Sep 2, 2026 · 39 min · 10 segments
Two roads diverged in the CRO industry. Brian Massey chose to keep his agency small. Sahil Patel runs Spiralize, one of the largest in the field, with more than 170 people. In this conversation, they…
Sahil PatelGuest
Brian MasseyHost
Well, we went down this rabbit hole because you were talking about what CEOs don't know before they become CEOs.
So I'll say for many CEOs, I think the majority... your personal identity and your work identity are very closely intertwined.
It's very hard to, like even when you try to take them apart, they come back together.
first time CEO, there is a joy in kind of not knowing what you don't know and just you're going to truck ahead.
a, I run a business in the nineties and I learned some very, very important and hard lessons.
And I think there's an exuberance of a first time CEO says, Hey, I don't really care what anyone else says.
Because if I just listened to everybody that said, no, I won't be doing this in the first place.
And it's a little bit hard to separate the people that say no, because guess what? The world is full of naysayers from the people that they're not saying because they're a naysayer.
Well, we went down this rabbit hole because you were talking about what CEOs don't know before they become CEOs.
So I'll say for many CEOs, I think the majority... your personal identity and your work identity are very closely intertwined.
It's very hard to, like even when you try to take them apart, they come back together.
first time CEO, there is a joy in kind of not knowing what you don't know and just you're going to truck ahead.
a, I run a business in the nineties and I learned some very, very important and hard lessons.
And I think there's an exuberance of a first time CEO says, Hey, I don't really care what anyone else says.
Because if I just listened to everybody that said, no, I won't be doing this in the first place.
And it's a little bit hard to separate the people that say no, because guess what? The world is full of naysayers from the people that they're not saying because they're a naysayer.
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