Latest / Pre-Sales Pathways / Karishma Kothari, Account Executive at Anthropic

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Karishma Kothari, Account Executive at Anthropic · Pre-Sales Pathways

• Chris: Kharishma, good evening. Thank you so much for being on the show this evening. Karishma: Chris, thank you for having me. I will say this is my first podcast by the way, so this is very Chris: Okay. Well, a f a fun fact, when you and I were both back at Slack, I remember when you moved into the AE role. And you were actually the first SE that I knew of that made that transition. And I remember thinking at the time, you know what, I really need to ask Krishma about that. It's like a really interesting move. Never got round to doing it, so you can consider this basically one of my SE bucket list items that I'm finally checking off. Karishma: Amazing, I love that. What like ten years later, but it's it's flattering that that left an impression, I guess. Chris: Yeah, definitely. A bit better late than never. but yeah, I'm getting ahead of myself rather than diving straight into that. Let's go right back to the beginning of of your career and how you found yourself into pre-sales. Karishma: Sure. my journey into pre-sales was sort of accidental, and by no means what I was like planning or ever really seeking for myself. it's kind of a funny story. So I started my junior year of college. I sort of by luck landed an internship at Box in the product management organization. I had the time of my life, it was like such an amazing place to work, such an amazing time. It was like 2011, really early for the company, and just like such good vibes. When I was graduating college and thinking about About what I wanted to do after school, I knew I really wanted to come back to box. And I had like, I had a job offer at Google, I had a job offer at Accenture, and I was like, Nope, I want to go back to Box. And I was trying to find a place. And they were like, Listen, like we you you know, we like you, we love you, I guess, but we're not really hiring the product organization. We are, however, building this sales engineering function. Chris: Okay. Karishma: And you know, we need someone with product expertise. you have really no work experience and are in no other way qualified for what we're looking for, but maybe because you know our product so well and you've worked with our product team, you might be interested in doing this. And I was like, done, sign me up. Chris: Amazing. And so roughly how big was Box at the time and what did the size of the Solutions Engineering Board look like? Karishma: Okay, so Box as a company was maybe about 350 or so people. Chris: Okay, early then. Karishma: yeah, the SC organization was, God, I would you could count like maybe five, seven folks. Chris: Okay. Interesting. So you Karishma: Yeah, really. Chris: you you go from doing a a little bit of product management, suddenly find yourself in solutions engineering. What was that first roll up box like? Karishma: it was so to be honest, so I started as an associate sales engineer. I was on the sort of corporate sales team. And it was it was a lot of fun, but it was a little bit of a demo monkey job. you know, my my manager would would hate to hear me say this, but we were kind of like 8:30 to 530, back to back in demos, in security conversations, just sort of like rins and repeating a lot of the same conversations and and narratives around: hey, what does it mean to move your content and files into the cloud? How do we help address scios that are scared of the idea of data leaving sort of the four walls of sort of their data warehouse. Chris: Yep. Yeah. So lots of demos, lots of security. Karishma: Yeah. And you know, like I think if I looked at that job today, it would be kind of monotonous and boring, but it was actually the best thing for starting my career because the benefit of working in sort of a transactional space like that on the commercial side and just being back to back in demos is like you get asked a lot of questions, so you learn really, really quickly. And also if you have a bad demo, it's sort of like learn from it and move on to the next. so I feel like a lot of like my core skills around communication. objection handling, like I was able to develop those really quickly because I had so many at bats really early in my career. Chris: Cool. So you have this role in the commercial organization at box. How does it go from there? Is there another role at box or what do you do afterwards? Karishma: Sure. So I stayed at Box for about three years and I actually grew really quickly, like from a commercial SC, kind of worked my way up the ladder to an enterprise SE. And about three years in, I was sort of doing field sales engineering. I was working with more like legacy, really enterprise customers. I remember I did an on-site with Fiskar's Scissors, which I guess those of you that are I don't know if that's a brand in the UK. so Chris: yeah. Yeah, yeah. Karishma: I was just working with like really legacy organizations that were not as nimble, fast moving. And I kind of got to a place that was like, okay, I'm a little, I'm not sure that this is for me. Chris: Okay, so you had the sales engineering role at box and then as I understand it you moved over to Slack. Was that in a similar role or Karishma: Yeah, so at the time Slack hired me as what they called a technical account manager. really they didn't Chris: Okay. Karishma: have a formal sales team at the time, but Largely they were starting to see a lot of demand from enterprise customers like IBM, and they needed someone more technical who could handle a lot of the security and architecture conversations that CIOs and CISOs were throwing their way because the like the role was really undefined. And so while that was a big part of what I was doing when I got there, and I was doing my fair share of security questionnaires for sure, I got to play a very hands-on role in defining. What a sales engineer or solutions engineer, as we later called them at Slack looked like, and really helped pivot the role as we grew the organization into more of a traditional pre-sales role that was really focused on helping selling the idea and vision of a new way of working that Slack represented. Chris: And so you start to build out the team effectively as one of the early members, and then you move into a formal management role within the solutions engineering orchestra. Karishma: Yeah, so that was sort of a natural evolution. I mean, it is, you know, maybe often when you're kind of the first, or in my case, I was sort of myself and and one of my colleagues or or managers, Kevin, were kind of the the first two boots on the ground. And so we had the sort of privilege of being able to to lead the charge and so naturally kind of grow into those leadership roles as the business need for more SCs sort of naturally took shape. Chris: Got it. And so you move into management, but ultimately then you pivot into a sales role. So what was some of the motivation there? And yeah, help us think through that decision. Karishma: Sure. So I think like when I was earlier in my career as a sales engineer, you sort of have this idea, obviously, that growth means getting to the next level and that managing comes with sort of great responsibility and greater sphere of influence. And all of those things are true. And I don't get me wrong, I I enjoyed managing the SC organization at Slack, but what I also found was that I sort of hit this inflection point where I was like, I actually don't want to be a, you know, at the time we then had a VP of sales engineering that we had hired, who was my previous leader from Box. I was like, I actually don't want your job. I don't want to grow into what you're doing. And I found as I became more senior as a leader at Slack and moved into sort of like a second-line leadership role. I was moving further and further away from the business and closer to more operational stuff. Obviously, I spent a disproportionate amount of my time hiring and doing, you know, a lot of other kind of managerial stuff. But I was far from what was happening boots on the ground with the business and like really understanding what our customers are saying. So I kind of had a period of of sort of inflection of of thinking about what I wanted to to do next, had a few sort of had a few ideas, and then ultimately Realized that at that point in my career I had I was managing a sales engineering team. I knew the Slack product inside and out. I had also kind of incubated incubated and started our demo engineering team, which, as you recall, sort of was a team that reverse engineered the Slack product experience. So I had all of this product knowledge and expertise. I knew how to talk about it really well. I had trained and mentored countless SCs, AEs during my time as our organization grew, and I just felt like The sellers were having a lot of fun. And maybe I could have a lot of fun and maybe also have like, you know, some lucrative upside if I did well in this new role. and so I really like thought about it, and I was, I knew it was what I wanted to do, but I was also a little bit scared that I was gonna fail or that like if I didn't hit my quota, I was gonna get fired. So I had a conversation with our VP of sales. And he had kind of taken a similar path early in his career. And he was like, Karishma, like we, you know, we would absolutely support you in making this transition to sales if that's what you wanna do. and like we got your back. Like you can always go back. If this is so if this role is so bad and you hate it, we know you're sort of highly capable here and a respected and valued leader. Like This is not a one-way road. So he really encouraged me to take that leap of faith and make that jump in a way that made me feel comfortable with the transition. Chris: Interesting. So if I understand correctly, the VP of sales themselves also made the same transition. They were in solutions engineering and moved into sales. Karishma: Yeah, yeah. Chris: wow, okay. So yeah, it's like difficult to find someone who would be better placed to give you that sort of advice. And you said that was very reassuring the fact that, you know, they had that trust in you that you could potentially move back to solutions engineering if it didn't work out. Karishma: Absolutely. And I think I had made, you know, I was lucky enough to be able to make the transition at a company where I already had earned a lot of trust and respect from peers and leaders who had seen my quality of work and understood what I was capable of that It wasn't like I was going to a new company, doing a new job that was totally unproven. And that was that made the transition I think a lot smoother as well, just feeling like I'm working with people that have my back and ultimately it's in the b company's best interest to see me succeed and like continue, continue on this trajectory. Chris: You had been at Slack for a while. By this point you had been in previous sort of pre-sales roles. So you would have seen a lot of sales cycles. All SCs have a perception of what the actual sales role looks like through those cycles, but what what was the transition like ultimately when you made it? Was it as you expected? Were there things that were different or more challenging than you expected? Karishma: Sure. You know, I think like my hypothesis going in was like 70% of this role is gonna be obvious and just fluid and make sense, and and like 30% is gonna be really uncomfortable. And I think that was like very true. I knew exactly what I was walking into. And the things that were uncomfortable was when you're an SC, You are automatically sort of like the respected resource in the room. When you get on a call, it's because the customer generally wants to talk to you, wants to hear what you have to say, wants to hear your opinions on things, right? when you're an AE and you're doing that like first 20% that the SE never sees, the prospecting, the outbone, those first calls, you are You're you're kind of like fighting for someone's respect and you have a very quick moment to tell like allow a CIO or a VP to determine whether you're worth their time or not. And so that was sort of a learning for me of like innately people don't want to the first conversation, people don't want to trust you, they don't wanna open up to you. And then the sort of last 20% of a a deal cycle, right? The negotiation and the close, that part That part was also a little bit uncomfortable to learn, right? Like when when someone says no or like says no to your deal, it doesn't mean you don't have a deal. It means you've got to kind of like work your way to a yes and understand better what does the customer actually care about? What are sort of like the drivers that you have to take a no and make it a yes. Chris: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I think definitely that tail end of the deal is allows for a lot more creativity than people probably expect before they get involved in those conversations. Karishma: Yeah, absolutely. Chris: And so as I understand it, you had one more role before you moved into your your current one at Anthropics. So where did you go from the A role at Slack? Karishma: okay, so so around the time Slack was getting acquired Slack got acquired by Salesforce. And I sort of had another inflection point in my career, which was like, do I stay through this acquisition or do I leave? And I very strongly actually considered leaving. but a fellow leader Knew I was thinking about leaving, and she reached out to me and she said, like, you need to stay. Slack and Salesforce need you to help see this transition through. And you already have the management chops and experience. Like, why don't you go into sales management here and help ensure that this transition of Slack is a success? Help ensure that Salesforce can really nail the co sell motion. And so she kind of convinced me to think about that. And I ended up staying for two years as a sales. Sales leader at Salesforce, still on the Slack side of the business, but as a as an R VP. Chris: Interesting. And so what was that ultimately that prompted the move from that role to anthropic? Karishma: I had had my first, I had my first kid, so I became a mom, and someone gave me great advice, which was like, if you are leaving your kid at home, you want to go back to a job that you love. Like you need to feel like it is worth your time to be where you are if you're not with your family. And that really resonated with me. And so kind of I knew after having my my daughter Mila that I didn't feel like returning to that job was a job that was like really motivating or gonna drive me. And I also knew that being at Salesforce, well, I think, you has an amazing company and has done a lot of amazing things, was not for me. I'm not a big company person. It was just not Chris: Mm-hmm. Karishma: the sort of like the most motivating environment for me. And so I really took a look around and I sort of had one of those moments and I thought, like, what is important to me in my next chapter? What will really motivate me? I took a lot of W what I learned from Slack and what I liked most about my time at Slack were like a really passionate principal to determined CEO that Stuart Butterfield was. a company that was laser focused on its mission and had a mission that I could sort of like personally identify with and rally behind, those just stood out as things that were really important to me. And I had a really hard time finding a company at the time that just fit that. And I learned more about anthropic, and as I learned more about Anthropic, read about Dario, read about what the company was trying to do with AI and AI safety. It just really stood out to me in a way that no other company had. And so again, I sort of took that leap of faith and said, like, I'm here, I've done a lot of things in my career. I'm here to do what what you guys need me to do in service of the mission. Chris: Amazing. And so Anthropic must have been reasonably early days as well when you joined. You've been there for a little while, right? Karishma: Yes. So over two years at this point. It was very kind of similar. you know, I think there was I say like globally, maybe there was like twenty, twenty-five people across like sales, BD, sort of everything that comprised of go-to-market, but it was incredibly early. at the time I joined, Anthropic did not have the best models. So it was not the the commercial viability or the commercial success of Anthropic was not at all clear. And it was actually a very big transition because my entire career up until that point had been, yes, you know, sales, sales engineering, social engineering, whatever, but I had never been in a consumption business. Where like what you are selling is access to APIs. Chris: Yeah, interesting. Yeah, so talk us through some of the differences because Slack and and Salesforce, Salesforce in particular, I mean, there's no company other that better, I think, that personifies the traditional SaaS model, right? It's per seat licensing, their whole go to market. It's what you know most organisations have modeled their go to market after. Shift from that to consumption based pricing. How does that feel? And what are the other sort of big differences in terms of both the AE role and the go to market motion more generally? Karishma: Yeah. Yeah. Salesforce is like an incredible, you know, especially once you're working with customers that have already you've already landed, you're growing the account by like selling them new products and by doing a lot of contracting, creative contracting is what they like to call it, to get customers Chris: Mm-hmm. Karishma: to take more of your products for, you know, what what appears to be a great deal. at Anthropic, and I I think just like in a consumption business in general. The victory is really not the contract, right? Like if you sign a customer commitment for $50 million or whatever. Nobody really celebrates that. I mean, it's amazing that a customer wants to commit that much money to spend with you, but it's sort of like when you do the contract, that's when the real work begins. So what Chris: Mm-hmm. Karishma: we really care about as a business in a consumption world is are is the customer launching new new products experiences with us? Are they deploying how are they deploying our models in their business to both power their employees and then power their business and products as well? So that is very different than a SaaS, you know, more traditional SaaS cycle where you sell the contract, everybody celebrates the daylights out of you for like, you know, 24 hours, and then your job is kind of largely done until like the next quarterly business review or what have you, where you kind of step back in and figure out if there's growth to be had. Chris: Yeah. Yeah. So I guess tangibly what would be the impact on your day to day in the role? Is it a lot more post sales involvement? Are the sort of deliverables that you're working on with customers quite different? Karishma: Yeah, I think very tangibly like The contract, like working on a contract with a customer, is sort of like one of the in a lot of cases, at least right now, like one of the earlier steps that you take with them. And so thereafter, it's really about shaping what are the what are the things that we're gonna go launch together? What what are the experiences or sort of metrics for change in your organization that you need us to go help with? My day-to-day absolutely looks different every day, every week. That's probably Just like the nature of working at a company like Anthropic. but I in a lot of ways can be sort of like you you are you can be everything to the customer, and it's your job to figure out who are the right specialists and people to bring in to help support the health and growth of this relationship. It's not just about the account team. It's not just about like dividing and conquering between AE customer success, right? And then applied AI architects and and product engineers. It's also about bringing in and finding the right sort of like research teams or product teams that are working on things that might be compelling or interesting to that particular customer and client. And that looks very different by the way, in this in this space, it looks very different based on what customer you work with. Chris: Interesting. And and and is that in part just because the work that the customers are doing with the products is so bespoke and so different from customer to customer? Karishma: Yeah, I think like it's very different customer to customer, very different industry to industry, right? if you are a B2B SaaS organization, a lot of what you want to do to like be successful as an organization is think about how can AI better power your product roadmap in your business and offerings. And so you might be focused on a relationship with us that's very heavily focused around like how can cloud models deliver a more intelligent product experience to my end customers. But if you are a bank like JP Morgan, I think you're maybe a little bit less focused on like how do I put predictive AI in like your bank statements and more, how does AI help power a lot of like the back-end processes and things like that that take place when you're like applying for loans and those sorts of things. And so from that perspective, it's very different. Like a a technology like Slack, a technology like box, Right, it's it's always going to be internal only. And so yes, there are differences when you're selling to a bank versus a B2B SaaS company, but the product is fundamentally the same. Here it is the product and what its purpose is for the company is very, very different just based on the the customer. Chris: Yeah. Interesting. And you you talked about the the contract being sort of less of an important milestone. I guess another milestone, particularly, you know, for people listening to this thinking from a pre-sales perspective, historically would have been a demo, right? You would work with a customer, do some discovery, build a custom demo, present that, that all you know, the hope would be that that leads to the big contract. Is that different anthropic? You know, how once you know the customer signed and you're working with them and you're working with these different parts of the business. Is it a demo that you're typically working towards or is it something different? Karishma: Yeah. Demos f are okay, so it's probably important to break down like at Anthropic we have sort of different, right? We have like Cloud for Work and we have Chris: Mm-hmm. Karishma: we have sort of like our API products and offerings. So they're demos I would say just in general are helpful, but they are not they're not necessarily necessary in every sort of like cycle that you work with a customer. and in a lot of cases, because anthropic is a consumption business, right, you can already like your developers can already use the product and use use the models in whatever ways they want to experiment and explore on their own. Chris: so one of the things that you touched on earlier, you mentioned around the different account roles. So you've got the account executive, customer success, and I think you said applied AI engineering. So would that be the closest equivalent to a a solutions engineer anthropic? Karishma: Yes. Chris: Got it. And so w would you work with them in a similar way to how you would work with like a traditional solutions engineer or 'cause it'd be I guess interesting for the people on on this podcast that th they don't see that job title at anthropic. Karishma: Yeah, the I say like in even just in my two years at Anthropic, the titles of like what is sort of the technical counterpart to the the salesperson has changed so much and I can't even keep track. But you know, applied AI I'd say generally is sort of like the the broad title within applied AI. I think we have like product engineers who are much more Technical oftentimes they're sort of like pseudo-could be developers themselves. and then we have pseudo-applied AI specialists. These are people that are are definitely much more technical, I would say, than your average like sales engineer or solutions engineer. but they they have like pretty good hands-on experience with the models themselves, and are able to kind of like present themselves as experts in building. agents and things that customers are really keen to do and and ship and launch. And these are people that can help advise on how to bid up build and set up your evaluation so that you're actually able to understand what model is the best for the job that you're trying to achieve. Chris: Got it, makes sense. And the last thing that's like a big buzzword obviously within the the industry at the moment and and and solutions engineers are particularly interested in is for deployed engineering. Is that also a motion that exists within Anthropic or is that covered by these applied AI architects? Karishma: It it does. it does. I think forward deploys and forward deployed engineering is much more common sort of in the industry side of the business. So I focus more on like tech customers. The idea of a forward deployed engineer, as I understand it, right, is like, hey, we don't have the technical resources in-house to go and build this thing or do this thing. So we want you to loan us someone to do hands-on keyboard work for us. so that's much more common that you'll see in like health, health and life sciences. financial services, those industries where like, you know, maybe their developers are still getting comfortable or still getting sort of building their proficiency in this kind of technology. Chris: Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. So it's a do it for me rather than just do it with me type thing. Karishma: Yeah, exactly. Chris: Well, Krishma, I'd love to know, you know, not just specifically at Anthropic, but across your whole career. Obviously you've you've had amazing success at some really, you know, flagship companies like Box, Slack and and Anthropic. What are what are some of the things that you would attribute your career success to? Karishma: it's a great question. I would say, like, first of all, I'd be a fool not to tell you like 90% of my success, at least like what you see from the outside in, is just due to luck. But there are certainly a few things that if I look back on my career have served me well, and things that I would definitely, you know, recommend and do twice over if I had the chance. I think in my day-to-day I got to a point where I became really open to feedback and inviting feedback from others in a way that didn't make them feel like it was personal and in a way that didn't make me feel like receiving it was gonna be a personal attack. By the Chris: Okay. Karishma: way, when I was like 22 out of college, and like the first time I received feedback, I certainly sat with it and took it a little personally. But very quickly I realized that feedback from the people that I work with that have more experience than me is what's gonna help me grow and take that next step in my career and just be seen as more of a go-to resource. And so I think I got really good at internalizing and acting on feedback. In a way that really like allowed me to grow later in my career. I think the Chris: Interesting. And it sounds like you were going after that feedback proactively rather than you know, some people just that wait for the performance review once a year and blast out like ten requests. But this sounds like more real time, more proactively. Karishma: Yes, yes, absolutely. you know, you you work with so many reps in your career, you work with so many customer success managers. So anytime I'd work with somebody new, and I would invite in a way that was like, okay, what do you think like how do you think that went between us? What do you think I could have done differently? What would you like to see what has worked well with you with other AE relationships that you've had? And so I think that absolutely served me well. And I think it speaks to like a broader theme that As I look back, I and particularly at my time at Slack, but even at box, I had So many incredible opportunities that I wasn't necessarily like qualified for in any way, but people came, you know, people brought to me. And I think that was a direct result of me really investing heavily in cross-functional relationships. One of the benefits of being, if you're early at a company that's growing fast, and if you're lucky enough to be in that position, is you get to spend a lot of time with product, with customer success, with professional service. I really took the time to invest in those early product relationships, to invest in those CS relationships, marketing relationships. And as a result, those are the people that would then kind of like tap me and say like, hey, we're we're working on this initiative or we're trying to figure this out and kind of want to collaborate with me on other projects in an organization that ended up having like higher visibility. And so I think that kind of like ended up serving me well in a few different ways. Chris: Yeah, amazing. Definitely one of the advantages I think of being in a in a role like pre-sales or solutions engineering, you sit at the intersection of so many of those different functions anyway, right, that it's it's quite easy to build those relationships. Have you got any thoughts because there's always a tension, right, between we get so many demands from cross functional partners on things to do and there's only so much time in the day. Have you got any thoughts in terms of how people think about like prioritizing that work or like making sure they don't take too much on or they take the right things on? Karishma: Yeah, it's a good question. I would say like early on in my s time at Slack, I didn't do a great job of delegating and I just wanted to say yes to everything because I wanted I just wanted to have an impact and I wanted to to do work that was meaningful and to help people and help my my team. I think it You you don't always have to take on every webinar that someone asks you to participate in or speak at every customer conference session, right? I think there's there's a way to think about like what are the where are the areas that I am most uniquely suited to support this, but also a lot of times people are fielding these requests to you because they don't know who else to take them to. And so it's also an opportunity to nominate and you know, suggest to them like, hey, we've got this new person here, they're still building their brand, they could be great for this type of opportunity. And either like if you're a leader delegating those opportunities out, or if you're if you're sort of an individual contributor, also like helping your team find other opportunities where they can contribute and make an impact in an organization. Chris: Yeah, yeah. Definitely feel that being someone who's reasonably early at a company or a specific team is you do become the go to person because you're recognizable, right? People people know your name but they don't necessarily know the others in the function. Karishma: Yeah I Sure. One of the biggest transitions for me when I moved from like sales engineering and sales engineering leadership at Slack to box to to to sales was just like I no longer was the person that had I I could no longer have say yes to like every customer conference speaking session opportunity that I was asked to do. And it got kind of tiring at the end at at Slack when it was like, you know, frontiers and Slacks, like I forget like what are all of our platform conferences and things like that. Those can really sort of like Eat up at your time. And it was a welcome change to take a step back and say, you know what, we've got some other great people that can help support this for you. Chris: Yeah, definitely. Cool. So we've we've talked about some of what's made you successful. I would love if you're happy to share a challenge that you've had in your career and and what you learned from it. Karishma: Sure. well actually before I do that, I did want to mention one other thing. Chris: Yeah, go for it. Karishma: that, you know, you can choose to do with this what you want, but there was one time at Slack when I was really wanting to I I I felt like I was doing a lot and I felt like I wasn't necessarily getting compensated the way that I wanted to. And so I put together a presentation, a PowerPoint deck for one of our sales, our our VP of sales. And I titled it like why invest in Kurishma? And it was sort of like four or five slides. That was not like pay me more money and here's why. It was more like, here's why you want to continue to invest in me. Here's some of the proof points of like initiatives that I've taken on and led and here's the feedback from respected senior leaders and cross-functional leaders in our organization that proves that I'm somebody you want to continue to invest in. And just when you think about your own, like if you're someone that's more limited in your if you're feeling like limited in your growth in your career, that was kind of a one somewhat bold, but but just like l step that I took to help make sure that the company understood what like we were on the same page and what my perception of my contributions were. And it was sort of a more unique way for me to ask for a raise. That you know, you shouldn't you don't need to do this every six months or anything like that. But certainly when you feel like you're sort of at a point where you're stuck or you're wanting something and you don't know the right way to ask for it, it was sort of a a different approach to helping make sure that. What I perceived as my successes were also what my leadership understood my successes to be, and that there was sort of like a good sort of alignment between us. Chris: I love it. Yeah. And was this as part of one of the normal review cycles or was this something that you decided to do proactively outside of that sort of more formal process? Karishma: This was outside of the review cycle. Yeah. Chris: Cool. Nice. Karishma: Yeah. And then to your question about what was it challenges, successes, failures? Chris: Exactly. Yeah. A professional challenge that you've had and and what you learn from it. Karishma: Yeah. So so I don't know if I'd frame this as like a a challenge, so much so as like a professional rejection or like a you know, something didn't go the way I planned, which I actually look back on and I'm like, this was so pivotal in my career and I'm so glad this played out the way that it did. But before I moved into sales at Slack. I was sort of, as I kind of mentioned earlier, having this like, what do I want to do? It's not, it's not to be a VP of sales engineering. So, what is that step that I want to take in my career? And I actually interviewed for a role in Slack's product organization. And like I mentioned, I had great relationships with the product organization. I thought to myself, like I sort of fell into sales engineering. It's an amazing place to be, but that was actually not what I thought I was gonna do with my career. So maybe I should just try to go back to being a product manager and see how that plays out. I interviewed for the role and ultimately I didn't get it. And I at the time was like a little surprised because I thought that the company had my back and like was gonna support me in whatever I wanted to do. And It was very much not that they didn't want to support me. It was that they were like, you're great, but this isn't the right role for you. And that was a hard conversation Chris: Interesting. Karishma: to have and sort of like a hard pill to swallow, especially at a time when I was just like feeling like I was questioning, what do the next four years at Slack look like? Because I don't think I want it to be in sales engineering management. Chris: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's definitely an element of patience to to it, isn't there? Like I've been in a similar situation where you're sort of pulling it threads internally thinking what's gonna be next. And yeah, helpful, like you said, to get that feedback from the product team 'cause ultimately it feels like going down that route wouldn't have been the right one. It sounds like you're much happier and more successful in your current role. Karishma: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean in hindsight, I I don't even know what I was thinking that I would be good in that role. And maybe I could have grown to to succeed in it. But now that I'm in sales, I really feel like there's such a match between both like parts, like areas that I can tap into that are intellectually challenging, but also just a better match for some of the like foundational skills that I learned as a sales engineer that I can like take with me into this role. Chris: Amazing. And Krishma, is there any advice that you would give to listeners of this show? And it could be people who are thinking of making a move from pre sales into the sales side, or it could just be more generally career advice that you would offer. Karishma: Sure. I think as it pertains to, you know, if if you're someone that's kind of like thinking about taking that next step in your job, too often I see people still to this day like chasing titles and like sphere Chris: Mm-hmm. Karishma: like perceived sphere of influence and responsibility over the opportunity to like develop new skills or have sort of a different experience to round out what they're doing. Now that's not saying you should go from like being a seller to being like a software engineer. Like you have to have transferable skills. But You know, I I have a lot of friends and peers that I've worked with that are like, I've worked so hard to become a director of solutions engineering or a senior manager of solutions engineering. I'm not going to an IC role or I'm not going to a first-line leadership role if I'm a second line leader. And they end up missing these incredible opportunities to broaden their skill sets. And also, like, if management is the t the c trajectory you wanna go down, sometimes it's helpful to take a step back. To allow you to go to a place where you can take three steps forward versus like limiting the scope of what you can do, where you can go next by saying I'm only gonna look for director level roles because that's the level I've at I'm at now. And you have no idea how hard I've worked to like get this get to this level and title. And I think if you see in my career, Chris, I've had the weirdest titles, right? Like I never thought I'd be a technical account manager. I still don't even like fully know what that means, and I've gone From IC to management, back to IC, back to management, and like you know, everything in between. But I feel like I've every role that I've taken on has has presented like a whole set of new challenges. And I think fundamentally both allow me to have an overall like better. breadth and depth of experience than I would have if I was only kind of like trying to sequence the next title and like the bigger pay bump or what have you. so I think that's definitely something to keep in mind. And then you know, it's hard out there right now looking for a job and I totally get it. I get reached out to honestly several times a day by folks in and out of my network. and I think there are ways to go about using your network that are effective and ways to go about using your network that are ineffective. And so I think people really need to keep that in mind, right? Like, one of the things you want to do when you're when you're in an organization is really make sure that when you leave or when someone else leaves the organization, that You're you're someone they remember, that they think of. Like, Chris was he I don't I didn't really work closely with him, but he was definitely a standout SC. Like he was someone that the company generally respected. That credibility goes a long way. A lot of what I see today is that either you're using your network for your like direct referrals into your next role. Or if you're not actually seeking referrals, this industry is so small that people are probably back channeling you if you're interviewing somewhere where they know someone who you might have worked with. I get I get reached out to about back channels not infrequently. And so I think it's really, really important to use your network effectively and make sure that You know, if you're reaching out to someone for a referral, by the way, that like you value their time and that you think they're someone who thinks very highly of you and can give you a strong referral versus just like a I'm gonna pass your resume and like I don't ever want to talk to you again. and that can be a really tricky thing. Like you have to do the work in your current role to earn sort of the support for your next role. Chris: A hundred percent. Yeah. And I love the point around titles. I actually think that's one of been been been one of the most positive things with this new wave of AI companies is, you know, there are these really high f profile stories of people like CTO of Workday moving over to Anthropic and taking a a title of just member of technical staff, I believe it is. And I think that's really inspiring, right? It's like people are really focusing on the the company, the mission, like you said, the nature of the work that they're doing and getting less hung up about the the title that they have. So couldn't agree more with that. Karishma: Yeah, absolutely. it is it is helpful to kind of like take all of that on the tape off the table. Actually, funnily enough, when I first started at Anthropic, we have seven co-founders, by the way, and I ended up needing to bring in sort of like someone on the technical side to a customer conversation. I His title was member of technical staff, so I didn't think anything of it. And I, you know, brought him on the call, not fully realizing exactly who he was. He gets on the call with a customer to talk about this very specific top topic and introduces himself as one of the seven co-founders. And I was like, Chris: wow. Karishma: my gosh, that is shame on me. Like I did not realize that, but like an amazing human. He has no ego whatsoever, but you know, it was like It was just kind of funny being in that meeting and realizing like of course I should have known this, but you know, there's seven of them. It can be hard to keep track from time to time and I was I was so new at the time that I didn't understand. Chris: Yeah, well how humble of them. And I bet the customer was delighted to have a co founder on the call, so I'm sure Karishma: Yeah. Chris: it it helped with the account. Well, Karishma: Absolutely. Chris: Krishma, this has been a a really insightful conversation. I thank you so much for for joining me today. Karishma: Absolutely, Chris. It was it was great to catch