Peter Kuhn learned the pitch so thoroughly that he borrowed the jokes. On his first day as Moat’s first salesperson, founder Jonah Goodhart walked him through the company’s story. Kuhn recorded it on his BlackBerry. Then came the transcription, the printed note cards, the pacing around the room. A week later, he gave the performance back to its author. Goodhart laughed. The jokes, he explained, were optional.
It is a pleasingly awkward apprenticeship story. A young seller has taken an instruction seriously enough to become, briefly, an impersonator. But Kuhn’s recollection has a second point. He wanted to understand how a story held someone’s attention, moved between ideas and gave a prospective customer something worth repeating. Memorizing the words was an early way of getting at the machinery.
Today, the Brooklyn-based co-founder and CEO of Baku works on a related problem: how to carry useful commercial judgment from one person to another. His career has moved through advertising technology, sales leadership and advising software businesses. The tools have changed considerably since the BlackBerry. The awkward handoff between a person who knows and a person who needs to learn remains familiar.
The lesson underneath the laugh
Moat gave Kuhn an education in explaining a complicated product. Its business involved helping advertisers understand what happened to their advertising. Attention was central to the story he learned from Goodhart. As the product and its target market changed, Kuhn recalls, the sales narrative changed with them. The underlying concern with attention stayed.
That distinction matters. A script can preserve yesterday’s explanation perfectly while becoming less useful to tomorrow’s buyer. Kuhn remembers applying the central story throughout the customer relationship, including trial reviews and pricing conversations. The pitch had a job after the introductory meeting. It helped connect what the company measured with why the customer should care.
By 2015, Kuhn was appearing on the IAB’s Small Publisher Conference program as Moat’s sales director. In March 2017, at an industry retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico, he discussed how advertising measurement was moving beyond clicks. Moat’s video score considered several dimensions of exposure, including sound, visibility and the space an advertisement occupied on a screen.
The question beneath the measurements was recognizably human: had anyone paid attention? In a panel discussion the following month, Kuhn argued that viewability supplied a necessary common standard while leaving further questions about effectiveness to answer. Even a tidy metric needed interpretation. A number could settle one argument and leave the commercially interesting one untouched.
“Viewability should be a baseline standard but it shouldn’t drive investment.”
Peter Kuhn, discussing advertising measurement in 2017
A philosophy degree meets the forecast
Kuhn studied philosophy at Temple University, attending from 2007 to 2011. His subsequent work included senior leadership roles at Oracle Data Cloud, after Moat became part of Oracle. He also took on advisory work, including a B2B SaaS sales advisory role with AgFlow listed from March 2022.
A philosophy degree can be made to explain almost anything after the fact, which is precisely the sort of easy explanation worth resisting. Kuhn’s practical concerns are specific enough on their own: what does a buyer need, what evidence supports the seller’s interpretation, and how does the next person learn to make a useful decision? Those questions give his work its continuity.
At Baku, which he co-founded with Guy-Thomas Barbier, those concerns became the work itself. The company’s consulting identity centered on helping software businesses develop repeatable sales processes. Founder knowledge had to become something other people could use. That meant dealing with actual conversations, proposals and follow-ups, where an elegant business theory acquires a calendar invitation and several objections.
The buyer has a working day, too
In a conversation with software sales hosts Kevin Donville and Matt Long, Kuhn described customer understanding in unusually concrete terms. Researching someone online was only a beginning. He pointed instead to visiting a customer’s office and watching a workflow: where the person clicked, where the task became difficult, where frustration entered the day.
That advice asks the seller to surrender some of the comfort of preparation. A researched biography tells you about a person. Watching the work reveals something about the problem you hope to solve. The buyer may spend very little time thinking in the categories that organize your presentation. Their afternoon still has to function when the presentation ends.
The same concern ran through Kuhn’s December 2024 conversation with Jeff Mains about customer narratives. They discussed positioning, testing messages, aligning teams and moving beyond founder-led sales. The episode also made room for hospitality and customer experience. How the encounter feels belongs in the commercial discussion alongside what the product does.
There is a modest demand hidden in this approach: pay attention before asking for attention. It makes the earlier Moat lesson more interesting. Learning a story gives a seller a starting point. Learning the buyer’s working day tells that seller which parts deserve to be spoken, which need changing, and which can politely remain on the note cards.
Six months in the details
One Baku engagement Kuhn described in October 2024 involved a founder selling to banks against established competitors. The product was there; access to the right people was harder. Kuhn’s account describes roughly six months of practical help, including observing calls, preparing strategy and ghostwriting communications. The work extended into the small steps that rarely earn a slide of their own.
Kuhn reported that the company closed a deal worth more than $300,000 in annual recurring revenue. He also relayed a buyer’s appreciation of the sales process. That second detail clearly pleased him. The experience of buying had become part of the outcome, rather than a regrettable obstacle on the way to using the software.
Annual recurring revenue from a bank-sector deal Kuhn reported in October 2024, following about six months of hands-on support.
He described another founder facing a crowded market of similar products. Baku worked on the narrative, the value proposition and preparation for a request for proposal. Kuhn reported a verbal agreement, a different milestone from a signed contract. His account kept returning to deliberate preparation: language, sequence, the particular conversation about to happen.
These are accounts of individual engagements, with the results reported by Kuhn. Their useful detail lies in the work they describe. Coaching can mean sitting close enough to a live opportunity to help write the next message. It can also mean recognizing that a promising conversation has yet to become a customer.
The calendar eventually objects
There is a limit to how much of that attention a human coach can supply. In May 2026, Kuhn said he had coached more than 500 sales representatives across more than 100 companies. A recurring complaint came from both sides of the desk. Sellers needed a manager at the moment a problem arrived. Managers were already in meetings.
He illustrated the constraint with simple arithmetic. Divide a forty-hour week among five sellers and the theoretical allowance is eight hours each. Make it ten sellers and the allowance falls to four. Twenty sellers get two. Those figures generously assume the manager has no hiring, administration or other responsibilities. The calendar is being remarkably cooperative.
Kuhn says that bottleneck pushed Baku to build its own AI tool. The ambition followed naturally from the coaching work: use recorded customer conversations to identify where a seller needs help, then support a decision while it can still affect the deal. His description leaves the seller responsible for exercising judgment and acting.
It is an appealing test for the technology. Can someone work through a difficult situation during the interval before a manager becomes available? A recommendation has to meet the circumstances of that account. Otherwise, the seller has simply acquired another general piece of advice to remember under pressure.
What survives the note cards
Baku’s current software organizes calls, emails and account history around questions of deal risk, stakeholders and possible next actions. It is configured around the customer’s business. The person using it can inspect the reasoning, contribute missing context and challenge the proposed approach. The account becomes something to examine together.
The company describes software that works alongside Salesforce and HubSpot and accommodates existing call-recording tools. That is a practical choice for teams already surrounded by systems. The interesting promise is that the accumulated record might become useful when someone has to choose what to do, including when an account changes hands after the sale.
Kuhn has also argued against treating fashionable sales frameworks as permanent destinations. Markets change, customers change and the process needs revision. In an October 2024 reflection on sales advice, he questioned the reassuring idea that a company could achieve a particular kind of “fit” and consider the matter settled.
“Investor decks don’t make payroll.”
Peter Kuhn, on the limits of tidy sales frameworks
The line is blunt enough to survive a meeting. It also fits the arc of his work. A pitch can be learned, a process can be taught, and an account can be recorded in considerable detail. Eventually, a buyer says something unexpected. The next move depends on whether the seller understands what changed. Kuhn’s note cards helped him learn another person’s story. His work at Baku asks how people can learn to think beyond the cards.