For a recent episode of Revenue Mavericks, I sat down with Navid Zolfaghari, SVP of Sales and Success at Zapier. His career has taken him through two companies he founded himself, Google, Metronome, and Branch, and now one of the most recognized automation platforms in the world. But what stuck with me most wasn't his resume. It was the consistency of how he thinks: long-term, systems-first, and always with a bias toward doing the right thing today even when the payoff comes later.

1. What Poker Taught Him About Running a Sales Team

Navid didn't point to a classroom or a mentor when I asked about the experience that shaped him most. He pointed to a poker table.

Around the time poker hit mainstream culture, Navid started playing seriously in high school and learning what the game actually demands of you. Most people assume it's about reading people. Others think it's pure math. He figured out early that it's both, and that leaning too hard on either one will eventually cost you.

The biggest lesson, though, wasn't strategic. It was about variance.

"You can make the right decision in any given scenario and still lose. It doesn't mean that you're actually wrong. It just means that variance shows up."

That's a harder idea to hold onto than it sounds. When a quarter goes sideways or a deal falls apart after months of work, the instinct is to question the approach. Navid's framework pushes back on that. The question isn't whether you won the hand. It's whether you made the right call. Do that consistently, and the math works in your favor over time.

Poker players call this "plus EV" thinking, decisions that generate positive expected value in the long run. It's the lens Navid has brought to every role since, how he evaluates reps, manages pipelines, and runs his team. Win the long game by making the right calls every day, even when the short-term results don't show it yet.

2. The Founder Years That Changed How He Sees Everything

When asked to identify the moment that shaped his career trajectory, Navid went back to his time as a founder at Pinpoint, a company he started after leaving Google.

As a founder, there is no lane to stay in. You are the SDR, the AE, the product lead, and the recruiter, often before lunch. Navid described it as constant altitude-shifting: moving from high-level strategic questions to an immediate pipeline problem to closing a specific deal, all within the same afternoon. It's disorienting at first, and then it becomes the most clarifying experience you can have as a leader.

What it gave him was something most people spend decades trying to develop: the ability to see how everything connects.

"You're always in that moment of connecting the dots. I'm doing this thing, which connects with this thing, and by the way, that's going to change the trajectory of what we're doing over here."

That skill doesn't leave you when you move into a more traditional leadership role. If anything, it becomes more valuable. The revenue leaders with the most impact are the ones who understand the entire system and can see how a decision in one area ripples through everything else.

His take for leaders at any level: think outside your role. The ceiling you hit is often less about capability and more about the narrowness of how you define your job.

3. Two Rules He's Never Stopped Using

When I asked Navid about his approach to driving results, he shared two ideas that have traveled with him across every company and every team he's led.

The first came from sales trainer Skip Miller: the Rule of 2x. The premise is that people will almost always take twice as long as they actually need. It's not laziness, it's just how humans naturally pace themselves when given room to do so. The fix is to stop giving them that room.

In practice, this means changing how you close out a sales call. Instead of "let's reconnect next week," you say "it's 2pm, I can get to a few things in the next hour, do you want to touch base at 4 or first thing tomorrow?" It sounds like a small shift, but shave a day off every touchpoint across an entire deal cycle and you've created meaningful velocity that compounds over time.

The second idea came from a former manager who referenced a line from Rocky 3: there is no tomorrow. Navid laughed when he brought it up, acknowledged his team is probably tired of the YouTube clip, and then made a point that landed anyway.

"In startups specifically, urgency matters. Urgency compounds. You can make up for a lack of skill by just moving a lot faster."

The two ideas reinforce each other. The Rule of 2x gives you a concrete way to compress timelines at every step. The "no tomorrow" mindset gives you the belief system that makes it a habit rather than a tactic. When a team genuinely operates this way, conversion rates improve, deals close faster, and the momentum becomes self-sustaining.

Why This Matters

Navid is the kind of leader who doesn't separate personal philosophy from professional practice. The way he thinks about poker variance is the same way he thinks about a rep having a tough year. The systems thinking he developed as a founder is the same lens he applies to go-to-market strategy at Zapier. Everything connects, and that coherence is what makes his approach transferable.

Think in expected value, not just outcomes. Build your team to connect the dots across the whole organization, not just their function. And move with urgency, because every day you compress is a day of compounding you get to keep.

Listen to the full conversation on the Revenue Mavericks podcast.