Episode 14

Why AI Agents Belong In Systems Budgets, Not People Costs

Michael Grinberg

the RevOps Shop

Michael Grinberg, founder and CEO of the RevOps Shop, has a stark take on AI in organizations: agents are systems, not teammates, and they belong in your systems budget, not your people costs. After six years building talent density at HubSpot and now scaling a revenue operations firm across borders, Grinberg has learned that the future of hiring isn’t about templating people or treating AI like headcount. It’s about finding humans with unbreakable grit and using technology to amplify what they do.

What you’ll learn

  • Why traditional employee templating fails and how to adjust expectations to match individual journeys instead
  • The highest-leverage method for turning employees into high-agency owners by managing outcomes and stepping away completely
  • How to design a secondary culture organizational chart using social pods to build a fabric of remote connectivity
  • Why you should mandate that entry-level remote hires become the squeaky wheel to extract necessary context from busy executives
  • The financial framework for evaluating AI integration by keeping agents strictly in systems budgets rather than people costs
  • Why the traditional hiring process is breaking due to fake profiles and how a live screen share test exposes real capability
  • Using life adversity and immigration as a core behavioral heuristic to identify unbreakable grit during interviews

Don’t Template People. Adjust Your Expectations Instead.

The instinct to standardize is strong in growing companies. You build a playbook. You apply it to everyone. Grinberg has watched this fail repeatedly. The real work is understanding that every person’s journey with your company is different. Instead of forcing fit, a leader’s job is to figure out what makes each person tick, then shape expectations around that reality.

This doesn’t mean lowering standards. It means being honest about the gap between what a candidate shows you and what they’ll actually become. That gap is always there. Your job is to close it through relationship, psychological safety, and clear feedback in the moment. The alternative is burnout and turnover.

We’re obsessed with templating in business, but it rarely works to template people. Every employee’s journey is unique and individual.

Michael Grinberg, RevOps Shop

Ownership of Outcomes, Then Get Out of the Way

The highest-leverage move for building founder mentality across your team is giving people ownership of outcomes, not activities. Be specific about the goal. Provide fast feedback early. Then step back completely. The moment your team delivers, it’s their win. Not yours.

This works because smart people with agency want to leave their fingerprint on the work. They want to solve the problem their own way. When you remove yourself from the execution phase, they own the result. That ownership compounds. It builds the muscle of self-directed work that defines high performers. One CEO removed all one-on-ones from his calendar to create this exact dynamic—forcing teams to own their outcomes without constant oversight.

When you’re getting the outcome, that’s when you completely step away. Your team delivers it. It’s their success. It’s not yours.

Michael Grinberg, RevOps Shop

Two Org Charts: One for Work, One for Culture

Most companies draw a single organizational chart rooted in business outcomes and KPIs. Grinberg draws two. The first layer is the operational structure needed to hit strategic objectives. The second layer is a culture org chart. These are small pods organized around interests, shared background, or just affinity. A Brazil-based team might form a “Latam pod.” An onboarding trio might call themselves “The Three Squeaky Wheels.” The names are fun. The purpose is real.

This second layer creates fabric in remote environments that mandatory Zoom happy hours never will. When someone is new to the company, especially an intern joining remotely for the first time, these pods serve as a connective tissue. They reduce isolation. They make the person feel part of something beyond their job description. For distributed teams across time zones and countries, this matters more than most leaders admit.

The culture org chart creates a fabric of connectivity in a remote environment that I can never achieve by telling people to bring a beer to a Zoom happy hour.

Michael Grinberg, RevOps Shop

Entry-Level Remote Hires Must Be the Squeaky Wheel

When Grinberg’s first intern, Doto, started working remotely, Grinberg did something counterintuitive. He told him to call, email, and text relentlessly. Don’t take silence personally. It’s not rejection. It’s a CEO managing chaos. Your job is to be the squeakiest wheel because the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

This reframes the remote onboarding challenge. You can’t give a remote junior employee structured hours without justifying it to the whole company. But you can empower them to extract context by being relentless. It puts agency back in their hands. It teaches them how real work gets done in chaotic organizations. And it ensures they get the context they need despite a busy executive’s calendar.

AI Agents Go in Systems Budget, Not People Budget

This is where Grinberg’s thinking diverges sharply from most growing companies. AI sales agents will never replace humans due to the accountability problem, but they are not teammates either. They don’t go on the org chart. Most critically, they don’t go in your people cost line. They go in systems.

This is more than accounting. It’s a frame that prevents magical thinking. When you put AI in people costs, you start treating it like headcount. You assign it a pod. You imagine it collaborating. You justify its existence the way you’d justify a human hire. That’s backwards. Agents are tools that amplify human capability. They live in the same budget as infrastructure, software licenses, and platforms. The moment you put them in people costs, you’re setting yourself up to rationalize replacing headcount, which is a different conversation entirely.

Agents are systems. Are you putting the agents into the people cost or the systems cost? They’re not teammates.

Michael Grinberg, RevOps Shop

Screen Share Test Beats Phone Screen Every Time

Fake profiles are now table stakes. Hiring is broken in ways that weren’t broken five years ago. The traditional phone screen is theater. People are too good at playing the part. The solution is brutal and simple: ask them to share their screen and solve a hard business problem in real time.

Watch them move the mouse. See what apps they open. Look at their bookmarks. See what they search. Most candidates will have hidden their bookmarks by now, knowing this happens. That’s fine. You’ll see their real problem-solving approach, their technical fluency, their ability to think on their feet. You can’t fake that. A blank screen and a hard problem expose capability in minutes. No amount of interview prep survives that test.

Make them share their screen, a blank screen, and throw your hardest business problems at them. See how they move. See what apps they open. Look at their bookmarks. Look at what they do and do not show because sometimes you just got to see for yourself.

Michael Grinberg, RevOps Shop

Grit, Immigration, and Why Life Adversity Predicts Performance

Grinberg looks for people who have been through something. Athletes. Immigrants. Anyone who has faced real adversity and come out stronger. This isn’t sentiment. It’s signal. Grit is overused in hiring language, but it’s the most reliable predictor he’s found.

His own immigration story shaped this. His parents abandoned language, social fabric, contacts, and everything familiar to come to the US with nothing. That’s not a career risk. That’s the ultimate risk. Living through that kind of uncertainty, starting from nothing, building in a foreign language and culture shapes how you respond to business uncertainty. You don’t panic. You find a way. That mindset is worth more than technical chops in early hires. Grinberg uses immigration, adversity, and athletic backgrounds as screens because they answer a behavioral question without needing to ask it.

People that have been through some form of adversity, that know how to challenge themselves, that exemplify grit. It determines whether someone’s going to be successful when you don’t have complete information and you need to persevere.

Michael Grinberg, RevOps Shop

Global Talent Changed Everything. Miami Didn’t.

Grinberg started with a belief: build in the US with US-based folks. Six years at HubSpot changed that perspective. He watched great talent get hired across regions. None of it looked the same. That belief was wrong. When he started the RevOps Shop, he carried that lesson forward but doubted himself anyway. Imposter syndrome is normal when you’re building from scratch.

Then he hired globally through a talent partner. Andre Schmidt from Curitiba, Brazil became one of his best builders. Building with Latin American talent proved that great work happens everywhere. What shifted wasn’t the work or the outcome. What shifted was Grinberg’s willingness to build systems that made remote, global teams feel connected and part of something real. The culture pods. The social structures. The relentless onboarding push. That’s what makes global teams work.

Miami is his home now. But he’s honest about the trade-off. The action in AI and SaaS isn’t happening in Miami. It’s in San Francisco and New York. He knows it. He watches it. He builds anyway. Because his people are everywhere, and location matters less than connection.

Key takeaways

  • Stop templating people and start adjusting your expectations to each person’s actual journey and capability.
  • Build ownership by giving clear outcomes, providing fast feedback, then completely stepping away from execution.
  • Design two org charts: one for operational outcomes, one for culture and connection, especially in remote teams.
  • Require entry-level remote hires to be the squeaky wheel and relentlessly extract context from busy leaders.
  • Put AI agents in systems budget, never in people budget, to avoid magical thinking about headcount replacement.
  • Validate real capability with a screen share test and a hard business problem instead of relying on phone screens.
  • Hire for life adversity and grit as a signal for how someone will respond to uncertainty in your business.
  • Global talent works if you build the culture systems to support it, not because location doesn’t matter.
  • Benchmark hiring practices against real capability tests; fake profiles and polished phone screens no longer distinguish good hires from poor ones.
Full transcript
Luiz Cent

Do you see a future where you have AI doing the work that actual employees and workers e- members were doing before?

Michael Grinberg

We have AI agents doing the work that people were doing previously today. Agents are systems. To me, they fall under the systems bucket. I also like to think about the P&L. You're putting the agents into the people cost. Are you putting them into the systems cost? They're not teammates. I don't say, "Hey, you really like to respond in this tone and you and this tone, so you three hang out. That's not what I do." How do you hire those folks that are equally as invested?

Luiz Cent

I think this is who we hire. I'm Luis sent, your host, and today I'm joined by Michael Greenberg, founder and CEO of the Revot Shop. Mike. Yeah.

Luiz Cent

Welcome to Who We Hire.

Michael Grinberg

Hey, thanks Louise. It's a pleasure to be here.

Luiz Cent

Really excited to have you on. So, you know, Michael worked his way up through HubSpot, worked in Boston, worked in New York, and now is living in Miami with his wife and two kids, uh, and running the RevOps shop. And I I saw on LinkedIn they had a an amazing culture event, invited the whole team to offsite in Miami uh in Winwood. Um and Mike's built an incredible culture. So we have him here today to to go and talk more about that. How he thinks about hiring decisions um and how he's built the culture at RevOps Shop. Uh roles are changing, your industry is is changing. So, when you're thinking about hiring in today's market with AI, um you know, what attributes are you looking for in candidates and and what values do you look for? Uh Mike,

Michael Grinberg

yeah, uh appreciate the question, Louise. Yeah, I think it's a fascinating time to both be on the hiring side and also uh looking to for anybody for any job seekers, candidates that are looking to get placed. I think there's a time uh right now it's a time of uh ambiguity, a lot of unknowns. I think that people are definitely doubting themselves and I think it's not only the people looking for jobs, it's the people that are looking to hire employers, people in our position, right, the two of us on this call. And you you asked me a lot there. So, I'm going to try to go one by one if that's okay with you. And at the core of your business are people and at the core of my business are people too. Uh what kind of people do we look for and what are the things that we can't really coach, we can't really train but we can screen for. So a little bit about my founding journey. A lot of my ethos and the way that I see business, the way that I see relationships, the way that I see growing a company, creating enterprise value is really built on uh understanding and finding people that are going to stay the course even when times get tough. And what are the heruristics? Because it's not always peachy. Uh you deal with a lot of uncertainty in business, in your career. Uh lots of things happen to us that are outside of our control. Uh a lot of it a lot of it is how we respond to it, right? We can choose to ingest the information again both on the candidate and on the employer side, but it's really about how we react to it and and what we do to solve for it. And the people that tend to do the best, at least at the revop shop, are people that have went through some form of adversity in their life. People that know how to challenge themselves. People that exemplify I know one of the most overused words in candidate screening is grit, but it's paramount. It it determines whether someone's going to be successful, whether you know when you don't have complete information, you don't have all the facts, you need to be able to persevere. Uh myself, I'm an immigrant, but I grew up in the United States. uh learning a new culture uh adapting a new culture, learning a new language and incorporating that every single day shaped my world view in a way that has led me to perceive hiring differently. So anytime that I see uh immigrants, anytime that I see people that have uh I think athletes are a good example that is pretty popular and common in business too. But even more so than that, it's just prove to me or prove to my team that you've been able to figure something out and you've uh you've dealt with something tough and and you came out in the other end of it uh a better person and a better professional and that's who we look for.

Luiz Cent

So, you know, you unpacked a lot there with grit. Is that because you want them to be on founder mode? you want like what what is grit and how you get somebody to have this passion for the business like you like you're you're a founder of this this business. How do you get how do you how do you hire those folks that are equally as invested?

Michael Grinberg

Everybody that's a great question. How do you hire uh how do you hire people? How do you find people that are equally as invested? I think it's unrealistic to expect everybody to be on founder mode. Let's just put that out there right now. I'm sure you would agree.

Michael Grinberg

I think that's a tall ask and a tall order. I think it's more about every candidate's journey with a company. Every employees journey with a a company is unique and individual. And we're obsessed with templating in business, but it rarely works in my experience to template people.

Michael Grinberg

Wow. Yes. So from my perspective, it's about having a really really tight and open relationship with everybody that works on your team and the people that you're evaluating to bring onto your team. making them feel psychologically safe, making them feel comfortable, letting them know that, hey, we are evaluating you for you, not who we think you are right now. There's always going to be a gap between what a person is able to put in front of you and what you think they are going to be able to put in front of you. It's never going to be a perfect onetoone match. It's on you as a leader, as the person that's doing the hiring, that's doing the training, doing the development to figure out what's going to make that person tick and then shape, use that to adjust your template so that expectations on both sides can be met. Now, how we get people to think like owners or founders, I think the highest leverage thing you could do is to give them ownership of outcomes. It's okay to be particular about details. It's okay to provide fast and furious feedback in the moment to get to say, "Hey, this is what I want you to get to, and I'm just giving you this feedback so that you can help get there faster." But when it happens, when you're getting the outcome or you feel like you're close to the outcome, that's when you completely step away because that way when your team delivers it, they own it. It's their success. It's not yours. Uh they make

Luiz Cent

a way away. I I I want to dive a little deep deeper in that because this

Michael Grinberg

I think it's I think it's uh let's talk about something that you and I go through every single day. Entrepreneurs watching this, listening to this, business leaders, people that are leading teams, you have a leadership edict or you have something that you need to get accomplished. You know that there is a way that exists. There are multiple paths to getting to an outcome. We can use the canonical sales example. Here's a number. Go hit it. I don't care how you hit it. I don't care what you do. Just figure out and get there. Uh you have to provide some structured guidance. But people are going to rally around the goal when they smart people with high agency that care are going to want to get there in their own way. They want to make you feel their unique sauce, right? They want to leave their imprint, their paw print on different parts of the company. And in order for you to give them that latitude, sometimes that means, hey, here's a bunch of information up front on how I think you should go do this. But now I'm going to step away and you and I, we're going to check in in a week and we're just going to talk about the outcome and you're going to tell me exactly how you got there and why you completed it and what it was that made you special that that got it done.

Luiz Cent

I love it. I love it. So going back to your journey at HubSpot. I mean you saw extreme growth there. Um and I you know recently we had uh Ilio Narciso on the pod and he was at AWS uh and then went and founded um his company Scalstack and he you know he he mentioned something interesting where there was a bar raiser role and and this was one of his roles um you know not an official role but a and I want to implement this in our company where this bar raiser can reject the hiring manager's decision. they have veto power. Um and you know he he mentioned as Amazon started scaling really fast unfortunately that the the bar got lowered um as it often does. How you know what did you see a really fast growth at HubSpot? Did that bar really remain there? What what did you know being there for over six years teach you about hiring that you've now implemented at at Revox? Yeah, I think another great question. I haven't thought about it too strongly before this call. When I think about my time at HubSpot, that was the place that taught me that great talent uh can come in all different shapes and sizes and it can come from all different corners of the world. I sat next to the LAM team. So, a couple of my formative years in the small business segment, there was a mix of USbased, US focused direct salespeople. That's the team that I was on at that particular moment in time. And we sat I sat uh right next to the LAM team and the direct sales and partner sales.

Luiz Cent

So, you watched them get bent. You watched this whole team get built.

Michael Grinberg

I watched the thing get built. And I also just got to appreciate that not every great rep is going to look like you or look like me or look like the person that is watching this or consuming this or listening to us. Well, between us both, we got half the world cover. We got Russia, Brazil.

Luiz Cent

Yeah. Yeah. Don't forget about the United States. Yeah. Best country. Uh absolutely.

Michael Grinberg

250 years. Let's go.

Michael Grinberg

Yeah. and and and I think that uh in terms of I think you nailed it with uh the uh Ilas example and the bar does get lower over time because companies need to scale, they need to grow. I think it's about you know that there's something to be said about building systems and processes to kind of help

Luiz Cent

bridge that gap a little bit. We're not going to go there right now.

Michael Grinberg

We we Yeah. Yeah. We can. But I I think the question to really answer is and and I I also want to tie this back in a way to uh what Latim sent brings to the table for the RevOps shop because you and I have known each other for quite some time and you know a little bit uh kind of about my mindset when I started the business. My number one goal was, hey, I want to build an amaz I want to build an amazing company uh in America uh with US based folks. I want to help a 100,000 companies grow their sales and marketing operations to a point where they can be generating demand, they can be capturing demand, and they can make sales people's lives easier. That's always been the dream.

Luiz Cent

And you're well on your way.

Michael Grinberg

Yeah, on my way. But there was a part that I got wrong, which is the talent is truly global. In hindsight, it seems obvious, but it was a combination of that HubSpot experience where I learned that great talent comes from all corners of the universe. And now I'm living that experience as a result of working with Latam send. And the the canonical kind of first proof point example is you helped us staff Andre Schmidt who's from Kurichiba in Brazil now currently living in Florida and uh he's uh he's been a fantastic contributor over the past year. He's helped us level up our business. He's in a builder role supporting some of our most complex and technical engagements. He's helped us untangle some of the most complex hornets nests that our clients have in terms of data uh people process. He's made sense of a lot of really complicated uh business scenarios and he's been a fantastic culture contributor. I mean, uh, when you look at it and and this can be a surprise, I think, to some of the people watching this or or if you're considering hiring outside of the US, like people across the world, they've watched more episodes of The Office than you. They know the mascots of sports teams that you don't know. They can rattle off the US pop top 40 and you can't.

Luiz Cent

Uh I love I love that perspective. you reminded me when I was in in college, I you know was in a a fraternity and my fraternity brothers made me watch every episode of Seinfeld uh before they would hang out with me. They're like, "No, we're we can't hang out until, you know, you go through these these all these seasons." Um and it it really is fascinating. It's, you know, um like when when I look at our team, I I I see the exact same thing. like you know some of them like I I don't watch American football. I'm like some of them do, right? But I've been living in the the the US for 30 years. So um I I love that example. Um so I I I want to unpack that because you know I honestly I didn't think that you were going to, you know, hire internationally. You're very adamant on US only, US only. Um you know because of the service you deliver to your clients the level the level that the talent needs to be you know um they need to be client facing essentially you know for forward deployed engineers uh for for for your clients client facing

Luiz Cent

nowadays. Yeah. Uh, and you know, we we we talked about this before where it you you mentioned that you didn't think you had built the the culture that could keep international talent happy and engaged. Um, but it it sounds like you've been able to do that. So, what you know, one, why did you doubt yourself at at first? and and uh you know what what system did you set up to and like create this where now somebody you know living 8 hour flight uh away can contribute to your culture

Luiz Cent

is it eight hours it's good to know it's eight hours to palo and then another like one or two to to Floripa from uh to Paulo

Michael Grinberg

okay amazing yeah uh I doubted myself because I think doubt is normal for anybody that's starting something from scratch, uh the the impostor syndrome, the doubting yourself, I think that's common. That theme has been documented very well uh in business and it's hard to say when exactly it flipped. I think it was just a classic entrepreneurial, hey, I'm going to take a risk and I'm going to try to do something different. and it was the the level of uh comfort with you in terms of what we're doing to help create that space. I mean, a thing that I've done recently that has been fun, that I think has been wellreceived is, you know, when you have a small but growing business, you're really trying and you're really trying to figure out how to set up the organizational chart. And designing an organizational chart needs to be rooted and grounded in business realities, KPIs, outcomes, strategic objectives. But what about the org chart within the org chart? So I almost think about it as think of a two-layer org chart where you have the business foundation and the core responsibilities that need to be executed to achieve a strategic outcome. But then on top of that, you have the c culture org chart. And that the way that I think about it is imagine you're drawing circles around little groups of people. You can align them based on interests, cultures, background. So, a thing that we've been doing is uh I had our we have two folks currently in LAM and I just put them in a group DM and I say all right guys it's Wednesday totally unprompted guys it's Wednesday by the end of the day today I need a LAN team name and it's just it has to be fierce and fun or make Make it whatever you want, but make it epic. And just to expand on that point a little bit, we also have an intern that started with us a couple weeks ago. Uh his name is Doto and he's working with Isabelle on my team as well as myself to work our HubSpot partnerships, our net new business prospecting. He's doing calling, learning uh value propositions. And there's a you're a CEO of a growing company. When you share your calendar with your friends, you just let them look at it and you just flash it. They probably have many panic attacks. They're like, "What? What do you

Luiz Cent

Yeah, exactly. It's always jarring to see it for the first time and it's another thing to live it. And I tell these culture-based teams or or I tell these little kind of pods and and the pods again I think the thing that I want to stress is culturally they don't have to be organized around the work. They can be organized around anything you want. So you can have a work team culture like an operational culture but then you can also have that like that social culture, right? And I think uh one of the thing and and and I gave the example around the social culture with the Latam team, but then the other example that I'm going to give is around the operational culture. So Isabelle, do and myself were a pod. Uh doto is 21 and starting his first kind of formative uh real business experience. And I tell him, "Hey man, look at this calendar. Look at all the stuff I got going on every single day. You can never have a successful new hire, whether they're an intern or a senior executive or a CEO, without a proper onboarding. They need to download context. We give executives a ton of grace, I think, in that respect. But when you have people that are entering the workforce for the first time, it could be hard to justify creating the structured hours that are necessary.

Luiz Cent

Yeah. And they're doing it remotely, right? So he's not even going into an office. Like my my first job we're in an office.

Michael Grinberg

Oh yeah. The remote thing is a whole other animal without a doubt. And I think this ties directly into that. I tell him said, "Look at this calendar. You want to learn? You've got to be the squeaky wheel. You've got to call me five times. You've got to email me three times. You've got to text me three times. And don't take it personally when I don't respond. It is not because I don't like you. It's not because I don't value you. It's not because I don't want to train you. It's my calendar is chaotic. Every day new things come up that I need flexibility to be able to respond to. So your job is to just make sure that you are the squeakiest wheel because the squeaky wheel gets the grease. So our team name is the three squeaky wheels. That's uh I don't know between El Salazan they they might uh they might get the sauce.

Luiz Cent

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I think LAM team name is cooler but even just to illustrate that it could be based around this ephemeral concept. I think it creates a fabric of connectivity in a remote environment in a crossborder multinational remote environment that I can never achieve by telling everybody, hey, you know, uh, bring a a beer to a 400 p.m. Zoom happy hour. How many of those can you do?

Luiz Cent

No. And they're exhausting.

Michael Grinberg

Yeah. Wear a funny hat. We do, you know, we do uh I have uh calling back to my HubSpot days. I'm going to give a shout out uh to William Oul who is uh senior director um at HubSpot now on his team. He encouraged us to uh wear Hawaiian shirts on Fridays. Uh my team doesn't always do it, but and I think I've become a little bit more liberal and loose with it, but on Fridays, I just try to show up with a funny shirt.

Luiz Cent

Our uh our head of go to market implemented suit up on Fridays for cold call. So everybody gets on the sales floor, throws a blazer on, glasses, and uh hits hits the floor. So, it's you got to be intentional about it and you got to make it fun, right? And it it sounds like that's, you know, something that you're doing extremely well. Um, and we can all learn from. I'm definitely going to implement that um right right after this is is those social pods and look at the Oregon social structure as well and and align people with common interest. So, uh thank you for that. That that is uh really incredible to see how you're accomplishing that. Um so when you're looking at you know you're very AI forward company uh you you know work with enterprise and are inside you know some of the top HubSpot accounts when you're looking at AI as employees AI agents um you know and then empowering your team to work with robots how how are they aligning in your org chart and are you you know in addition to operational and and culture um within the operational how are you placing AI agents?

Michael Grinberg

Yeah. Uh I am probably still earlier on in a lot of respects. Yes. We're very AI forward in terms of our internal operations, our external operations, the expectations of customers. As it relates to the org chart, I really don't view agents as working side by side with people in an org chart. I don't equate them. They're not the same things to me. Agents are systems. To me, they fall under the systems bucket. I also like to think about the P&L. Are you putting the agents into the people cost or are you putting them into the systems cost?

Luiz Cent

The systems. Yeah, because it's a general ledger, right? So, for me, uh I think that agents have to serve people. I mean, you and I both know this. Uh the way of hiring for us is breaking. When I started this company and I spoke to you and I said, "Luis, I need you to help me find someone fantastic if I'm going to try this thing with you." you and you said, "Hey man, don't even worry about it. We're going to We know that you have high standards. We know you really care about your clients. We know that you have these big HubSpot enterprise accounts. We know that you want to make sure that you're able to give them the level of service that's possible. And that's the only thing that can help you, you know, trust or get over the mental hump of being able to build your organization, your remote organization globally, not just within the US." Uh, you know, as I think about that, when I started, I really cared about finding someone that knows where to point and click inside of HubSpot, right? And and know where all the buttons are and know how to build all the workflows and know the various idiosyncrasies of particular property types and etc etc. So, it's really important that they delivered a complex project and we valued that at the beginning. We really did. But I think that shape is completely shifting uh because of AI. And I'm going to call back to an earlier thing that you said when you said I mean the the the stakes and the pressure I think are uh higher higher uh than ever. And and you can really think about a couple of elements here. A veteran executive you ask them what makes a higher stick. uh they're not going to tell you, oh well, they're supported by four AI agents in the ORC chart or they're supported, you know, they they've got a they're not going to say that. Um but they may say, oh well, they need to be AI fluent or they need to be AI forward and they've got to be able to show something like that upfront in the process. So I really think of them as working side by side but I think about you have to bring that capability uh if you want to come work here now there's no doubt

Luiz Cent

100% and it's uh I I mean I love that you mentioned like look at the P&L right they're not they're not in a work chart there are some companies that are doing that though they they are you know they they have an organization there's a hundred workers and 90 of them are are AI there's stdis there's There's uh Rob Rob in the you know AIA. Um do you see a future where you have AI doing the work that actual employees and workers you know team members were doing before?

Michael Grinberg

Yeah we have AI agents doing the work that people were doing previously today.

Luiz Cent

You're just not putting them in order.

Michael Grinberg

They're not teammates. I don't build social maps and skirples.

Luiz Cent

We don't put them in a pod and say, "Hey."

Michael Grinberg

Yeah. I don't say I don't say, "Hey, you really like to respond in this tone and you in this tone, so you three hang out."

Luiz Cent

That's not what I do.

Luiz Cent

So, as a, you know, founder that is growing this company, you're going on four years. Congrats. Um, you know, you you want to help a 100,000 businesses. Is that like where did that mission and and and vision come from?

Michael Grinberg

It grew up in sales. I like nice easy round numbers. No, I'm just kidding. Uh there's a little bit of truth to that. Absolutely. the it just comes from I think great entrepreneurs they want to make an impact before they decide to become an entrepreneur I'd venture to say that a really high percentage of them a really meaningful chunk of them before they decided to go into business the questions they were asking of course entrepreneurs care about money but outside of that I think it's how can I make the biggest possible impact on this amazing, beautiful floating rock that's flying and spinning through space dust. How can we leave our dent on the world and what speaks to us? And I think it's normal to consider other high agency uh careers. You want to be a doctor. Um you want to be an attorney. You want to be uh an investment banker, a strategic advisor to other corporations to help them improve and create enterprise value? Or you want to go be and you want to go be someone that goes out there builds something that changes the world in some meaningful way. And that meaningful way is doing a lot of lifting. And that's what helps us quantify that 100,000 company number. um you know there's uh probably a 100,000 companies at least that get started in the United States um every single year.

Luiz Cent

So we we both moved here um I I moved to America when I was seven. When when did you move?

Michael Grinberg

Uh well I moved to the States when I was uh two years old.

Luiz Cent

Two years old. Um so you're you know like America is obviously my favorite country. I'm rooting for them in the the World Cup right now.

Michael Grinberg

Oh, love it. Yeah, we believe that we will win.

Luiz Cent

I think so. I think so. The um the interesting thing though like you you mentioned you hired you know a lot of immigrants um and you you being an immigrant yourself. Um what like what kind of perspective does that bring to somebody who is is coming to America greatest country in the world to go and start a business to create the SpaceXes of the world to create you know we're in this AI boom who's who's dominating it you know anthropic um open AI the all the conferences are here everybody's moving to San Francisco from Europe not the other way around like What what makes America so great and like why, you know, why is an immigrant see that differently?

Michael Grinberg

Yeah, I think it's just uh there's just things you don't take for granted with the immigrant mindset. You know what reality is like. You know what life is like in in other places and you know that every day here is a gift. Every day here in the United States is a gift. Uh it's a privilege. Uh it's the greatest lottery ticket that you can possibly win.

Luiz Cent

Yeah, it literally is. Countries have lottery tickets to get here.

Michael Grinberg

Yep. Precisely. And I didn't even I can't even sit here and pretend that I was the one that put my ticket into the jar to be drawn. That entire uh journey is owed to my parents and my grandparents that decided that we're going to go out there and we're going to take the ultimate risk. You talk about entrepreneurship being a risk. That's not a risk. Immigration is a risk. It's the ultimate risk.

Luiz Cent

Yeah. Coming with nothing, right? Coming to a country with nothing, no contacts, no no.

Michael Grinberg

It's abandoning everything, you know. It's abandoning your language. It's abandoning your social fabric. It's abandoning the connections that you've spent years, like you said, building uh and saying that I'm going to start a new. I'm going to start from scratch. I'm going to delete my ego. I'm going to delete my expectations in hopes of a better future at some point with zero timeline. It's not like you get a Gant chart with all of the different uh specializations and disciplines that are required to help you complete your project and get to your end state. It's a project for the rest of your life. It's something you're working on for the rest of your life. uh mixing your energy, your love with uh and uh yeah, it's uh I that's really why I I think that being an immigrant gives me a unique perspective on what it means to build a business and therefore I look for people that again immigration stuff and I don't want people to walk

Luiz Cent

the only thing rad.

Michael Grinberg

Yeah, exactly. It's just a it's just ah heristic. It's a heristic. It's a factor that says there are behavioralbased questions that I do not need to ask you and do not need to drill you on in the interview process because your life experience solidifies the fact that you have this in spades and it just creates I think momentum and confidence at the start of a hiring process. And that's it.

Luiz Cent

I love it. You and you you built a company in New York. Um and then you moved to Miami. How has Miami been for the business? You've done a couple off sites there. Um and and you go into an office. You're in a beautiful workspace right now, but you work fully remote. So tell me a little bit about, you know, how how you structured a Miami move. um what why you go into this this beautiful industrious in Winwood uh and how uh and and how you bring everybody together every year and make it a vibe.

Michael Grinberg

I think that uh it's a great place for uh my family and and the lifestyle is enjoyable uh because of the weather. Uh that's pretty much the

Luiz Cent

put the top down on the

Michael Grinberg

Porsche. Yeah. as far as as far as the talent a center of talent density, it's not great for us. And in terms of building a better business, I constantly live in a state of duality because a lot of the world is happening in San Francisco and New York. And I just think a big part of business building that people do not that people are delusional about uh sometimes is your opportunity to build something really big like help a 100,000 companies be better version of themselves is going to be dependent on your ability to maximize the number of beneficial chance encounters that you are able to manufacture on a day-to-day basis. It's what's the quality of the conversation inside of a coffee shop. When somebody's running on the street and they drop their keys, who am I handing them back to? Uh there's a lot of different scenario and it's just because you're going to go through the motions of day-to-day life anyway and you really have to ask yourself where's the action happening. I think there's a ton of capital that's coming into Miami that and South Florida in general that is great for the local economy, great for the state of Florida, great for America but as an AI forward agency for discerning sales and marketing executives and teams. our talents again all over the place and some of the best people want to be around some of the other best people and it is a burden that I wear every day as an entrepreneur that I'm building here and and I also want to take a step back. I am not building my company. My people are building my company and they're all over the place. So, and we don't have anybody in San Francisco yet. Uh yet, but that will happen. And uh yeah, hopefully that's going to help us bridge the gap. I mean, there's really nothing else to say.

Luiz Cent

Yeah. I now that the tech and the AI uh wave is not happening on the Golden Coast and then and the uh the beaches in uh Miami. It's not happening here. It's happening elsewhere.

Luiz Cent

Yeah. Miami had its crypto run uh and you know when you look at venture capital invested it's it's so tiny uh in in comparison to San Francisco. We got direct flights. Uh Jet Blue from Fort Lauderdale. Nice.

Michael Grinberg

Anytime. Come anytime. You'd love to have you, Mr. Who We Hire.

Luiz Cent

Um Greenberg, if you could leave uh a founder going to build a team fully remote for your first time with, you know, one piece of advice as we start wrapping up here, what would you leave them with?

Michael Grinberg

Hiring is really important. Trust but verify. Make them share their screen, a blank screen, and throw your hardest business problems at them to see how they move. Make them move the mouse. Make them touch the keyboard. See what apps they open. Look at their bookmarks. Look at what they do and do not show on a screen because people are getting really good at initial phone screens and they're really good at presenting themselves in a way that makes them great or makes them appear great. Uh, but I don't think that you can really have the confidence you need in a world where there's, you know, fake profiles, fake jobs, all this kind of fake fake fake. You don't really know what's real anymore. Sometimes you just got to see for yourself.

Luiz Cent

It I love that example and I think that you you live inside our our sales team because when they're sharing their screen now, everybody knows to hide their bookmarks, make sure their presentation's clutch. Uh, so you've definitely leveled up our screen, Carrie.

Michael Grinberg

Leveled up our hiring. It works both ways.

Luiz Cent

Let's go. Let's go. Michael, thank you so much for being on who we hire. You the man. I appreciate you.

Michael Grinberg

It's an honor and a privilege to see you. Congratulations on all of the success. Uh, LAMS is a key part of what we do here at the RevOps shop. There's no world in which we scale to our ambition of helping the thousand 100 thousand companies uh prepare their sales and marketing operation for the AI era uh without the help of uh great partners like you uh and your entire team. So, thank you to you. It's a privilege to be here. I think you're doing a fantastic job with this podcast and and everything else. I learn from you every day, too. And uh uh excited for the next one. Thank you, my friend. Thank you, Michael. Really, really appreciate it. Where can folks go find you if they want to connect and uh get some help with their revops?

Luiz Cent

Uh well, uh they actually should just go to linkedin.com/sales-n-arketing. I I will challenge people and say I've got a pretty good vanity URL um on there. So, you go find us. They already go to our website, revops.shop. Yeah, just go to revops.shop.

Luiz Cent

Revops.shop. Michael Green, thanks for being on.

Michael Grinberg

Hey, thanks Luis. Appreciate it.