Stuff I am currently focused on:

#1 Bring new financial advisory products to market at Arta Finance. 

#2 Help anyone host engaging and successful events via Eventship.

#3 Help others with AI via GPT Hacks. 

#4 Help my youngest develop his soccer skills, my second work on her basketball game and my oldest shine like his sax.

#5 Spend more time with my awesome wife doing fun things in San Diego and around the world.

Hussein Yahfoufi

Founder @ vibescaling (Advisory & Talent Placement Firm Supporting Founders, Execs & Top Talent from $0 to $100m+ ARR) 

Learn more about us at vibescaling.ai

Co-Creator of Silicon Sands (Private San Diego Founder/Exec/VC Network with over 350+ members)

Advisory:

9 of our 120+ portfolio companies (< $20m valuation when we started working with them) are either public or private decacorns or unicorns in 2026, including Dropbox, Retool, Zip, Box, Front, Productboard, Metronome, LiveKit and 1 Unannounced.

15 others have 9 figure valuations and have surpassed 8 figures in ARR.

15 have been acquired by companies like Stripe, Salesforce, PagerDuty, SAP, Hightouch, IBM, Honeycomb, Inflection AI, Procare HR, Checkr, DoiT and Gambling.com

Talent:

Over 100 top AEs, BDRs, CSMs, Rev Ops, and GTM Execs placed at our portfolio companies in 2025

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Focus Areas: Sales Development, New Business Acquisition (SMB, MM, Enterprise), Customer Success, Account Management, Partnerships, RevOps, Solutions Engineering, Marketing, Recruiting (technical / non-technical roles), People Operations, Compliance, Equity Strategy, Fundraising, etc.

Highlights:

Dropbox - First GTM hire, Series A to Series C (IPO, $12B market cap)
Box - First GTM hire, Seed to Series C (IPO, $5B market cap)
Front - First 8 employees & Head of Sales, Seed to Series B ($1.7B valuation)
RevenueCat - First GTM hire & VP Sales, Series A to Series B ($500m valuation)
Retool - Investor & Advisor @ 3 employees ($3.2B valuation)
Zip - Investor & Advisor @ 2 employees ($2.2B Valuation)
Productboard - Investor & Advisor @ 2 US employees ($1.7B valuation)
LiveKit - Investor & Advisor @ 2 employees ($1B valuation)
Cortex - Investor & Advisor @ 3 employees ($470m valuation)
Arcee.ai - Investor & Advisor @ 2 employees ($120m valuation)
Truework - First 10 employees & VP Sales, Seed to Series B (Acquired by Checkr)
Okay Software - Fractional CRO (Acquired by Stripe)
Jeli.io - Advisor to CEO (Acquired by PagerDuty)
Bhuma - Advisor to Founders (Acquired by IBM)
Select.Dev - Investor & Advisor (Acquired by DoiT)
HeadsUp - Advisor to Founders (Acquired by Hightouch)
Jelled AI - Investor & Advisor (Acquired by Inflection AI)
Grit - Investor & Advisor (Acquired by Honeycomb.io) 
Bluebirds.ai - Advisor to Founders (Acquired by Salesforce)
Clarent - Advisor to Founders (Acquired by ProCare HR)
OddsJam - Advisor to Founders & CCO (Acquired by Gambling.com)

Cailen DSa

....and then there were 8 unicorns in the vibescaling portfolio.

We've been a partner to LiveKit dating all the way back to their pre-seed round when Russ d'Sa & David Zhao were wrapping up their tour of duty at Medium.

The pandemic had just hit and voice & video was all the rage given the entire population was forced to create enterprise value from their bedrooms. 

They started with product called "Watercooler," which was essentially Clubhouse for Enterprise; an always on voice app that allowed you to build bonds and camaraderie with your coworkers in a remote-first world. Unlike most first-time founders, Russ & DZ (4th timers) quickly realized that the underlying alpha was in the infra that powered voice & video apps (and betting on voice and video as a core input for developers who were building AI agents as ChatGPT launched in 2023).

This foresight paid off - LiveKit now powers billions of calls for the likes of Tesla, xAI, and OpenAI and is quickly becoming the de-facto standard for any developer building a voice or video agent in 2026.

Today, their momentum is validated via a $100m Series C led by Index Ventures, alongside existing investors Altimeter & Redpoint. Congrats to the entire LiveKit team on this major milestone (Kimi Hindman, June-June Shih, Jonathan Chang, Brian Braunstein, Jamin Ball, Robert Keith).

Here at vibescaling, the only thing we care about is helping every portfolio company become a unicorn via GTM support & introductions to the best talent that exists. In spirit of this news today, we've decided to release our current track record to the world:

➡️  8 of our 120+ portfolio companies (< $20m valuation when we started working with them) are either public or private decacorns or unicorns in 2026, including Dropbox, Retool, Zip, Box, Front, Productboard, Metronome, and LiveKit.

➡️ 15 others have 9 figure valuations and have surpassed 8 figures in ARR.

➡️ 15 have been acquired by companies like Stripe, Salesforce, PagerDuty, SAP, Hightouch, IBM, Honeycomb, Inflection AI, Procare HR, Checkr, DoiT and Gambling.com

Supporting Founders & Top Talent @ vibescaling | First GTM @ 6 Unicorns | Placing the Top 1% Talent at the Most Promising AI Startups

One of my most fondest memories at Dropbox was the day I hired Kyle Parrish. 

The year was 2011. After an arduous & competitive multi-round interview process, Kyle finally decided to accept our offer to be AE #3 and was excited for a relaxing one-month break to recharge. He had just done a brutal ~3 year stint at ADP, and was ready to log some international explorations before jumping into the early stage grind that is startups.

Not even 3 hours after accepting his offer on a Friday afternoon and probably already celebrating at his local watering hole, he gets a call from me: "Sorry to do this bro - I need you to start on Monday."

Kyle: "Sure - I can start on a Monday; see you July 15th"

Me: "No, I mean *this* Monday"

Kyle: "WTF - you're joking, right?"

Me: "No - ran the numbers and we're going to lose $1m+ in bookings if you don't start for another 30 days"

Kyle: "Ok - let me cancel my flights & hotels and I'll see you Monday"

It was in that moment where I knew that we had a winner on our hands; and the rest is history.

Now we get to share his incredible career arc with the world.

----

The 3rd episode of the vibescaling Podcast featuring Kyle Parrish dropped last week on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts

Kyle joined Dropbox as an early sales hire and became the founding sales leader at Figma, where he grew the company from $2M to $950M ARR over six and a half years leading up to their IPO .

Him and Chris covered:

-The full journey from PLG to enterprise
-Timing your first head of sales hire
-How Kyle identified Figma's potential early on - the three key trends he monitored that indicated a breakout opportunity & his approach to evaluating companies
-Navigating the startup emotional journey - "stay low at the highs, high at the lows"

Kyle is one of the most genuine and grounded GTM leaders I've gotten to work with.

His insights on founder-led sales, building teams, and selecting winning startups are pure gold.

check it out/rate/review/subscribe - links in the comments

Also, shoutout to our awesome sponsors Kondo: Superhuman for LinkedIn DMs for helping with this one - I've been a huge fan of their tool and try them for a free month in the comments as well!

I'm seeing a lot of takes where people believe you can clone Workday, HubSpot / name your favorite public SaaS product in 2-3 months with Claude Code and a few engineers.

If you truly believe this, I will hire you tomorrow and let's IPO 4-5 companies in the next 12 months.

If you have some time to kill this weekend, instead of throwing on Netflix or watching irrelevant regular season basketball games, I highly suggest you catch up on some of the latest episodes that just dropped on the vibescaling podcast.

Hear from the best GTM Leaders in tech, including Kyle Parrish, Patrick Forquer, Liam H. Mulcahy, Raphael Parker, Todd Busler and Chris Balestras.

Don't forget to hit like & subscribe!

Last week it was big news in dev tools with LiveKit raising at $1B; this week it's major news in Vertical AI...

Huge congrats to vibescaling portfolio company, Fulcrum on their $25m Series A, led by my longtime friends & partners at CRV.

I'll never forget the day I got introduced to Arjun Mangla by my friend and old-colleague, Aditya Agarwal two years back.

I've met enough founders over the last 20 years to know who has the "it" factor - and Arjun has it in spades. Within 10 minutes of hearing the vision and already impressive traction generated by a small 5 person team, it was evident that this business was going to be special.

For the uninformed: Insurance is full of messy workflows that should be automated, but rarely are. Fulcrum builds AI-powered automation tools for insurance brokerages that streamline the tedious manual work around core workflows like proposals, policy checks, coverage comparisons, and client servicing. Their AI agents take messy insurance inputs, run the right processes, and produce polished outputs quickly; freeing up significant time for agents and account managers, while boosting accuracy and compliance.  

Most importantly, Arjun Mangla & Sambhav Anand have literally assembled "the avengers" within their talent ranks. I've had the great fortune of getting to spend time with Lexie Tonelli, Matt Fordyce, Rikav Chauhan on a weekly basis, and I'm constantly feeling like the dumbest guy in the room (which is the best leading indicator of a future unicorn).

See you at the top 📈 

(s/o Veronica Orellana, Reid Christian, Brittany Walker, Caitlin Bolnick Rellas, Mia Krishnamurthy, et al.)

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Hussein Yahfoufi

Cailen DSa

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