The Two Ways to Sell AI: Lighthouse or Landgrab?

There's a moment right now to go sell big software again. We're now looking at a different way of doing business entirely. What are the Lighthouse and Landgraab sales playbook? Here's the framework for evaluating. Which playbook should you be following? There's this very obvious one. Go after the very obvious companies companies here in San Francisco that probably have some sort of proof or social value associated with them. Or, like, go out and sell in Ohio. Find people who needed your solution. If you think about sort of the enterprise networking world in 2009, people thought we were crazy. Like, they had no lighthouse, because Cisco and HP had them all tied up. But what we could do is we could say, listen, we can configure, we can deploy faster, we're simpler to use. And that was very much a land grab strategy. Too few people are willing to pick up the phone and willing to get on the plane and willing to get, you know, in front of those customers right now because they feel like it sounds way more sexy to sell to JPMorgan Chase than to Shmesh Mishmoor Finn. I think the biggest mistake that I see founders make at an early stage, honestly, is just Today, Elena Burger sits down with a 16 z's Joe Schmidt and Andy McCall to unpack two competing go to market strategies, lighthouse versus land grab. Do you win a handful of high profile customers and use their credibility to unlock a market? Or do you find customers with existing budgets, prove the math, and capture as much of the market as quickly as possible? Drawing on today's AI companies and lessons from building the sales organizations at Samsara and Meraki, they break down how to know which game you're playing, when to switch strategies, and why sometimes the best sales advice is simply to stop strategizing and start selling. You can read Joe's article in the show notes. Welcome back to the a 16 z podcast. Today, we're getting into the single most expensive question an AI founder makes, how you sell. Joe Schmidt just wrote a piece called Lighthouse or Land Grab, which gets into the two dominant playbooks he's observed among enterprise AI startups. Joe, tell us about the piece in your own words. What are the lighthouse and land grab sales playbook? Yeah. And this this piece actually all stemmed back from an observation that I had actually driving up the 101 Freeway. Maybe this is three, four, five months ago. I can't remember. And you just realized that you have the same kind of two competing companies. Like, one's on one side of the freeway, and the other's on the other side of the freeway, and they're selling the exact same piece of software. And for some reason, they all have decided that the only relevant companies for this piece of software are in San Francisco and driving on the 101 Freeway. And then …