Ed Smith (HFD) on Founding RevOps, The Magic of Maybe & Your Anti-AI Advantage
August 7, 2026
Ed is VP of Revenue Operations at HFD, a fintech platform that has helped over 1.5 million patients finance more than $3 billion in healthcare treatment. Before HFD, he spent seven years at RealSelf, where he moved from senior analyst to data scientist to founder of the RevOps function. (The Salesforce admin quit on his first day, which he calls one of the best learning moments of his career.)
What's your anti-AI advantage? Ed Smith thinks that's the question every RevOps leader should be answering right now — and most aren't.
Ed is VP of Revenue Operations at HFD, a fintech platform that has helped over 1.5 million patients finance more than $3 billion in healthcare treatment. Before HFD, he spent seven years at RealSelf, where he moved from senior analyst to data scientist to founder of the RevOps function. (The Salesforce admin quit on his first day, which he calls one of the best learning moments of his career.)
He joins GoToMasters for a conversation about what RevOps actually is when it's done well, why the best leaders should be buying less and building more with AI, and why the most powerful concept in sales comp design is what he calls the magic of maybe — the idea that if a rep works hard, they could earn 3x their typical pay.
He gets into the shared marketing-sales dashboard that ends the leads blame game, the exception process that keeps compensation adjustments from swallowing his week, and the Claude benchmark that has him rethinking his analytics team's capacity — the idea that 95% of self-serve analytics could be handled by AI, and only 5% actually needs a human.
If you're building a RevOps function, designing comp experiments, or trying to figure out what AI actually changes for the RevOps job, this one's worth your time.
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