George was a professional poker player, then CEO of a company that sold to Logitech for around $100M, and now he’s the CEO of Monk, an AI company automating accounts receivable.

Monk is an API company solving the other side of the ledger from Ramp: getting B2B invoices paid. George gets candid about the go-to-market mistakes he made (“50 more than I expected”), why vertical companies win on in-person workshops, the proprietary “harness” that he argues is the real moat in applied AI, the extreme-accountability culture he runs with 16 people and almost no meetings, and his sharpest tactical advice on fundraising, websites, and co-founder relationships.

Brought to you by:
Nooks - discover how revenue agents can transform your GTM at https://nooks.ai/gtmfund

Transcript:
Full interview transcripts can be found by episode at https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/

What you’ll learn:
- Why sales and marketing is “tier zero,” and why he used to believe the opposite (“if you build it, they will come” is wrong)
- Two lessons from pro poker that transfer to building: stay disciplined through variance, and adapt or get destroyed
- Why go-to-market has never been more nuanced, and why vertical companies are winning with in-person workshops and lunch-and-learns over cold email
- The pre-seed website bet: why spending big on a cohesive visual identity early lifted one company’s close rate ~50%
- The “harness” thesis: why owning your own evals, guardrails, and tests (not just calling the models) is the moat in applied AI
- How to run extreme accountability: everything in Slack, blameless retros, almost no meetings, 16 people
- Why they reverse-engineered into a huge-TAM problem on purpose (recruiting, and not getting disrupted by the frontier labs)
- Why hard ROI (dollars in your pocket) now beats “time savings” as an AI value prop
- Fundraising: compress the process to create FOMO, and why how you run the raise signals how you run the company
- Why the co-founder relationship matters more than the idea, and how to invest in it like a marriage

George, Co-Founder and CEO at Monk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgekurdin
Monk: https://monk.com/

Sophie Buonassisi:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona

About the guest: George is the co-founder and CEO of Monk, an API company that automates accounts receivable (collections and cash application) for B2B businesses using AI. He was previously CEO of Streamlabs, which sold to Logitech (reported around $100M) in 2019, and before his operating career he was a professional poker player for about five years. Monk is based in New York and has raised roughly $28M, including a Series A. His co-founder is Joe.

About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.

Visit us: https://gtmnow.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
IG: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now

The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

Legora went from $3.5M to over $100M in revenue in about a year, the fastest any company has ever scaled a direct-sales motion from zero to $100M. Then, they doubled revenue in less than 6 months and hit $200M ARR.

Patrick spent seven years at Braze, from the early days through IPO, before joining Legora (a vertical legal-AI company founded by Max, backed by Benchmark and Redpoint) at $3.5M in revenue. He shares the scaling journey. He also gets tactical on the three things he looks for before joining a company, why speed-to-value is the number-one leading indicator of revenue performance, the pilot that lets customers keep everything they build even if they walk, how he structures forward-deploy across legal engineers and traditional FDEs, the Jude Law and Aaron Judge campaigns and whether they paid off, the "8 Mile" objection-handling play, and the shift to consumption pricing.

Brought to you by:
Nooks - discover how revenue agents can transform your GTM at https://nooks.ai/gtmfund

Transcript:
Full interview transcripts can be found by episode at https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/

What you'll learn:

• The 3 criteria Patrick uses before joining any company (founder, product, investors)
• Why speed and quality of implementation is the #1 leading indicator of revenue, and why teams over-index on sales and under-index on onboarding
• The pilot design that hands customers the IP, integrations, and workflows to keep (even if they don't buy)
• How to structure forward-deploy: legal engineers for use-case design, FDEs for enterprise integration
• Why he hires roughly 2 post-sale people for every 1 pre-sale
• The Jude Law and Aaron Judge brand campaigns: the real ROI case for B2B brand spend
• The "8 Mile" framework: disarming competitive objections by naming the competitor's move first
• How he screens for real AI fluency in interviews (and why "I summarized my Gong calls" fails)
• Moving the top product to consumption pricing, and what it did to the metrics
• Advice for operators on the fence about joining an AI-native company: bet on yourself, the window won't last

Connect with Patrick Faucher:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-forquer-1419a5a

Connect with Host, Sophie Buonassisi:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona

About the guest: Patrick Faucher is the CRO of Legora. He joined at roughly $3.5M in revenue and helped scale it past $100M in about a year, the fastest any company has taken a direct-sales motion from zero to $100M. Now, they’ve hit $200M ARR. Before Legora he spent seven years at Braze, from the early days through its path to IPO.

About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.

Visit us: https://gtmnow.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
IG: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now

The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

The CMO of Samsara joins GTMnow to walk through exactly how she ran an AI transformation inside a public company, from a 2.5 week boot camp to 113 agents in production, all while keeping headcount flat and pushing pipeline and revenue up.

Meagan has led teams through platform shifts before (PLG, social, Covid) at MongoDB, DocuSign, Nieman, and now Samsara, and she argues AI is categorically different: not a new channel, but a production shift that changes how the work itself gets done. She gets tactical on the change-management sequence (learn by doing before you cap anything), how agents live in Slack for every function, the ABM pages that went from 2-3 weeks to under 30 minutes, the KPIs she tracks, how she interviews for AI fluency, and her message to anxious operators: this is a chance to leapfrog, not a threat.

What you'll learn:

• Why AI is a production shift, not just a new channel, and what that changes about running a team
• The change-management order that works: let people learn and play before you put cost caps on
• Inside the 2.5-week AI boot camp (vibe-coded LMS, hands-on agent build, present-back) that trained half the org
• Why she democratized agent-building into every function instead of centralizing an AI team
• How 113 agents run in Slack across events, sales, ADR support, and creative
• The rebrand that hit the market in 3.5 weeks instead of six months
• ABM landing pages from 2-3 weeks to under 30 minutes, and content from weekly to 10 a day
• How she keeps headcount flat: backfill differently, raise the bar on output
• How she interviews for AI fluency, and why you can't earn a top calibration score without building agents
• Her advice to anxious operators: build agents to leapfrog leadership, don't wait

Connect with Meagan:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meageneisenberg

Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona

Thank you to our sponsor:
@NooksHQ - discover how revenue agents can transform your GTM at nooks.ai/gtmfund

About the guest: Meagan is the Chief Marketing Officer of Samsara, a public company on the NYSE. She has led marketing through major platform shifts at MongoDB, DocuSign, and Nieman, and has a background in MIS and computer science, starting her career as an IT engineer before moving into marketing.

About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.

Visit us: https://gtmnow.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
IG: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now

The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.