Micael Oliveira

co-founder @amplemarket, @fermatslibrary. physicist. yc (w14). 👨🏻‍💻 in foggy SF 🌁

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

10 tips for Founders doing Sales (from a Founder) - a thread

I have a technical background (I am a Physicist by training) and had 0 experience when I first started doing sales. Here are the 10 most important things I learned since I started doing sales. 👇

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

We just launched the new Amplemarket University.

Videos, webinars and playbooks on what actually works for Sales, GTM and Revenue teams. As always amazing work by the @amplemarket team! 🖤

Great weekend binge watching. 😂

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

@nikitabier just searched "Jensen Huang". Got a stock tracker, a "Jensen Huang Snob," a fan account, and Jensen Tung. Did not get @JensenHuang - exact name, exact verified handle with 430k followers.

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

@santmun__ @coldemailchris thank you for the mention! keep it up @amplemarket team 🙌

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

@HenrM_Cruz 💯

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

the market is catching up to what the @amplemarket team has known for years. 👀

[Naval @naval]

When software was expensive - thin, horizontal, best-of-breed software stacks extracted rents across every business.

Now that software is cheap - value moves to vertically integrated businesses that deliver opinionated end-to-end experiences.

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

Wow 👏

[Track & Field Gazette @TrackGazette]

WORLD RECORD!!!!🤯🤯

Josh Kerr 🇬🇧 has just broken the World Record in the mile, running a blazing 3:42.66 in front of a home crowd at the London Diamond League!

He takes down Hicham El Guerrouj's World Record of 3:43.13 set in 1999!

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

@amplemarket Love this 👏👏

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

@amplemarket Amazing work @amplemarket team!!

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

@connorgrant thank you for the kinds words Connor! ❤️ Stay tuned the @amplemarket team is cooking more exciting things!

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

@davidgomes That can’t be the biggest question today 😉

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

they said my feed couldn’t be saved. thank you @nikitabier 🥹

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

@morganjingram 👋

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

Great insights

“We just gave every employee, even the worst ones, infinite headcount and budget.”

“People are spending so much on tokens because they don't know how to use them.” 👀

[George Sivulka @gsivulka]

https://t.co/aLTltYpmcj

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

@stephenmruiz 🤣

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

@mistamor @amplemarket 😉

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

Great insights @Carles_Reina! 🙏 3 I'd push even further:

Outbound from day 1, but the 2026 version. Templated volume is dead. The new outbound runs on context: who to reach, why now, what to say, and which channel to say it in. Volume without context is just spam with a personalization token.

Enablement isn't a headcount milestone as many leaders think. It's actually a product-velocity problem. When product ships fast, the pitch falls behind within a quarter and reps keep selling the demo they saw on day one. You're not losing to competitors - you're losing to your own old demo.

Not all deals are good deals - a hard lesson for a founder to learn. The wrong ones are just churn you're buying twelve months in advance. And you can't coach a seller into walking away from a deal their comp plan pays them to close. Qualification is a comp problem before it's a training problem - incentives do the coaching.

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

Great insights @Carles_Reina - 3 I'd push even further:

Outbound from day 1, but the 2026 version. Templated volume is dead. The new outbound runs on context: who to reach, why now, what to say, and which channel to say it in. Volume without context is just spam with a personalization token.

Enablement isn't a headcount milestone as many leaders think. It's actually a product-velocity problem. When product ships fast, the pitch falls behind within a quarter and reps keep selling the demo they saw on day one. You're not losing to competitors - you're losing to your own old demo.

Not all deals are good deals - a hard lesson for a founder to learn. The wrong ones are just churn you're buying twelve months in advance. And you can't coach a seller into walking away from a deal their comp plan pays them to close. Qualification is a comp problem before it's a training problem - incentives do the coaching.

[Carles Reina @Carles_Reina]

If I had to restart @ElevenLabs GTM from scratch, these are the things that I would change 🖊️

- Hire quicker. I was alone selling for the first 9 months because I believed we didn't have PMF. Main reasons: the AI tourist external mantra of 2023, and the uphill battle convincing everyone to hire more GTM (Sales development, Sales, Customer Success) because we were still mostly PLG / self-service. The hiring constraint lasted until earlier this year when we boosted our team to meet demand.

- Build an enablement team earlier. Sales enablement has such an important role in an org, and we mostly think about it when we hire a lot of people. The reality is that we need Enablement earlier due to the speed of product iteration.

- Open more markets. The results from Uber v Lyft operating models played a key role in deciding to open markets early, but I would triple down on it if we were to start over.

- Have more big bets. Similar to VCs, you only need 1 big bet to work in order to generate Alpha. We could have executed more big bets if we had had a single person owning & iterating on them. Former successful founder profile with drive and speed.

- Be more vocal about product ROI & our success. People buy from people, and companies buy based on success & ROI. In AI, we've all been slow showing ROI. This should be the key number when you start a conversation.

- Hire senior sellers. In startups, we've been told that culture is everything and someone with +25y experience may struggle to fit in. This is bullshit. The experience, connections and drive +25y sellers bring is crazy. We have a bunch today, but I would hire many more earlier.

- Reduce cash commissions and replace them with more equity. Cash is king, but Equity is queen. Queens also rule countries, so why not make Equity the dominant one in GTM?

- Open more offices. We are a remote-first company, but our customers are everywhere, and employees want to meet each other. I would open more offices to be embedded in markets quicker.

- Fun brand. Brand perception is 33% of the work. Building a fun brand adds quickly.

- Outbounds outbounds outbounds. We waited too long to migrate to an Outbound organisation. I would do it from day 1 now.

- Pipeline construction with more whales. The ideal pipeline needs to have a combo of segments to reduce risk, improve results and provide liquidity. We waited too long to pitch & bring whales.

- Not all deals are good deals. We, sellers, want to close a lot of ARR, but it is important to split early on between good vs bad deals.

Thank you to Tomasz Gmur for asking how I would do GTM again!

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

@GuliMoreno @davidgomes thanks @davidgomes! happy to grab coffee @GuliMoreno - feel free to dm =)

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

@elwatto 💪

[Micael Oliveira @MicaelOl]

People tolerate mediocrity to a degree that's hard to describe. Company culture is mostly just refusing to.

And you can't install that refusal. You can't make people care - you can only hire people who already do.

The best people I work with treat what they do as their own craft. Getting better at it isn't a chore for them - it's the fun part. When the whole team is like that, the quality bar takes care of itself. You stop enforcing it because nobody around you can stand shipping something mediocre.

It shows up in the small things. The bug that annoys one rep, the half-second of friction nobody notices on a demo, the detail a customer feels every day but never mentions. The details - that's where care actually lives. Not in the big launch, but in the thousand quiet things around it.

Craft is just who you hire.