Guest: Sam Jacobs believes leading with kindness is the only way to lead. He is the Founder & CEO of Pavilion, a community-powered learning platform for go-to-market leaders and teams. Sam launched Pavilion as Revenue Collective in 2016 and bootstrapped the company to $10M in ARR before taking on a $25M growth financing round in early 2021, led by Elephant Ventures and GTM Fund.

Pavilion is powered by an international community of more than 10,000 sales, marketing, RevOps, and successful leaders from the world’s fastest-growing companies. Everyone at Pavillion teaches new skills, forges meaningful connections, and helps companies grow. Pavilion University leverages a proprietary Immersive Learning Framework™ to fuse structured training with ongoing social learning and just-in-time resources that drive results.

Before founding Pavilion, Sam spent 15 years as a senior revenue leader at VC-backed companies in the New York area, including Gerson Lehrman Group, Axial, Livestream/Vimeo, The Muse, and Behavox.

Episode in a Tweet: You will find success when you understand your values and what brings you joy. I found joy in helping people I care about and respect achieve their personal goals; nothing is more rewarding.

Background: “There’s a better way to do business.” This belief is what inspired Sam Jacobs to start his company, Pavillion. Sam says, “We’ve been taught that business is cutthroat — but it doesn’t have to be. Pavilion is proof that building a business on foundational values, centering reciprocity, and coming from kindness works.” During this week’s episode of Reflect Forward, Sam and I discuss the power of values, networking, and finding what brings you joy and doing it.

Same talks about his book, Kind Folks Finish First, the story of how Pavillion came to be after being fired from his 5^th job. After seeing his tenure as a revenue leader shrink, he was inspired to look at the long game and stop being transactional. Sam shares the process he went through to find his mission and how joy, kindness and respect drives everything he does. This is an introspective and fun conversion that I know you’ll enjoy. Have a listen and let me know what you think!

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