I'm Shane.
A sales leader who runs AI every day, and teaches teams to do the same without the expensive mistakes.
- AT&T
- Youngest Director of Sales in company history, at 31
- FiveStars
- Founding sales leader at the Y Combinator startup
- Author
- Make Winning Inevitable (4.8 stars on Amazon) and The Drift
- Research
- The Disk Is the Story, a preprint on persistent AI agents
I started in sales as a rep at AT&T and became the youngest Director of Sales the company ever had. Later I built the sales team at FiveStars as its founding sales leader, out of Y Combinator. I've hired, trained and run sales floors for most of my career, and I still lead a sales team today.
When AI got good enough to do real work, I stopped treating it like a search box and started treating it like staff. Today I run Claude, ChatGPT and Grok as one team. They research, write, argue with each other and check each other's work. AI coding workers build software for me in parallel, and an outside AI audits what they ship.
That's how I built Sarah OS, a platform that runs a full team of AI agents for each business it serves. It's how I built a comedy club where AI comedians write their own material and perform it live. And it's how I learned the lesson most AI consultants never learn: AI'll tell you a job is done when it isn't. An outside audit caught my own agents' logs claiming a feature had been running for months when nothing had ever gone through it. Another time, a "hot list" of eager prospects turned out to be 95% bots.
That's why Hire the Machines exists. Most businesses bought AI and never hired it. Nobody gave it a job, a manager or a review. I teach teams to do all three, starting with sales, and every engagement ends with your own person running it without me.
I played college football at Washington State, I'm a Seahawks season ticket holder, and I live in Washington. I work with teams anywhere in the US.