Okay, great. And yeah, I thought hiring would be a great topic because you seem you've been talking a lot about hiring on LinkedIn. You're hiring now. I'm trying to get hired. So that's quite near and dear to my heart right now. You one thing I saw that you said is you guys are a startup. So you need people to ramp in 60 days, not six months. How do know somebody is going to ramp fast? And what are you looking for there?

Matt Stinson (01:21.655)
Yeah

Matt Stinson (01:35.468)
Yeah, yeah.

This is just like super top of mind as I've gotten off two interviews today, right? We are very much in the midst of finalizing a blitz of candidates. We're scaling our AE team from five people at the, you know, basically the end of the fall, and we're gonna be at 14 in another couple of weeks. And we've been so fortunate with the people that we've brought into the organization. Some of the AEs we've hired, we're taking

Carter (01:45.856)
Yeah.

Matt Stinson (02:08.162)
demo calls, like first calls on day one at Starbridge. So we've just like, in past roles, I onboarding looked like, hey, sit side by side with an AE for a month, then by month two, you'll get some support, and then by month three, you'll be leading calls. I'm not kidding, on day one, several of our AEs are just jumping in and leading calls. And that's in part.

given the amount of work that they're kind of willing to do as they phase out of their old job and phase into this one. And we've been lucky to identify people who are just super excited about what we're doing. But I think you get at this in a couple of different ways in the interview process. I think one is their energy and excitement around the problem that we're solving. Do they have some reason why it's Starbridge, not just because they're looking for a job, but are they excited about the mission?

of adding more transparency to public-private partnerships, and are they fired up about that? I find that people will work 60 hours a week happily and not feel like they're working a ton if they love the problem. So that's kind of one thing we try to tease out is just like, excited are they? What's their story about why Starbridge? I would say the second thing is getting a sense of what they learn and how they learn throughout the interview process.

So asking questions like, what's the last thing you learned? Walk me through the process of how you learned it and really evaluating like their technical acumen. It's not like you're opening up a line of code to build and sell Starbridge, but there's a certain amount of systems thinking that is really useful to be an AE here. You're essentially really understanding, okay, who's your prospect and who's their prospects? So I am a customer of ours is in structure.

Instructure sells learning management systems to K-12 and higher education. Well, what would be going on at a K-12 school district that would be interesting for a sales rep at Instructure to know about to drive outbound? So there's this kind of triangular relationship between you, your prospect, and your prospect's prospects that you need to have a high degree of intellectual horsepower in order to jump in on day one. And then I would say the...

Matt Stinson (04:23.884)
you know, the last way that we're kind of evaluating someone's ability to just jump in really, really quickly is by talking to people that they've worked with in the past. I actually got into, I had some flack on LinkedIn this past week. I posted about how we run references and how important references are, including both front of sheet references that candidates provide, as well as anyone you could find in your network who may know that, like a backdoor reference.

Carter (04:48.321)
Yeah.

Matt Stinson (04:51.446)
And to me, this tells the whole story. In very few exceptions, and actually I would say to no exception, I've never worked with anyone who turns out to be absolutely elite, who every single person that they've worked with in the past wouldn't say as much. And I'm sure Carter, if I talk to your former bosses and you're a killer, they're gonna say, Carter's incredible, you'd be stupid not to hire him, he's a 10 out of 10. And it goes beyond just the blanket.

Carter (05:15.937)
Right.

Matt Stinson (05:19.564)
Hey, Carter's a good guy and we liked working with him. There's an enthusiasm that you can detect if you ask the right questions on a reference call, which we've spent a lot of time thinking about how do you structure the right reference call. So those are kind of the three ways.

Carter (05:31.981)
How do you find, how do you find, that was one of my questions, how do you find the back channel references? Like without it being weird or it being sketchy, like are you blasting random people on LinkedIn or how does that, I was curious of how that worked.

Matt Stinson (05:39.404)
Yeah, yeah. Look, and one of the points that someone made was that, you know, it was, the argument against is that this is an unethical practice that puts the candidate in jeopardy because you are now talking to other people about their potentially confidential job search, and that could be a, you you could introduce some difficulty for the candidate. And I'm super sensitive to that. And I think, you know, upon react,

reflecting on my original post, I thought there was probably some nuance that I should have gone into that acknowledges that point. To make sure that we are not running afoul of that, there's a couple of things that I do. One, in a top grading interview. So we go through top grading. Are you familiar at all, Carter, with that as a concept in interviewing?

Carter (06:23.839)
No, top grading? No, explain that. don't know. Well, is it with the number? Because I saw one thing you said too. You have this, like you rate them one to four. Is that what you're talking about or is that something different?

Matt Stinson (06:31.244)
Yeah, really different. top grading is almost like a, a structured interview process where you go through someone's professional resume, like line by line, and it's a pretty structured interview. So you're asking more or less the same questions about every opportunity that they've had in the past. And one of those questions is, if I talk to your former manager and I ask them, how is Carter one to 10 against all of the

AEs or BDRs or managers of sales, like whatever the position is, where do they rank? What do you think they'll say and why? And when I ask that, it's not really a hypothetical. I also say, hey, we rely on references really heavily here. And I may likely be talking to your former manager. Who are they? Like, what's their name? And so I get them to kind of, I give them an opportunity here to say, don't talk to X, Y, Z person because of whatever reason. And so occasionally that person will say,

Carter (07:25.58)
Okay.

Matt Stinson (07:29.228)
Yeah, if you talk to Matt, probably give like a, I don't know what he'll say about me. We ended on weird terms. Here's why. And then I have that context, right? It's like, it's important that I don't just go call this person and let's say, you know, their old sales leader was an absolute asshole and every AE left the business because this guy was like a maniac. I have that context now, right? So I'm not just taking asshole hypothetical VP of sales as word, as bond. I have like the story from the AE. I think that's super important.

I think it's also super important that you never reach out to someone in the organization that they're currently working. I'm never gonna go back door to their current manager and be like, what do you think of Carter when he's currently working for them? Exactly. With that said, the way that I do it, I one, I ask what the names of these people are during the interview process so then I can look up on LinkedIn and then if I can't get to them directly through the candidate or through my own network, maybe I'm a degree of separation away.

Carter (08:07.725)
Alright, get him immediately fired, yeah.

Matt Stinson (08:25.346)
And then there's just like this annoying process of just like, okay, they worked at this organization during this period of time. Who else do I know who was there? Let me check. Did they overlap? And then I will drop a LinkedIn DM or a text to that person. It's a pretty small world of GovTech and EdTech people that I've worked with. And so there's a lot of crossover. And I never say like, hey, they're interviewing here. I just say, I'm curious to pick your brain on Carter as a rep.

like why your perspective. And like you can definitely read between the lines, but I'm never overtly saying, hey, I'm interviewing them and they're looking for another job.

Carter (09:02.721)
That makes sense. And you mentioned those reference questions. I wanted to talk about those. You mentioned one, but there was another one. On one of your posts, you said something like, you'll ask, if I call you back again in six months and I told you they failed, what's the reason? And I want to know, what are you looking for there? What are red flags that they'll say? And green flags that you think are good.

Matt Stinson (09:14.968)
Mmm.

Matt Stinson (09:24.856)
Yeah, mean, green flags are when people really struggle to contemplate a reason. You'll get answers like, that this person's done, they figured it out. Like they're gonna go figure it out. They always figure it out. They're a grinder. They're not gonna take no for an answer. I would say red flags are a particular weakness that we know

we are not well positioned to ameliorate. So early on I was interviewing someone, and I get to references all the time and don't make offers, which I think everyone on LinkedIn were like, they're rubber stamps and you get no information. And I'm like, all the time I'll get red flag information on a reference call. And it's not like the person is selling this person down the river, they were often provided by the person, but you just need to ask good questions. And so like,

One of the things early on was, well, if there's not enough structure, I think X person might not do well, right? Like they really do well with a playbook. And like we were six months old and had two AEs and we're building the plane while flying it. And I said, you know, we think this person's great, but I think that this probably just is not, if that's where they are, we're probably not the right fit for them right now. Let me call them back in a year.

Carter (10:29.453)
Okay, yeah.

Matt Stinson (10:49.454)
I look for a very particular profile of AE. I could give you another example of Red Flag. Like the lone wolf. I go figure it out by myself. I view myself as like an individual player, not a team player. I'm not gonna help other reps. If I get that kind of feedback in that question, if you manage them too much, or if you're...

kind of pushing your point of view on them too much, or if you're pushing your playbook on them too much, that's usually a little bit of like a red flag for me. Just given the profile we hire for, I think for many people, that's a fine profile. That's a lot of salespeople, yeah, for sure. But I've always felt that it's best for me to like let those people go because the toxicity potentially that they bring to the culture of the team that like my way or the highway, I know better.

Carter (11:26.923)
Right, feel like that's a lot of sales people probably, so yeah that makes sense.

Matt Stinson (11:42.882)
There's this like little subversive comments that they make. We've all worked with those people. I know I'm losing out on some revenue because I don't have those people here, but I think that by cultivating this more collaborative, I view my role as also to be a member of this team that builds something that's like more sustainable and more enduring than what you generally see. And in past lives, my average tenure of reps on my team were always in the...

four to four and a half years in the role. And that's pretty long relative to industry standards for SAS. I think that's a part of it.

Carter (12:16.183)
Do you think it's part of the culture too? Cause I saw maybe you were saying this like, we're trying to make a fun culture and we want people that fit that culture, something, something like that. And I saw some video you guys are like doing man on the street interviews and all this random stuff.

Matt Stinson (12:29.238)
Yeah, what was the, I kind of missed the beginning of the question there. What was it?

Carter (12:32.685)
Oh, I was just saying, maybe it was you, I can't remember, maybe it you or somebody else, but they were saying, oh, we're trying to like create a fun culture, and that's kind of the types of people we're looking for. Like, is that why you think reps stay so long on your teams historically? Or not really.

Matt Stinson (12:46.178)
Yeah, I yeah, no, think, I mean, for me, we've all had the jobs that suck the energy out of you, right? No matter how successful you are, you kind of, log in, you do your job, and at the end of the day, you're exhausted because you've given everything and it's not fulfilling. And I always want to create an environment where I want work to be the thing that makes, it's a force multiplier for everything else in your life. Yes, you're gonna work really hard.

But hopefully you should feel like you're being fulfilled, you're being challenged, and you're surrounded by fun, interesting, dynamic people. We've had that in pass roles before, in pass orgs, but I think it's pretty unique to StarBridge, our culture. One of our four corporate values is fun is a feature. And what that means is we post irreverent content on LinkedIn, we're making jokes to one another, we're smiling all the time.

And it's, as much as I would have loved to say, I've cultivated that in past roles. I think here it's like 20X what we've done in the past.

Carter (13:55.339)
Yeah, and was curious, I also saw another post on this, maybe you made it. your link, because you post a lot of stuff on LinkedIn, is a lot of that to get good talent in, is that like the main point or is there other stuff to it?

Matt Stinson (14:02.093)
Yeah.

Matt Stinson (14:07.99)
Yeah, I mean, I would say my posting on LinkedIn serves three kind of primary functions. One, I found a long time ago that the forcing function of writing is just a helpful reflection on what's working, what's not working, what am I feeling. Now you don't have to go post that on LinkedIn, but I'm gonna be doing that exercise anyway. And so like the content's there.

Number two, it's a lead generation for us for new opportunities for our sales team. So I get a couple of DMs a week, probably three to five DMs a week from personas, like decision makers at our core ICP who want to learn more based off of my posting. And three, it's a recruiting mechanism. I think a lot of people on the first screen with myself or our recruiter mention our LinkedIn personality, mention our LinkedIn presence as a reason why.

They were kind of captivated or taken, otherwise weren't looking, but wanted to check us out. So it's lot of work. know, it's at least an hour and a half, two hours every week of planning, pausing, writing, reflecting. And early on, it was something that was difficult to prioritize, but our chief marketing officer, Jen, was adamant given who we sell to, salespeople, they live on LinkedIn, we needed to dominate the channel. And I think it's paid off.

incredibly for us.

Carter (15:36.941)
That makes sense. And to bring it back a little bit to hiring, hopefully this is helpful to people. But how would a candidate stand out? Like, is there any crazy work before the first call they would do? They would bring, I think this guy was already hired, so maybe this is not very similar. But you said some guy on your team was doing a bunch of gong, or listening to a bunch of gong calls and coming in super prepared. But just before that, before somebody actually gets hired, how would a candidate stand out? Like when you rate somebody a four, like what are they doing here?

Matt Stinson (15:56.44)
Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Stinson (16:05.016)
Yeah, yeah. Hopefully you aren't listening to a bunch of our Gong calls before we hire you. That would be problematic. Although it would probably show off your technical acumen that you've hacked our instance of Gong and I'd have to hire you. No, no, no, but you're right. That is one of the things that enabled that person to take a call on day one. I mean, I think a couple things of how you break through the noise. I mean, one,

Carter (16:11.451)
right, yeah, I've never used Gong, so I don't know how it works, but yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Carter (16:19.787)
okay, yeah, yeah.

Matt Stinson (16:34.914)
I think you have to send, if you really care about the position, my advice to candidates is you run that interview process like a sales process. It's the, like, short of the references, the way that you run the process of being interviewed is the best proxy for what you're gonna be like as a seller. Because they're very similar. And so what do I mean by that? Up front, reach out to the decision makers and multi-thread at the business.

with a customized message. DM, find me on LinkedIn, DM me, like add me on LinkedIn. I would say a pro tip is don't add any message in the initial outreach, just add me. always, I know that spam is coming when someone types in a direct message. And write something compelling, right? Like, and let it know that that is how you're modeling in that moment, how you're gonna reach out cold to prospects. So it should be short, a few quick sentences at most.

There should be some personalized hook and it should be well written. Throughout the interview process, keep following up with other people, right? Like the best people who've impressed us throughout a cycle with us in two weeks managed to talk to five other people within our business who weren't part of the interview committee. And they just looked up who's an AE, who's the head of marketing, who's worked at Starbridge. They reached out cold to them. They showed their prowess. They learned what we cared about. They learned what was going on. And then three, like do, just do your homework.

Like come to that first call with a point of view. I saw that you guys just raised a Series A with Kraft. know that XYZ is also a Kraft company or I sold Sled and this tool, I know you guys compete against GovSpend. Just like you would on a discovery call with a customer, it's super useful if you can show me that you know me and come with some point of view on that initial call.

Carter (18:22.379)
Yeah, that makes sense. Just do the job. Run it like you're doing the job, basically.

Matt Stinson (18:27.862)
Yeah, and I think where people go a little bit wrong on this is like the overly like hard close. I think like at some point candidates have been coached of any reason why you wouldn't hire me at this point and.

Carter (18:38.352)
I say that actually a lot of stuff like that a lot actually.

Matt Stinson (18:41.71)
Yeah, and this is just personal opinion. I mean, the way we do this internally is we give, there's one specific part of our process where we give feedback actively. Beyond that, it's important that we kind of debrief and give all feedback like anonymously through our portal or ATS to make sure we're not having like any color on that. And so my canned response is usually like, we'll get our feedback and we'll be back in touch. Like, I don't like share that information.

I'm sure some people like that. So that's just a personal preference.

Carter (19:14.295)
But you don't like that. Like how would you just a normal ending, just like, okay, you know, I'll hear back whenever. Like, is there anything specific? That is good. That is good.

Matt Stinson (19:22.19)
I think, I think get next, yes, yes, yes, great to answer more on the positive. I think really understand, making sure you understand the decision making process and who's involved. Cause that's core to running a sales process as well, right? What's your timeline? When should I expect to hear from you? Should we calendar something? I love when candidates push me to calendar something. I love when they push to get my cell phone. To me, those are things that are gonna lend itself well to when they're actually representing the company and selling our product.

Carter (19:52.365)
Makes sense. Okay, I think this is pretty good overall. Hopefully some people get some value out of this.