The Greatest Salesman in the World, Og Mandino’s bestseller on the philosophy of success, tells the story of a young entrepreneur who rises from tending camels to running a massive trade empire after studying ten scrolls about the importance of persistence, love and other virtues. It’s one of our favorite books here at Sequoia, in part because persistence and love are foundational in sales.

But today, persistence and love alone aren’t enough—sales is hard and probably getting harder. Modern B2B sales teams juggle research, prospecting and thousands of Zoom calls. They pull off heroics at the finish line. There are all kinds of distractions in the way, from updating the CRM to cleaning contact data. And making things more frustrating, the average sales team works across 10 different tools, with no single home base where they can focus on doing their jobs.

Fil Twarowski and Eddie Eriksson became obsessed with this problem when they ran sales and growth at the equity-management company Pulley. In the process of integrating the dozens of tools they used to make Pulley the new default for thousands of companies, Fil and Eddie recognized that running exceptional campaigns required exceptional amounts of manual work. It’s one thing to dump generic copy into mass emails. It’s another to craft personalized outbound to exactly the right audience—and to deal with the endless technical details involved in getting those messages seen, such as caps on how many emails you can send per day.

Now, as co-founders of rift, Fil and Eddie are freeing up salespeople to shift their focus back to the core of their work. The platform combines the tools modern sales teams need, in one place. It’s an email solution for perfect sequencing to prospects. It’s a dialer to make calling leads more efficient, and a scheduler for automatically routing them and booking meetings. It’s the infrastructure for managing mechanics like email deliverability. It’s applying LLMs not to replace salespeople, but to lighten their load with features such as custom copy. And it’s all in one—no more passing data back and forth between multiple tools.

In short, rift does more than just give sales teams new capabilities. It creates a delightful, focused home base where they can do their best work.

Since Fil and Eddie started rift in late 2022, leading companies including Gusto, Capchase and Rhombus have come to rely on what the team has built—and they’re getting results. One customer, for example, replaced an outbound email program paralyzed by spam issues with a more personalized approach, and generated $300,000 in pipeline in just one sequence.

And this is just the beginning. We at Sequoia are beyond excited to lead rift’s seed round and partner with Fil, Eddie and their team as they scale their vision to empower exceptional sellers.