Escape Velocity
Variabl's CEO Tom Rogers speaks on firing himself, the future of sales, and the art of marketing unsexy products.
Variabl is an AI-native platform rebuilding incentive compensation management from the ground up. Fresh off a Seed round co-led by Armory (plus a full rebrand), CEO Tom Rogers sat down with our CFO/Partner Neenah Jain to talk hiring, AI's impact on sales teams, marketing "boring" software, and the challenge of scaling culture.
Neenah Jain: Take us back to your origin story. What prompted the founding of Variabl, née ZenCentiv?
Tom Rogers: It wasn’t a single moment, but it started with Spiff’s acquisition by SalesForce. Being acquired is an experience, and the reality of post-acquisition life is very different from what you walk in expecting. The pace of product evolution slows significantly. I realized I loved building too much to stay comfortable there.
At the same time, I was pushing into enterprise deals at Spiff with a product that wasn’t ready for it. There’s a ceiling you hit when the product can’t handle the complexity your customers need. Around that same time, I reconnected with Alex Kulik, whom I’d been trying to sell an unready product to for years. He helped me understand where the real moat lived: who knows the most about this problem, and who understands the tiny nuances that can throw a wrench into any other system?
NJ: What do you look for when hiring salespeople?
TR: Drive, more than any particular skillset. I’ve seen networkers succeed because they built such deep champions that the sales cycle became transparent. I’ve seen methodical “arrangers” win because their process was airtight. What the successful ones share is self-awareness: they know what they’re good at, they get the most out of it, and they have an engine. They take losses with poise and keep going. Angela Duckworth calls it grit. Whatever you call it, that’s the underlying thing.
NJ: How do you see AI reshaping sales teams?
TR: Output expectations are increasing whether you use AI or not, because everyone around you is using it. Teams will contract, or at least efficiency expectations will increase. That said, I’m maybe a little nostalgic. When AI volume on LinkedIn and email keeps climbing, people are turning off notifications. No human sends three messages in the same week and expects them to land. But when one of my business development people gets someone on the phone and immediately understands the nuance of their pain? That builds trust in a single call. I don’t think that goes away.
What I will say is this: if you’re not embracing AI at the core of your product and support experience, your clock is ticking.
NJ: Variabl just went through a full rebrand. How do you think about marketing what some might call a “boring” product?
TR: We need the bells and whistles. We need the things that catch the eye of a CRO who wants to see an AI dashboard curated to each rep’s goals. But what’s never changed in this space is the pressure admins and stakeholders are under to get compensation right, because the people counting on that money would lose faith in the company if it was inaccurate.
I’ll be honest: marketing is a muscle I’ve historically underestimated. I operated an escape room back in the day, which had the best puzzles and narrative in the state. We just didn’t invest in marketing. So now I’m leaning into that. Trusting Molly to reinvent our entire brand, our name, our persona, that’s a big bet. For some companies it could be a nail in the coffin. We think it’s our rocket fuel.
NJ: You recently raised a Seed round and grew the team. How do you think about preserving culture as you scale?
TR: Culture is inspired from the top but maintained from the bottom. You have to build an engine where voices are heard and people feel like their contribution is visible and valued.
I recently fired myself from directly leading sales. There wasn’t enough of me to do it at the quality it needed. That was uncomfortable but necessary.
What I’ve learned is that within a performance culture, you start to genuinely appreciate that talent comes in many forms. If you’re recognizing high performance, developing people toward it, and creating space for ownership mentality, a culture that can sustain itself follows naturally.
NJ: Any advice for first-time founders going through fundraising?
TR: Don’t make assumptions about valuation or market consistency based on what things looked like a few years ago. The tides shift fast.
The narrative is durable though: there are still major problems to solve. My belief is that the era of all-in-one platforms is fractured. There are soft spots in those Goliaths, and AI-native point solutions that offer real autonomy will make a resurgence.
On the investor side: ask them questions. They’re talking to hundreds of companies and learning constantly. And don’t perform. As soon as I stopped trying to be on stage and just talked about what was genuinely exciting about what we’re building, I felt the traction accelerate.
NJ: What’s your partnership strategy in a world of competing point solutions?
TR: Our most exciting opportunity is with third-party service organizations that have deep customer relationships but see the writing on the wall. Their services revenue is plateauing as AI eats into implementation work. We’re offering a path to software revenue that’s more sustainable. We’ve had four partner-sourced leads in the last sixty days from just a couple of those relationships. The math is compelling for everyone involved.
NJ: Any AI tools that have been transformative for you personally?
TR: NotebookLM has been a game-changer. I used to spend four hours grinding through a 374-question InfoSec questionnaire from a prospect’s IT team. Now I load in our security documentation and spend an hour reviewing answers it’s already populated. If you’re still doing that the old way, you’re leaving a lot on the table.
The velocity of innovation on our engineering team also blows me away. I was part of a software company on the rise five years ago. The pace now is five times what it was then.