The Thread Podcast

Hosted by Justin Vandehey

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158

Latest episode

Oct 2026

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About the show

The Thread Podcast explores the future of enterprise sales in the era of AI. Hosted by Justin Vandehey, founder of Thread, we bring together top sales leaders, enablement pros, and innovators shaping how go-to-market teams grow and win. Each episode dives deep into what’s changing in sales—from real-time AI coaching to modern revenue systems of action—and features actionable insights from CROs, RevOps leaders, startup founders, and the technologists building the next generation of tools. Whether you’re scaling founder-led sales or leading a global GTM team, you’ll walk away with new strategies to improve seller performance, accelerate deal cycles, and leverage AI for growth. If you’re ready to think differently about sales execution and the future of GTM, follow The Thread and join the conversation.

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November 6, 2026Episode 15821 min

Compliance as an Enabler: Michelle Lewis (ex-Amex, Zelle, Trustly) on Onboarding, Agents, and Getting to Yes

Kicking off our fintech and financial services season, Justin sits down with Michelle Lewis , a compliance leader who has spent her career writing the rules for payment networks. Michelle started as a corporate lawyer in New York before spending more than a decade at American Express running global network governance and operating rules (including getting the network ready for Apple Pay). She then joined Early Warning as part of the team that brought Zelle to market, building the compliance framework and operating rules for the first real-time payments network in the US. Most recently she served as Chief Compliance Officer for the Americas at Trustly. In this episode: What “writing the operating rules” actually means day to day, and why they have to stay close to the product roadmap Building a network’s risk posture from scratch at Zelle vs. inheriting the machinery at Amex Consumer vs. business onboarding: why “is the business real?” is a harder question than “is the person real?” Where merchant onboarding friction really comes from (hint: it’s often internal handoffs, not regulation) How agents change the compliance playbook, and why they belong in your third-party risk management program The two questions to ask about every control: does it work, and is it actually mitigating the risk? Examples of compliance pushed too far, from beneficial ownership verification to redundant KYC/KYB across the industry What Michelle is building next as an independent advisor Michelle is now working with payments, fintech, and identity companies to turn risk and compliance into an enabler for innovation. Connect with her on LinkedIn. Hosted by Justin Vandehey, Co-Founder and CEO of Thread (thread.app).

October 23, 2026Episode 15722 min

PayFac as a Service: Why Attach Rate Beats Basis Points, with Caleb Avery (Tilled)

Caleb Avery started in payments at nineteen, knocking on doors in Greenville, South Carolina, selling terminals to small business owners. That run, followed by years of consulting and angel investing in vertical software, led him to found Tilled , the PayFac as a Service platform that gives software companies the economics and brand control of a payment facilitator without the registration, underwriting, audits, or compliance headcount. In this episode, Caleb breaks down why the two default paths for embedded payments are broken: handing everything to Stripe and giving up the economics, or becoming a registered PayFac and taking on liability that doesn't pencil until you're at massive scale. He explains the shift he watched firsthand, from one in twenty small businesses using vertical software to one in four, and why that changed where the opportunity sits. The core of the conversation is about what happens after the integration. Tilled has worked with hundreds of vertical software companies, and Caleb can usually tell on the kickoff call whether a launch will work. The signal is an owner. Everyone accountable is no one accountable. The technical integration takes two to three weeks (the record is four days); the hard part is pricing, positioning, onboarding, and sales enablement, and when those are an afterthought it shows up in attach rates. Caleb also shares how a Google Ads optimization system Tilled built for its own go-to-market, retuning campaigns every five minutes instead of monthly, became a product its enterprise partners now ask to buy. Plus what's next for Tilled: a white-labeled PayFac as a Service offering for banks, processors, and ISOs, paired with AI-powered lead generation. Follow Caleb on LinkedIn and learn more at tilled.com. Chapters 00:00 Intro: Caleb's path from door-to-door terminal sales at nineteen to founding Tilled 02:53 The insight: small business adoption of vertical software went from one in twenty to one in four 05:03 Why both paths are broken: giving the economics to Stripe vs. becoming a registered PayFac 07:48 What PayFac as a Service actually solves: brand control, onboarding, revenue, portability, no liability 08:36 The first 90 days: what separates partners who ramp from partners who stall 09:33 Everyone accountable is no one accountable: why a payments owner predicts success 10:46 Attach rate vs. basis points: the bigger lever is more dollars flowing through the platform 12:37 AI in payments GTM: how Tilled optimizes campaigns every five minutes instead of monthly 15:52 From internal tool to product: enterprise partners asking for the AI go-to-market engine 16:59 See you at Money20/20 17:14 What's next for Tilled: the enterprise strategy and white-labeled PayFac as a Service 18:10 Wrap Key takeaways Most vertical software companies start on Stripe, then hit scale doing millions a month in volume with zero payments revenue. Becoming a registered PayFac doesn't pencil until you're far beyond $5M a month, and even then it's a focus question. Tilled's integration record is four days; average is two to three weeks. The integration is the easy part. Chasing the lowest cost provider is a trap: the partner offering 100 percent splits won't pick up the phone when adoption stalls. The best launches have a named owner for pricing, messaging, onboarding flow, and sales training before day one. Links Caleb Avery on LinkedIn Tilled: tilled.com Thread: thread.app

October 16, 2026Episode 15629 min

"Frictionful" Payments and Why Your Money Should Slow Down Sometimes (with Michelle Beyo, Finavator)

Kicking off our Future of Finance series ahead of Money20/20, Justin sits down with Michelle Beyo , founder and CEO of Finavator , president of Open Finance Network Canada, and author of the newly launched Mastering the Future of Finance. Michelle spent twenty years in telco, online shopping, and prepaid before running WeChat's first QR payment pilot in North America and realizing the future of finance was being built somewhere else. She walks through why she quit her corporate job, what Money20/20 Rise Up had to do with starting her company, and how she organized the entire fintech landscape into a periodic table of nine elements across data, trust, and tech. Then it gets practical: - why Canada is one of only two markets without regulated open banking and why "a date and a mandate" matters more than the legislation itself. - Why she wants her payments to be frictionful, not frictionless, when real money is moving. - Why KYC has to be continuous and why "know your agent" is the next layer as AI starts transacting on our behalf. - And the advice she gives every fintech founder trying to land a bank: don't go there first. Michelle is moderating the agentic payments panel at Money20/20 (Tuesday, 10am, main stage) and signing books Monday at 10:45. Come find Thread at SU9 in Startup Alley! Chapters 00:00 Intro and the Future of Finance series 00:53 Twenty years in telco, online shopping, and prepaid 02:00 The WeChat QR pilot that changed everything 03:22 Money20/20 Rise Up and starting Finavator 04:42 The periodic table of finance: data, trust, tech 05:53 Open banking: what Canada got wrong and Brazil got right 11:28 A date and a mandate 13:19 Frictionful payments 14:27 KYC is not one and done; enter KYA 15:50 Personal AI agents and who owns your data 20:13 Selling to banks: don't make them your first customer 22:09 Where to find Michelle at Money20/20

October 9, 2026Episode 15529 min

3X, Then 3X Again: How AI Broke the Job Application (and How Willo Is Fixing It)

Hiring didn't break all at once. It broke one year at a time. This week on the Thread Podcast, Justin sits down with Euan Cameron, CEO and co-founder of Willo, the global candidate screening platform built to make hiring faster, fairer, and more human. Euan walks through the year-by-year evolution from 2019 to today: remote work upending where companies hire, AI handing candidates a resume machine, employers responding with AI of their own, and application volume tripling, then tripling again, until both sides stopped trusting each other. They dig into Willo's Insights product, which scores every candidate video against an employer-specific "blueprint" instead of chasing a perfect hire that doesn't exist, why interview cheating apps actively hurt the people using them, and what's coming next: a verified global community of candidates matched to employers at a scale that wasn't physically possible before AI. Euan grew up in Scotland and has been building companies for eighteen years. Willo is his fourth startup and the first he's ever raised for, launched in the middle of COVID and now spanning forty people across twelve time zones. Check out Willo at willo.video (fifteen-day free trial, every feature unlocked) and connect with Euan on LinkedIn. TimeChapter 00:00 | Intro: why hiring is a staring contest right now 00:38 | Meet Euan Cameron: Scotland, dyslexia, and eighteen years of building things that pay invoices 02:45 | Forty people, twelve time zones: building a COVID-era global team 04:55 | The year-by-year breakdown: how 2019 to 2026 rewired hiring 07:30 | 2024's turning point: 3X application volume, fewer jobs 09:00 | 2025's trust problem: everyone looks and sounds the same 10:06 | Willo Insights: video applications and the employer blueprint 12:40 | There's no perfect candidate (and founders are unemployable) 15:53 | The Disco "Backdoor" story and why cheating apps backfire 18:30 | What's next: verified communities and many-to-many matching 21:51 | Upskilling for the new job market 23:32 | Where to find Euan and Willo 24:10 | Justin's takeaways and sign-off

September 18, 2026Episode 15423 min

Go-to-Network is Eating Go-to-Market, with The Swarm's Olivier Roth

Cold outreach is dying....so what replaces it? This week Justin sits down with Olivier Roth, co-founder & Chief Growth Officer of The Swarm, the go-to-network platform backed by HubSpot Ventures ($10M raised to date). The Swarm started as a network recruiting tool in 2021, but customers kept pulling it toward sales, and a category was born: go-to-network, using the combined relationships of your team, investors, advisors, and customers as the first motion in your funnel instead of going cold. Olivier breaks down what go-to-network means in practice, how The Swarm became the "who knows who" data layer under tools like Clay and HubSpot, and the unfiltered lessons from dogfooding their own product, which now drives 30–40% of their pipeline. Key points: From recruiting to a category. The Swarm launched as network recruiting; design partners kept asking to use it for sales. The term "go-to-network" was coined by Mac Reddin (Commsor, which The Swarm has since acquired). Go-to-network, defined. Before spending on ads or cold sequences, look at who your investors, advisors, partners, customers, and team already know. It's full-funnel — warm intros at the top, endorsements to unstick deals, even retention. It's not a volume game. The opposite of 10,000 intro requests. It's finding the needles in the haystack that were always there, with a data layer that finally makes it scalable. The new SDR morning. A Slack or email digest: "here are three intros you can ask for today." Phone calls move to the afternoon. The ecosystem play. Clay tables run the workflow; The Swarm powers the data underneath. CRMs are customers, distribution partners, and via HubSpot's MCP you can ask in plain language: "find intros to unstick my deals that have been sitting 90 days." Dogfooding lessons. 30–40% of Swarm pipeline comes from their own motion. What works: short lists of 5–10 names (never a single yes/no ask), a once-a-month rhythm, and building process + incentives around the tech. What flopped: their own cold email experiments and LinkedIn ads. Try it yourself. The Swarm's MCP connector is live on Claude and ChatGPT: "who do we know at this company?" is one query away. Connect: Olivier Roth on LinkedIn · The Swarm at theswarm.com

July 31, 2026Episode 15318 min

The Voice Layer for Emerging Markets: Aethex AI's Co-founder and CTO Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa

Most voice AI startups today are thin wrappers on someone else's models. Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa went the opposite direction and built the entire stack. In this episode, Justin sits down with the CTO and co-founder of Aethex AI, who along with co-founder Mariama is building the voice layer for emerging markets across Africa and the Middle East. This is the AI that banks, call centers, and telcos use to reach the customers a human team never could, and it's already running 17,000 calls a day. Ayooluwa takes us through her path from Caltech physics to Meta to Stanford to founder, and unpacks the decision that defines the company: in her markets, you aren't competing against other software, you're competing against the cost of human labor. That single reality is why Aethex owns everything from data collection to model serving to deployment, so they can pull every lever on cost and latency. We also get into why building for the harder market first reveals things a Western-first founder never sees, how the forward deployed engineer became their most valuable role, and why in a market this new, what you're really selling is trust. A conversation about infrastructure, conviction, and betting on the markets everyone else overlooked.

June 12, 2026Episode 15238 min

The Scarcity of Being Human: Catherine Blackmore, Oracle's Group VP of Customer Programs and Employee Success on CS in the Age of Agents

Catherine Blackmore has spent nearly two decades building the programs that wrap around technology, from the early days of customer success in 2007 to her current role as Group VP of Customer Programs and Employee Success at Oracle . In this episode she sits down with Justin to unpack what the discipline got right, what it got wrong, and what survives the shift to AI. Catherine makes the case that the high touch model was right all along. It buys a company time to build its moat. But the obsession with the golden record, bridging every data silo, and the red, yellow, green health score was a costly detour, because customers live in their own tools and every account ends up yellow anyway. From there the conversation turns to the question on everyone's mind. If agents can scale the work, what is left for humans? Catherine's answer is that human connection becomes the scarce, valuable thing, and the next generation of CS leaders will manage teams of agents while doing the relational work no agent can fake. She also reframes customer advocacy as the true end state of customer success, the double funnel where your strongest customers become your most believable salespeople. She closes with the career advice she is giving her son as he enters a reshaped workforce. Adaptability beats raw talent, the sum of your experiences equals your existence, and you should always watch the game within the game. What we get into: The high touch model and defending the moat Why the golden record and the red, yellow, green health score never delivered Human connection as the new scarcity model The CSM of the future leading a team of agents Customer advocacy and the double funnel Outcomes over seats and consumption Career advice for the next generation entering an AI-shaped workforce Guest: Catherine Blackmore, Group Vice President of Customer Programs and Employee Success, Oracle

May 22, 2026Episode 15127 min

Your Next Role Won't Be Posted, It'll Be Whispered — Andy Mowat

Andy Mowat has run RevOps at four unicorns, and between every role he's gone out and built something new. His latest is Whispered , an AI platform that helps top GTM execs build their careers through shared insights, warm introductions, and access to the roles that never get posted. In this episode, Andy and Justin get into why the entire GTM tech stack is heading for a two-year rebuild, what the move to a data-warehouse-first model means for RevOps teams, and why smaller companies are suddenly more nimble than the enterprise. Andy shares hard-won lessons from scaling Culture Amp, including the speed-to-lead system he built around time-critical leads and the market-maturity question he buried in the win-loss forms. They also dig into whether the fractional exec wave is real, why thoughtful gifting and distinctive events still beat automated outbound, and what it actually feels like to run a proactive job search at the VP level for the first time. A candid conversation between two friends about category strategy, positioning, and building a career in go-to-market when the ground keeps shifting. Buzzsprout Chapter Markers 00:00 — Intro: how Justin and Andy met around Culture Amp 01:40 — Andy's background: RevOps at four unicorns, and why he keeps building 03:30 — Founders as a hiring profile, and the trap of "ambiguous roles" 05:30 — Rebuilding the GTM tech stack: data warehouse first, the semantic layer, and two years of turmoil 07:00 — The give-to-get ratio and why AI-era outbound still comes down to better emails 08:30 — Strategic gifting, distinctive events, and the Wisconsin business school cold open 11:00 — Podcasts as relationship engines, not just content 11:30 — Inside Culture Amp: 180 events a year and the speed-to-lead system 13:00 — The multi-prospect demo experiment, and the market-maturity question that predicts a category's breakout 14:45 — The fractional exec wave: real shift or euphemism for "between jobs" 16:15 — Why early-stage marketing needs people to "grok what you do" before top of funnel 18:00 — What's next for Whispered: the network, the community, and the roles that get whispered

May 8, 2026Episode 15024 min

You Can't Read the Label from Inside the Bottle

Justin sits down with Nils Vinje , business growth guide and longtime customer success leader, to talk about the single biggest thing holding most growing companies back: everything still depends on the CEO. Nils spent the early part of his career on the leading edge of the customer success movement — convincing his first employer to ditch the "account manager" title back in 2011 — and has since coached hundreds of CS and CX leaders through the challenge of making their function legible to the rest of the organization. These days he works with CEOs and their leadership teams using the Pinnacle system, a five-principle framework built around people, purpose, playbooks, performance, and profit. In this conversation, Nils and Justin get into what running a CX org teaches you about leadership that no other function can, how to read the label from outside the bottle, and why the hardest decisions in any company are usually the ones everyone already knows need to be made. He also shares what he'd ask anyone standing at a crossroads in their career — and why the answer has nothing to do with money. Chapters [00:00] Intro and What Nils Does Now [01:42] What Leading a CX Org Teaches You About Leadership [03:30] The Single Biggest Challenge Every CS Leader Faces [05:01] Who Nils Works With and When to Bring in Outside Help [07:08] The Pinnacle System — Five Principles for a Well-Oiled Machine [09:38] Delivering Hard Truths with Grace [11:00] The People Problem Most CEOs Won't Solve [13:08] Why Being Inside the Bottle Kills Objectivity [14:29] The First Question Nils Asks Anyone at a Career Crossroads [16:25] What's Next for Nils and the Growth Bottleneck Blueprint [18:34] Never Stop Adding Value

April 24, 2026Episode 14921 min

From Cisco to IBM: How Professional Services Became the Most Important Role in Enterprise Tech w/ Sanjay Pal, WW VP of Software Professional Services at IBM

Justin sits down with Sanjay Pal , Worldwide VP of Professional Services at IBM, to explore what it really takes to lead services at global scale and why the role is more strategically important now than ever before. Sanjay draws on his journey from Cisco to Accenture to IBM to break down what has fundamentally changed about services delivery in the AI era, and what has stayed the same. He shares how IBM thinks about standardizing delivery across 16 global markets without sacrificing client experience, why the forward-deployed engineer model is gaining momentum, and how professional services leaders need to evolve from deployment executors into trusted business advisors. He also shares a personal story about his father, who wrote 52 books with pen, paper, and a stack of research clippings, and what that means for what's possible now. Chapters [00:00] Intro and Sanjay's Path to IBM [02:33] What's Changed in Services, and What Hasn't [05:00] How AI Amplifies Delivery Without Replacing Judgment [08:01] Standardization vs. Customization at Global Scale [10:38] The Evolving Role of the Services Leader [12:44] Forward-Deployed Engineers and Leading with Services [15:02] Breaking Down Silos Across Pre-Sales, Implementation, and Post-Sales [16:05] What's Top of Mind Heading into 2026