Stay ConnectedMeet Gabe Lullo.
Gabe Lullo is the CEO of Alleyoop, a sales development agency working with industry giants such as ZoomInfo, Salesloft, and Adobe.
He has trained over 8,000 salespeople across diverse businesses and, during his tenure in Alleyoop, he has personally hired and managed more than 1,500 SDRs.
With over two decades of experience in sales, marketing, and executive recruitment, his strategies have significantly driven Alleyoop’s growth.
"The worst thing you could do is go look at what your competitors are doing and try to replicate what they just said on your website. You're just going to look like everybody else.” - Ryan O'Hara
Ryan started as a video production intern at Dyn, hoping to make ads before pivoting into cold prospecting instead, becoming the company's first BDR.
He helped scale the sales team from three reps to over a hundred before Oracle acquired the company for north of $600 million.
He carried the same instinct through LeadIQ: business messaging didn't have to be boring.
While the sales tech space drowned in "hit your number" energy, Ryan sent music videos to prospects and made 90s-style jingle ads for target accounts like Zoom and Logitech, then watched those videos rack up thousands of organic views from inside the exact companies he was trying to reach.
His first Pitchfire venture nearly ended when his sole investor passed away from cancer mid-round.
He rebuilt it into a new company, investment infrastructure for VC firms still running deal flow through Typeform and Google Docs instead of anything built for it.
His read on outreach in the AI era hasn't changed: reply rates have crashed, AI-written pitches all sound the same, and what still breaks through is a real detail two humans actually have in common, not a value prop.
"Be yourself the whole time. If you're an SDR who makes music, put music into your prospecting. Life doesn't have to be one octave lower just because you're at work."
"There's software replacing software, and now there's software taking over services. I don't think we've seen anything like this since the Industrial Revolution." - Michael Assraf, Founder of Flamingo
Michael started in the Israeli infantry, then moved to logistics, managing budgets in the hundreds of millions at 18 years old with nothing but Excel macros to automate it.
That early responsibility, thrown at him before he was remotely ready, became the foundation for everything after.
He co-founded a cybersecurity startup in 2016, took nearly five years to find product-market fit, raised $60 million, and walked away as CEO after nine years, right as he felt AI was about to change what software even meant.
His new company, Flamingo, targets a market most VCs don't even understand.
Managed service providers, a $105 billion, deeply fragmented industry where 75 percent of MSPs run under $3 million in revenue with fewer than five people.
He'd learned firsthand that MSPs pay twice for the same problem, once to software vendors and once to technicians.
Flamingo was built to zero out the tooling cost using open-source infrastructure instead.
Before shipping a single feature, he launched a free community and vendor directory called Open MSP.
No pitch, no sales ask, just a better way for MSPs to see what open-source alternatives existed for the tools they were already overpaying for.
It crossed 2,000 MSPs on the waitlist before the product even existed.
"People are always suspicious when you give them something for free. But that's exactly the customer profile I was looking for: the ones willing to adopt open source."
"There's software replacing software, and now there's software taking over services. I don't think we've seen anything like this since the Industrial Revolution." - Michael Assraf, Founder of Flamingo
Michael started in the Israeli infantry, then moved to logistics, managing budgets in the hundreds of millions at 18 years old with nothing but Excel macros to automate it.
That early responsibility, thrown at him before he was remotely ready, became the foundation for everything after.
He co-founded a cybersecurity startup in 2016, took nearly five years to find product-market fit, raised $60 million, and walked away as CEO after nine years, right as he felt AI was about to change what software even meant.
His new company, Flamingo, targets a market most VCs don't even understand.
Managed service providers, a $105 billion, deeply fragmented industry where 75 percent of MSPs run under $3 million in revenue with fewer than five people.
He'd learned firsthand that MSPs pay twice for the same problem, once to software vendors and once to technicians.
Flamingo was built to zero out the tooling cost using open-source infrastructure instead.
Before shipping a single feature, he launched a free community and vendor directory called Open MSP.
No pitch, no sales ask, just a better way for MSPs to see what open-source alternatives existed for the tools they were already overpaying for.
It crossed 2,000 MSPs on the waitlist before the product even existed.
"People are always suspicious when you give them something for free. But that's exactly the customer profile I was looking for: the ones willing to adopt open source."
"It's easy to father a child. It's hard to be a dad. It's easy to be a founder. It's hard to be a leader." - Yaron Vorona, Founder Coach and Former VC
Yaron has a physics degree and an MBA from London Business School, an unusual pairing that came from wanting to build technologies that lead to a better future.
He's since founded and backed companies in cybersecurity, AI, blockchain, and defense across three continents, made most of the classic first-time-founder mistakes, ran a company out of cash, and eventually crossed to the VC side before coming back to work directly with founders.
His diagnosis after years on both sides of the table… What looks like a strategy problem or a team problem is almost always a leadership problem underneath.
The hardest tension he sees founders wrestle with isn't delegation or speed, it's fear.
Founders usually already know the right decision the moment they're faced with one.
Fear is what sends them looking for evidence to justify what they're already scared into believing.
He calls himself a "dad venturer" on purpose.
A founder who can't manage their relationship with their family or their own body can't lead a company at full capacity either.
Nutrition, movement, sleep, and the people at home aren't separate from the job, they're the foundation of it.
"No founder has ever looked back on what they built and said, 'I wish I had spent less time with my family.'"
"It's easy to father a child. It's hard to be a dad. It's easy to be a founder. It's hard to be a leader." - Yaron Vorona, Founder Coach and Former VC
Yaron has a physics degree and an MBA from London Business School, an unusual pairing that came from wanting to build technologies that lead to a better future.
He's since founded and backed companies in cybersecurity, AI, blockchain, and defense across three continents, made most of the classic first-time-founder mistakes, ran a company out of cash, and eventually crossed to the VC side before coming back to work directly with founders.
His diagnosis after years on both sides of the table… What looks like a strategy problem or a team problem is almost always a leadership problem underneath.
The hardest tension he sees founders wrestle with isn't delegation or speed, it's fear.
Founders usually already know the right decision the moment they're faced with one.
Fear is what sends them looking for evidence to justify what they're already scared into believing.
He calls himself a "dad venturer" on purpose.
A founder who can't manage their relationship with their family or their own body can't lead a company at full capacity either.
Nutrition, movement, sleep, and the people at home aren't separate from the job, they're the foundation of it.
"No founder has ever looked back on what they built and said, 'I wish I had spent less time with my family.'"
"Innovation is never born. It's forced into creation kicking and screaming against its will." - Stephen Klein, Founder and CEO of Curiouser AI
Stephen sat in a Harvard Business School classroom in 1994 feeling dumber than he'd ever felt in his life, unable to follow a single thing his professor said for a month and a half.
The breakthrough wasn't a lower IQ, it was realizing he'd never actually learned how to think, that thinking itself was a craft you get better at with practice.
That idea sat with him for thirty years: what if technology could make us think more deeply instead of thinking for us?
When large language models arrived, he watched the industry build the opposite.
Every company raced toward automation that replaces human thought.
So he built Curiouser AI around reflective AI, technology trained to ask questions back instead of just handing over answers.
He didn't fully act on his own convictions until his 50s, when he stopped making decisions based on what strangers thought of him.
That shift is what let him build a 70,000-follower LinkedIn audience by breaking every algorithm rule in the book, posting at night, posting on weekends, saying things the industry didn't want said out loud.
"There's no such thing as failure if you don't quit. Read the biographies of anyone you admire. Every one of them failed. What they didn't do was stop."
"Innovation is never born. It's forced into creation kicking and screaming against its will." - Stephen Klein, Founder and CEO of Curiouser AI
Stephen sat in a Harvard Business School classroom in 1994 feeling dumber than he'd ever felt in his life, unable to follow a single thing his professor said for a month and a half.
The breakthrough wasn't a lower IQ, it was realizing he'd never actually learned how to think, that thinking itself was a craft you get better at with practice.
That idea sat with him for thirty years: what if technology could make us think more deeply instead of thinking for us?
When large language models arrived, he watched the industry build the opposite.
Every company raced toward automation that replaces human thought.
So he built Curiouser AI around reflective AI, technology trained to ask questions back instead of just handing over answers.
He didn't fully act on his own convictions until his 50s, when he stopped making decisions based on what strangers thought of him.
That shift is what let him build a 70,000-follower LinkedIn audience by breaking every algorithm rule in the book, posting at night, posting on weekends, saying things the industry didn't want said out loud.
"There's no such thing as failure if you don't quit. Read the biographies of anyone you admire. Every one of them failed. What they didn't do was stop."
"You should convince investors about the problem, not the product. Most founders are so excited about what they built that they forget to prove who's actually bleeding in that market." - Vahid Fakhr, Co-Founder and CEO of Evalyze
Vee spent ten years on the other side of the table in venture capital, reviewing more than a thousand pitch decks before he ever built anything himself.
The mistake he watched founders make over and over wasn't a bad product.
It was leading with the dashboard instead of the wound.
Convince someone the problem is real and painful first. The product comes after.
Then he switched sides.
Being a founder, he says, is a genuinely lonely job in a way being a VC never prepared him for.
As an investor, he could reject a hundred people a week with a generic line and move on.
As a founder, every rejection landed personally.
His advice on rejection: don't just close the laptop and walk away.
Ask for feedback. Ask to stay on an investor's radar with a monthly update.
Most founders treat a "no" as a dead end.
He treats it as the start of a relationship that might pay off eighteen months later, once the traction catches up to the pitch.
"Most of the time, rejection isn't about you. It's about that specific fund, their timing, their portfolio. Take the no, and build the relationship anyway."
"You should convince investors about the problem, not the product. Most founders are so excited about what they built that they forget to prove who's actually bleeding in that market." - Vahid Fakhr, Co-Founder and CEO of Evalyze
Vee spent ten years on the other side of the table in venture capital, reviewing more than a thousand pitch decks before he ever built anything himself.
The mistake he watched founders make over and over wasn't a bad product.
It was leading with the dashboard instead of the wound.
Convince someone the problem is real and painful first. The product comes after.
Then he switched sides.
Being a founder, he says, is a genuinely lonely job in a way being a VC never prepared him for.
As an investor, he could reject a hundred people a week with a generic line and move on.
As a founder, every rejection landed personally.
His advice on rejection: don't just close the laptop and walk away.
Ask for feedback. Ask to stay on an investor's radar with a monthly update.
Most founders treat a "no" as a dead end.
He treats it as the start of a relationship that might pay off eighteen months later, once the traction catches up to the pitch.
"Most of the time, rejection isn't about you. It's about that specific fund, their timing, their portfolio. Take the no, and build the relationship anyway."
"No one has ever asked me for my diploma or my GPA. Show me the journey, not the destination." - Evin Schwartz
Evin never worked corporate for more than two weeks.
He built his first agency straight out of college, then found himself drawn into K-12 education after watching schools hand kids the same outdated curriculum he'd grown up with, decades removed from the world those kids would actually enter.
His question was simple: what if instead of building a new curriculum, we just helped kids connect with each other as humans first?
That question became Beluga, a global social learning platform now used by learners in over 120 countries.
It started with cold DMs to 50 award-winning teachers. Five responded.
Those five became the platform's first users, and Beluga has never spent a dollar on external marketing since.
One of the earliest moments that proved the model: a classroom in Missouri video-called a classroom in South Korea at nine at night.
A kid in South Korea said he loved basketball.
The room in St. Louis erupted like they'd won a championship, because a kid an ocean away had just become instantly familiar.
That's the wall Evin has spent his career trying to bring down.
His argument for reimagining education isn't anti-testing, it's pro-human.
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