Josh Heller is Chief Revenue Officer at Coactive AI, a Forbes AI 50 content-understanding company backed by a16z and Bessemer. He started his career in finance — earning his CFA, working at Siemens venture capital in Palo Alto and, later, one of Goldman Sachs' largest San Francisco wealth-management teams — and calls getting laid off by Goldman one of the best things that ever happened to him. He pivoted into tech sales as an SDR at Responsys (acquired by Oracle), then spent eight years at customer-data platform Amperity, joining as an individual contributor when the product was 'literally Google Sheets in the backend' and leaving as head of sales after helping scale it from $0 to $80M in ARR. A former president of BATS Improv in San Francisco, Josh is unusually candid about the mental side of revenue leadership — he stopped drinking and began treating his anxiety, and credits the resulting clarity for making him a better leader, husband, and father of three. His operating thesis: in a world of unlimited information, clarity is the ultimate competitive advantage.
“Goldman Sachs did the best thing they could have done for me, which was they laid me off.”
“Anxiety is something that I always looked at as a tool. It's something that helped me really focus... but over time, I started to realize that maybe it was getting in the way. So the first thing I decided to do was stop drinking.”
“When I'm working, I'm focusing on work instead of thinking, hey, I should be with my family. And then when I'm with my family, I'm not focusing on all the work stuff I need to get done. So it's allowing me to compartmentalize better, which has actually seemed like it's created time. And that's been magical.”
“Knowing and understanding your gaps might be even more important than knowing where your skill sets are, especially in a leadership role.”
“You just don't care what they're going to do anymore. You just have to be a part of that magic.”
“One of our investors, Martin Casado, coined a term called market annealing. It differs from product-market fit in that you're trying to not only shape the product, but also shape the market and educate your buyers.”
“You have to help people understand that the impossible is now possible with AI. And you still need systems to turn possible into something that is practical and production ready and able to use at scale.”
“AI from a UI perspective is easy. The infrastructure to be able to process 9 million minutes of content is really, really hard. So we built the hard thing, and now it's about putting these things on top of it.”