A rep says "follow up on that" on a call, then buries it under five more calls and a late-night inbox. Three days later the deal's gone cold, but the CRM still says it's live. The manager forecasts off that.
The CRO forecasts off the manager. The board asks the CEO if anyone actually has a grip on the number. The whole thing was built on a promise nobody kept.

Adam Liska worked on the early Gemini models at Google DeepMind before leaving to close that gap. His company, airspeed, just raised a $20M Series A on a bet that "revenue execution" is the next real category, not another tool that logs calls and calls it intelligence.

Sam Jacobs traces the full arc with him: DeepMind to founder-led sales to the unglamorous work of turning a founder's instincts into a system a team can actually run.

What we get into:
Why "follow up on that" breaks the forecast chain from rep to CRO to board What "revenue execution" means, and why it isn't revenue intelligence with a new label
Whether you own the interface or hand it to a chat model and live as middleware
The Nashville lunch that became airspeed's first six-figure deal
The real sequence from founder-led to scalable: capture the data first, then build the playbooks
Owning your data instead of renting Salesforce's architecture
The modern Turing test, AI-native orgs, and where the back office is headed

Chapters:

00:00 Intro
00:44 From DeepMind to airspeed, and the $20M Series A
01:30 "Follow up on that" — the execution gap that breaks forecasts
04:00 What category is this? Revenue execution, defined
05:40 Headless vs. owning the interface
08:00 The origin story: leaving DeepMind in 2022
11:39 Founder-led sales and the Nashville lunch that closed a six-figure deal
13:18 The hard part: turning founder-led into a repeatable system
14:14 Why they recorded everything from day one
16:35 Owning your data, and where the source of truth lives
19:03 The playbook: data first, then hierarchical playbooks
20:52 Influences: the modern Turing test and AI-native orgs
23:37 Where to find airspeed
Try airspeed: goairspeed.com

SPOTLIGHT: The AI category GTM teams are about to converge on | Adam Liska, CEO & Co-Founder @ airspeed

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SPOTLIGHT: The AI category GTM teams are about to converge on | Adam Liska, CEO & Co-Founder @ airspeed