Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
AI presentation startup Gamma crossed $100M ARR profitably with 50 employees and no sales team, relying entirely on word-of-mouth growth. CEO Grant Lee now admits he should have added sales earlier despite the numbers. Here is what that scaling path looks like and why the typical 200-person playbook did not apply.
SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin says most VC pressure to increase burn rate and hire fast is wrong, especially from large funds. Founders already know their spending velocity by $6M ARR. The push often serves investor interests, not startup survival.
Vanessa Larco and Mercedes Bent are launching Premise, a consumer-focused early-stage fund. Worth noting: they are running it with startup discipline, formal investment memos, KPIs, and internal R&D. The thesis? Back technical founding teams building category-defining companies OpenAI will not kill.
Brian Le scaled Notion's sales compensation from 80 to 400+ commissionable employees, building the comp infrastructure that enables top AEs to earn over $1 million in a single quarter. He moved comp from broken spreadsheets to automated systems, treating it as go-to-market infrastructure, not an HR derivative.
A founding customer churned after nearly two decades because Adobe Marketo raised pricing instead of offering a retention discount. The case highlights a common trap: legacy vendors protect NRR metrics by letting at-risk customers walk, rather than discounting to buy time for product improvement. For account managers, the lesson is clear: renewal discounts work when migration friction is high, and losing a logo costs more than the NRR hit.
A major Telstra network outage disrupted businesses across Australia on Wednesday morning, affecting mobile calls, data, and payment processing. Sales teams relying on Telstra's network for CRM access and customer communication were cut off, with some businesses reporting they could not process card payments. The outage started before 5am AEST and affected Telstra customers plus resellers including Boost, Belong, and Aldi Mobile.
Australian DTC brand Who Gives A Crap pulled its AI-powered customer email system after it told a subscriber their toilet paper would jump from $1.38 to $2.90 per roll. The error highlights implementation risks as more sales and CX teams deploy automated communication tools without proper guardrails.
Richard White quit as WiseTech Global chair after 18 months, citing media attention as a distraction. Shares rallied 9% on the news despite a 75% decline over 12 months. White stays on as director and CIO. Worth noting: WiseTech runs $1.2B revenue with 97% recurring, employs 200-500 globally.
Jason Lemkin's SaaStr runs real revenue on custom AI agents. They didn't replace Salesforce, they went headless on top of it. That distinction explains why rolling your own CRM works for a three-person team but breaks at 40 reps, and why most sales orgs will keep paying for the platform even as agents handle the workflow layer.
Three years from first dollar to bigger than Salesforce. Anthropic's $47B annualized run rate in May 2026 already exceeds every pure-play software company globally except Microsoft. By year-end, tracking toward $70-90B, larger than the top 10 next-gen software companies combined.
Wagner Sustainable Fuels closed $2m from Qantas and Airbus plus $3.15m in ARENA grants to scale household waste conversion to aviation fuel. The Brisbane venture is targeting 104 million litres of SAF annually from its Toowoomba refinery, part of a $2.5bn infrastructure project with long-term airline offtake deals.
Melbourne unicorn Culture Amp is shedding 70 roles (9% of headcount), targeting middle management. Second cut since November. Revenue growth slowed to 10.8% in FY25, losses hit $91.5m over two years. New CEO Caroline Rawlinson calls it necessary restructuring.