Mona Akmal, CEO of sales intelligence platform Falkon, is the outspoken co-founder behind an emerging leader in a hot space. Mona migrated to the United States at age 20 with a CS degree and little else. She had an impressive 12-year run as a product leader at Microsoft where she helped scale OneDrive and Office. She subsequently led product and technology organizations at places like Code.org and Amperity. Two decades later, Mona’s the CEO of Falkon AI, an intelligence platform for go to market teams. Falkon recently raised $16M from a group of A-list investors that includes Greylock and Madera among others.

Listen and learn...

1. Why Mona's philosophy revolves around two words: "efficiency" and "excellence" 2. What makes a standout sales rep great. 3. How do find signal in noisy sales and marketing data 4. How many touches are required from stage one to closing a B2B deal 5. How to fix the CRM data hygiene problem 6. Why econometrics approaches perform better than machine learning to solve the "small data problem" 7. Why "everyone needs to be coached and nobody needs to be managed" 8. Mona's (legendary) mental health advice to entrepreneurs

References in this episode...

Barr Moses • from Monte Carlo on AI and the Future of Work Derek Steer • from Mode on AI and the Future of Work Peter Fishman • from Mozart Data on AI and the Future of Work Stephen Messer • from Collective[i] on AI and the Future of Work Kamal Ahluwalia • on AI and the Future of Work Leading scientists fear AI could lead to nuclear war by the end of the century