Podcasts about 100m arr

Radical AI is building scientific superintelligence—AGI for science—through a closed-loop system that combines AI agents with fully robotic self-driving labs to accelerate materials discovery. The materials science industry has a fundamental innovation problem: discovering a single new material system takes 10-15+ years and costs north of $100 million. This economic reality has frozen innovation across aerospace, defense, semiconductors, and energy—industries still deploying materials developed 30 to 100 years ago. In this episode, Joseph Krause, Co-Founder and CEO of Radical AI, explains how his company is attacking the root causes: serial experimentation workflows, systematically lost experimental data, and the manufacturing scale-up gap. Working with the Department of Defense, Air Force Research Lab on hypersonics systems, and as an official partner to the DOE's Genesis mission, Radical AI is focused on high entropy alloys that maintain mechanical properties in extreme environments—the kind of enabling technology that unlocks entirely new product categories rather than optimizing existing ones. Topics Discussed: The structural economics preventing materials innovation: 10-15 year timelines, $100M+ discovery costs, and why companies default to decades-old materials Three fundamental process failures in scientific discovery: serial workflows that prevent parallelization, the 90%+ of experimental data that lives only in lab notebooks, and the valley of death between lab-scale discovery and manufacturing scale-up How closed-loop autonomous systems capture processing parameters during discovery—temperature ranges, pressure requirements, humidity impacts, precursor form factors—that map directly to manufacturing conditions High entropy alloys as beachhead: 10^40 possible combinations from the periodic table, requiring materials that maintain strength and corrosion resistance at 2,000-4,000°F in oxidative environments created by hypersonic flight The strategic rationale for simultaneous government and commercial GTM: government for long-shot applications like nuclear fusion and access to world-class science institutions; commercial customers in aerospace, defense, automotive, and energy for near-term product applications Why Radical AI focuses on enabling technology rather than optimization technology—solving for markets where novel materials unlock new products, not incremental margin improvements GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Engineer downstream adoption barriers into your initial system architecture: Joseph identified that customer skepticism centered on manufacturability, not discovery speed. Most prospects understood AI could accelerate experimentation but questioned whether discoveries could scale to production without restarting the entire process. Radical AI's response was architectural: their closed-loop system captures processing parameters—temperature ranges, pressures, precursor concentrations, humidity effects, form factors like powders versus pellets—during the discovery phase. This data maps directly to manufacturing conditions, eliminating the traditional restart cycle. The lesson: In deep tech, the adoption barrier isn't usually your core innovation—it's the adjacent problems customers know will surface later. Engineer those solutions into your system from day one rather than treating them as future optimization problems. Select beachheads where problem complexity matches your technical advantage: Radical AI chose high entropy alloys not because the market was largest, but because the search space is intractable for humans—10^40 possible combinations that would take millions of years to experimentally test. This creates a natural moat where their ML-driven autonomous system has exponential advantage over traditional approaches. Joseph explicitly distinguished "enabling technology" (unlocking new products) from "optimization technology" (improving margins on existing products), then targeted markets with products ready to deploy but blocked by materials constraints. The strategic insight: beachhead selection should optimize for where your technical approach has structural advantage and where success unlocks new market creation, not just better unit economics. Structure dual-track GTM to derisk technology while building commercial pipeline: Radical AI simultaneously pursues government contracts (DOD, Air Force Research Lab, DOE Genesis) and commercial customers (aerospace, defense primes, automotive, energy). This isn't market hedging—it's strategic complementarity. Government provides access to the world's most advanced scientific institutions, funding for applications with 10-20 year horizons like nuclear fusion, and willingness to bridge the valley of death that scares commercial buyers. Commercial customers provide clear near-term product applications, faster revenue cycles, and market validation. Joseph views them as converging rather than divergent, since transformative materials apply across both. The playbook: in frontier tech, government and commercial aren't either/or choices—structure them as parallel tracks that derisk each other while your technology matures. Reframe the economics of the innovation process itself: Joseph didn't pitch faster materials discovery—he reframed the entire process from serial to parallel, from data-loss to data-capture, from discovery-manufacturing gap to integrated workflow. This changes the fundamental economics: instead of 10-15 years and $100M+ per material, the conversation shifts to discovering and scaling multiple materials simultaneously with manufacturing parameters already mapped. This reframing unlocks budgets from companies that had stopped innovating because the traditional process was economically irrational. The insight: when industries have stopped innovating entirely, the problem isn't usually that existing processes are too slow—it's that the process itself is structurally broken. Identify and articulate the broken process, not just the speed/cost improvement. Lead with civilizational impact to filter for long-term aligned stakeholders: Joseph explicitly positions Radical AI as "building a company that fundamentally impacts the human race" and tells prospective talent, "if you are focused on a mission and not a job, this is the place for you." This isn't recruiting copy—it's strategic filtering. In frontier tech with 10-15 year commercialization horizons, you need customers, partners, investors, and talent who think in decades, not quarters. Mission-driven positioning attracts stakeholders aligned with category creation over optimization and filters out those seeking incremental improvements. It also provides air cover for decisions that prioritize long-term technological breakthroughs over short-term revenue optimization. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Rainforest enables vertical software companies to embed payment processing directly into their platforms - solving the complexity that previously forced software companies to direct customers to separate banks or resellers for payment processing. Founded by Joshua Silver, who spent nearly 20 years in payments starting with PatientCo (a healthcare billing company that scaled to process billions for major healthcare organizations), Rainforest now serves as the enabling layer for thousands of vertical software companies. In this episode of BUILDERS, Joshua shares the unconventional GTM decisions that shaped Rainforest's trajectory: from making contracts a product feature to implementing a zero bugs policy, and why he measures podcast success by qualified lead conversion rather than download counts. Topics Discussed: The embedded payments opportunity: why software companies stopped directing customers to banks Building in highly regulated environments where traditional MVP approaches fail The extended foundation-building phase required before processing the first payment Transitioning from 2.5-3 years of founder-led sales to a scalable GTM motion Using contract terms as competitive differentiation rather than negotiation leverage Implementing a zero bugs policy and its impact on service costs and retention Building thought leadership through the Payment Strategy Show and Vertex conference Lead quality metrics over vanity metrics for content investments GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Hire from the industry and invest disproportionately in technical onboarding: Rainforest maintains one of the highest concentrations of payments talent on a percentage basis—nearly everyone has worked in payments or payments-adjacent roles. But hiring isn't enough. Joshua obsesses over training because in complex sales, prospects ask detailed technical questions and "the moment that you give bad answers or don't know your stuff, they're going to detect that and that's going to detract a lot from the trust." When selling technical infrastructure, surface-level product knowledge kills deals. Every touchpoint—engineers, support, account execs—must understand not just how the product works, but why it works that way. Engineer your standard contract to eliminate negotiation cycles: Joshua inverted conventional wisdom by making Rainforest's standard contract "overly favorable to the client"—no hidden terms, no punitive clauses, no exclusivity provisions. The result: "We don't have to spend a lot of legal time going back and forth. We don't have to invest a lot of time and by the way, burning a lot of goodwill too in contract negotiations." Prospects consistently report the legal process was shockingly easy compared to competitors. This isn't about being naive—it's strategic capital allocation. Joshua's philosophy: "Pick the fights that really matter and everything else is just rounding." Time spent in legal negotiations is wasted time that could be spent onboarding customers. Embed sales capabilities into your customer success function: Rainforest trains their CS team on negotiation tactics, value selling, and objection handling—competencies rarely developed in post-sale teams. Joshua noted the primary goal is customer assistance, but growth is an underlying objective. This isn't about making CS "do sales"—it's about equipping them to have commercial conversations when customers naturally express expansion interest. The key enabler: strong product-market fit means "we don't have to sell it that much. It's really a conversation about solutioning." Enforce a zero bugs backlog in high-stakes environments: Joshua's unofficial core value—"don't f with the money"—manifests in their zero bugs policy. It's not that they never create bugs; it's that "we don't tolerate living with them. We don't have a backlog of bugs to fix." When a bug is validated, they fix it immediately. His head of engineering recently discussed this on a podcast because people find it radical. The payoff: "When you have a higher quality product, you don't have to invest as much in service because the product just works and you have naturally happy customers." For infrastructure products where errors cascade into customer incidents, the accumulated cost of technical debt vastly exceeds the upfront investment in quality. Qualify content success by whether it's converting your ICP: Joshua rejects vanity metrics entirely. When asked about podcast ROI, he said: "I'd rather have 100 highly qualified listeners that are great targets for us than have 100,000 listeners and not have 100 qualified ones." They track this rigorously—every inbound lead is asked how they discovered Rainforest, and an increasing percentage cite the podcast. Prospects explicitly say "we heard the podcast and nobody else is putting this content out there." The metric isn't downloads; it's whether qualified buyers are self-identifying through your content and entering sales conversations pre-educated and pre-sold. Build ecosystem assets without demanding immediate attribution: Rainforest launched Vertex—a curated conference for vertical software founders and operators—that explicitly isn't a Rainforest sales event or user conference. Joshua doesn't track lead conversion from the conference: "That's not one of the key metrics. We actually look at NPS score as one of the key metrics. Did people find value in the conference?" They're running it twice this year because attendees report it's the highest-quality conference they attend annually. His philosophy: "Go create value, legitimate, genuine value for the ecosystem and they will come to us." They deliberately limit attendance to several hundred and choose venues that physically can't accommodate massive scale—maintaining intimacy as a forcing function against growth-for-growth's-sake. Plan for extended pre-market build phases in regulated industries: Joshua's advice for payments founders: "Make sure you know what you're getting into. It's a big build and there's very low tolerance for misses." Before processing their first payment, Rainforest had to achieve PCI compliance, SOC2 compliance, and implement comprehensive security infrastructure. Only then could they begin customer development with close network contacts. He contrasts this with his standard founder advice: build an MVP, sell quickly, get feedback, iterate. In payments, that playbook doesn't work—"you actually have to build so much of the foundation first just to process your very first payment." Founders in regulated spaces need patient capital and realistic timelines that acknowledge compliance infrastructure isn't optional. Institutionalize "ruthlessly simplify" as an operating principle: One of Rainforest's core values is ruthless simplification, which Joshua applies to "the legal contract, the engineering documentation, anything." He asks his team repeatedly when reviewing anything: "Can we simplify it? Can we simplify it? Can we simplify it?" The output quality dramatically improves. He references the Tim Ferriss framing: "What would this look like if it were simple?" When applied consistently, it cuts approximately 50% from plans, strategies, and deliverables—even when the creator thought they were already building simply. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Jome built a marketplace for new construction homes by solving a transparency problem most people don't know exists: the vast majority of new builds never appear on Zillow, Redfin, or traditional MLS systems. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Dan Hnatkovskyy, CEO and Co-Founder of Jome, to unpack how he identified a massive category gap during Austin's pandemic housing boom and scaled from scraping builder websites to partnering with 1,700+ builders including 92 of the top 100. Dan shares the specific market moments that unlocked builder partnerships, how he discovered Google's separate product category for new construction, and why early LLM traffic became a meaningful acquisition channel. Topics Discussed: Why IDX feeds and MLS requirements systematically exclude new construction inventory The three market inflection points that accelerated builder partnerships from 500 to 1,500+ in 12 months How Google's separate new construction product category created an arbitrage opportunity against brand-focused builders The manual MVP: Typeform + text message delivery before building any real product Why the mortgage rate lock-in effect (50%+ of mortgages under 3.5% vs 6-7% prevailing rates) compounds the housing shortage Accidentally discovering ChatGPT and Perplexity were driving closed transactions through analytics instrumentation The decision to optimize entirely for buyers despite builders being the sole revenue source GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Map structural exclusions in existing distribution systems: New construction homes can't enter MLS because they often lack finished addresses, real images, or completed properties—requirements designed for resale homes. This structural incompatibility created a $400B+ blind spot. Dan didn't just find underserved customers; he identified a category systematically locked out of dominant distribution. B2B founders should analyze whether incumbent platforms have structural requirements that exclude segments of the market, not just underserve them. Exploit paid search category mismatches between buyer intent and seller behavior: Dan discovered Google maintains separate product categories for new construction versus resale homes. Zillow and Redfin competed intensely in resale, but new construction was dominated by individual builders (Lennar, DR Horton) who assumed brand-driven intent—similar to car manufacturers. The reality: buyers search "new construction homes in Austin," not "Lennar homes." This category/behavior mismatch created immediate arbitrage. B2B founders should audit whether buyers search by problem/outcome while incumbents bid on brand terms, creating white space for aggregators. Time enterprise outreach to industry stress events, not product readiness: Jome scaled from 500 to 1,500 builders in one year by capitalizing on three specific moments: (1) pandemic demand surge when builders needed millennial/Gen Z reach, (2) 2022 quantitative tightening when builders feared demand collapse, (3) Zillow's 2023 policy change excluding builders with under 10 communities. Dan didn't wait for product-market fit—he mapped when prospects would be most receptive to any solution. B2B founders should create a calendar of industry stress events (regulatory changes, market corrections, competitor policy shifts) and time outreach to these windows regardless of product maturity. Instrument conversion funnels to detect emergent channels before consensus forms: Jome discovered meaningful lead volume and closed transactions from ChatGPT and Perplexity through analytics, not strategy. Only after seeing the data did they experiment with what Dan calls "reinforcement learning with LLMs"—promoting positive results to train the models. This wasn't about SEO or prompt engineering; it was about measurement infrastructure that surfaced signal before the channel was obvious. B2B founders should track referral sources at the closed deal level, not just top-of-funnel, to catch emerging platforms while unit economics are still favorable. Manually deliver value at zero margin before building product: Before any integrations or platform, Jome ran Google Ads to a Typeform, manually created searches in their agent-facing tool, and texted results to buyers. Dan's framework: "Start with manually creating value...and then step by step, improve it, automate it, make it more efficient." He launched this on a personal credit card and got immediate signal. B2B founders should resist the urge to build scalable product until they've proven someone will pay for (or convert on) manual delivery of the outcome. Optimize for the non-paying side when you're building a two-sided marketplace: Despite 100% of revenue coming from builder commissions, every product decision optimizes for buyer experience. Dan's logic: "If we want to bring value to the builders...we need to start with the buyers. We need to create the best possible home buying journey." This isn't idealism—it's recognition that in transaction-based models, buyer liquidity determines builder participation. B2B founders in marketplace businesses must identify which side is supply-constrained and build obsessively for the other side. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

After building products at Microsoft (Xbox, Surface), a gaming startup acquired by Disney, Twilio, and Box, Vanessa Larco joined NEA where she led seed investments in Greenlight (debit card for kids), Majuri (C2C jewelry), and Limitless (acquired by Meta). She served on Robinhood's board for five and a half years through IPO and the GameStop crisis. In this conversation, Vanessa breaks down the specific traits that separate top 1% founders from the rest, why venture capital is experiencing structural chaos from simultaneous mega-fund expansion and generational transition, and why technical founders who deeply understand consumer behavior change represent the next wave of breakout companies. Topics Discussed: How customer-focused decision-making at Robinhood during GameStop contradicted public perception The specific paradox great founders must balance: maniacal focus versus recruiting ability Why venture is simultaneously dealing with fund size chaos and generational leadership transition The decision framework for staying in venture versus returning to operating Why consumer is radically underinvested despite users' demonstrated willingness to pay for "magical" experiences How AI tools create internet-scale behavior change by synthesizing information rather than just accessing it The authentic voice problem in VC personal branding and platform-specific challenges GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Great founders possess maniacal focus on the right problems, not all problems: Vanessa describes exceptional founders as having an "insatiability" where "they pick the thing and they can focus on the thing and not get distracted by anything else and be maniacal about it." This isn't generic persistence—it's the ability to identify which specific problem deserves obsessive attention while ignoring everything else. Employees often push back ("we have these other fires"), but top founders maintain "one track" focus. The implementation challenge: most founders spread maniacal energy across too many initiatives. The best founders are "obsessive compulsive about how they build" on 1-2 things maximum, then deliberately de-prioritize everything else, even when it feels irresponsible. Incentive structure misalignment creates unwinnable scenarios: During GameStop, Robinhood faced retail traders whose incentives were fundamentally incompatible with traditional market participants. As Vanessa notes, "if your team and your company is bound by a certain set of incentives and you're up against someone with a very different set of incentives, that never really ends well." The Wall Street Bets mantra—"we can stay irrational longer than they can stay solvent"—explicitly weaponized this mismatch. For founders: map not just competitor strategies but their underlying incentive structures. Are they optimizing for growth, profitability, strategic acquirer appeal, or something else? When your incentives conflict with a market participant's (customer, partner, regulator, competitor), you cannot win through superior execution alone—you need structural repositioning. Technical founders who ship faster capture AI-era market position: Vanessa specifically seeks "technical founders with an eye for consumer behavior change" because "speed is really important in this era." This isn't about being first to market—it's about iteration velocity. When foundational models improve every few months and user expectations evolve weekly, the team that can "deliver on it faster than anyone else" compounds advantages. Non-technical founders add product/sales/fundraising cycles between insight and deployment. Technical founders collapse these cycles, testing behavioral hypotheses in days rather than quarters. In markets where "what's possible" changes monthly, this velocity differential determines who owns category definition. Behavior change wedges beat feature superiority: Vanessa looks for founders who understand "how this new technology is changing how people behave and changing what people expect of their tools" and can identify "what need can I fulfill better because I can build this thing that couldn't be built before." The critical insight: users don't adopt based on capability—they adopt when technology enables a behavior they already want but couldn't execute. She emphasizes products that are "radically faster, radically cheaper, radically easier" (not 10% better) and founders who understand "how they'll wedge into behaviors." Implementation framework: don't ask "what can this technology do?" Ask "what behavior is currently blocked by cost/speed/complexity that this technology removes the blocker for?" Category creation happens post-problem-solving, not pre-launch: Discussing Robinhood's positioning, Vanessa reveals how the team "stayed focused" on enabling "people to continue participating in the markets" rather than defending an abstract category. The company focused on structural problems (settlement times, capital requirements) rather than category messaging. For founders: solve the acute problem your customer articulates, even if it seems tactically narrow. Category definition emerges after you've solved related problems for enough customers that the pattern becomes obvious. Premature category creation forces you to defend an abstract positioning rather than deepen specific problem-solving. Personal brand building only works at the intersection of authenticity and utility: Vanessa admits "I can't find my authentic voice on Twitter to save my life" and her successful posts are "when I'm on an airplane and it's delayed by like over an hour and I'm angry." Meanwhile, "video and audio, way more my comfort zone" but requires "discipline that I don't think I yet possess." The lesson for founders: audience building helps ("people then know what you are, what you stand for... it helps establish trust faster, it helps people find you") but forced authenticity backfires. Better to own one channel where your natural communication style works than maintain mediocre presence across all platforms. LinkedIn for thoughtful analysis, Twitter for real-time reaction, podcasts for deep conversation—pick the format that doesn't require you to perform. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Doctronic became the first AI in the world legally licensed to practice medicine through Utah's AI Learning Lab regulatory sandbox in December 2025. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Matt Pavelle, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Doctronic, to learn how he and his co-founder (a physician) launched an AI-powered primary care chatbot in September 2023, validated demand through Facebook chronic condition groups and minimal Google Ads spend, and navigated uncharted regulatory territory to offer $4 prescription renewals for chronic conditions—targeting the medication non-adherence problem that causes 125,000 preventable deaths and costs $100B annually. Topics Discussed: Why friends with excellent health insurance still couldn't get medical answers quickly Building clinical accuracy into GPT-3.5 when context windows were small and hallucinations were rampant The tactical launch: Google Ads plus Facebook chronic condition groups in September 2023 Architecting safety: RAG with tens of thousands of physician-written clinical guidelines The study: 99.2% agreement rate between AI treatment plans and human doctor reviews across 500 patients Navigating Utah's AI Learning Lab: the only regulatory sandbox that mitigated medical licensing laws Securing AI malpractice insurance through Lloyd's Market—a first in the industry The three-phase oversight model: 100% human review, then 10%, then spot checks Expansion strategy: targeting other state regulatory sandboxes and international governments GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Launch with the minimum feature set that proves your core hypothesis: Pavelle shipped Doctronic in September 2023 without user accounts—chats disappeared when closed unless users saved them manually. Within days, user requests for persistent chat history validated demand. The insight: your MVP should test one assumption, not solve every user need. If you're hesitating to launch because features are missing, ask whether those features are actually required to validate your hypothesis or just things you assume users want. Use specificity to unlock early adoption in skeptical markets: Rather than targeting "healthcare" broadly, Pavelle posted in Facebook groups for specific chronic conditions, offering a free AI backed by clinical guidelines. Half the groups banned them for commercial activity, but the other half engaged immediately. The lesson: in regulated or skeptical markets, narrow targeting with explicit safety mechanisms (clinical guidelines, physician co-founder credibility) converts better than broad positioning. Identify where your skeptics congregate and address their specific objections upfront. Design system architecture to prevent failure modes, not just tune models: Doctronic's safety architecture separates AI decision-making from prescription execution. The LLM asks questions and determines renewal safety, but deterministic code outside the AI verifies the prescription exists, checks dosage accuracy, and confirms the schedule. Even if adversarial prompting compromises the LLM, the deterministic layer prevents bad outcomes. Founders building high-stakes AI products should architect multiple independent verification layers rather than relying on prompt engineering or temperature tuning alone. Target regulatory pain points with quantified deaths and costs: Pavelle approached Utah with specific numbers: 125,000 preventable deaths annually from medication non-adherence, 30-40% caused by renewal friction, and a $100B economic burden. These statistics—combined with Utah's rural population and physician shortage—made the problem impossible to ignore. When approaching regulators, lead with mortality and cost data that make inaction untenable, not just efficiency gains or convenience improvements. Regulatory sandboxes require proof of safety methodology, not just technology demos: Utah's AI Learning Lab didn't just grant Doctronic permission—they required a three-phase oversight structure where human physicians review 100% of initial prescriptions in each medication class, then 10%, then ongoing spot checks. Pavelle also secured AI malpractice insurance through Lloyd's Market before launch. The insight: regulatory innovation offices want risk mitigation frameworks, not promises. Build and fund your oversight methodology before approaching regulators, and treat insurance underwriting as a third-party validation of your safety claims. Publish clinical validation studies before scaling—they become your regulatory and sales asset: The study showing 99.2% agreement between Doctronic's AI and human physicians across 500 patient encounters became the foundation for regulatory conversations and public trust. Founders in regulated spaces should budget for formal validation studies early—these aren't marketing expenses, they're the permission structure for everything that follows. Work backward from what regulators and enterprise buyers need to see, then design studies that generate that specific evidence. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

aiOla is pioneering speech-to-data technology that transforms unstructured speech into actionable data for enterprise operations. As a serial entrepreneur on his sixth startup, Co-Founder Amir Haramaty built aiOla after witnessing firsthand how traditional AI implementations fail to deliver ROI in enterprise settings. The company has developed proprietary technology that achieves near-100% accuracy in challenging environments with heavy jargon, multiple languages, and difficult acoustics. With strategic investors including a major airline and partnerships with Nvidia, Accenture, and USG, aiOla is addressing the fundamental challenge that 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail to show value by focusing on immediate, measurable ROI through speech-based data capture. Topics Discussed: The genesis of aiOla from consulting work revealing AI's implementation gaps in traditional enterprises Solving the triple challenge of speech recognition: accuracy in jargon-heavy environments, separating signal from noise, and converting speech to structured workflow data aiOla's "jargonic" approach: creating hyper-personalized language models for specific processes without retraining Early customer acquisition through serendipitous encounters and demonstrating immediate ROI Vertical expansion strategy from food manufacturing to aviation, travel, hospitality, and retail Channel partnership strategy refined from previous startups to achieve scale The shift from convincing customers about speech technology to being pulled into diverse use cases Building the aiOla Intelligate orchestration layer to dynamically select optimal speech recognition models GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Make CFOs your best friend, not IT departments: Amir explicitly targets CFOs rather than IT as primary buyers because "it doesn't matter how small or big you are, you still have to do more with less." While IT serves as facilitators, CFOs control budgets focused on operational efficiency and ROI. B2B founders should identify which executive truly owns the pain point and budget authority, even if IT will implement the solution. Deploy capital strategically to remove obstacles before they emerge: aiOla convinced their airline investor to provide working capital specifically to fund POCs for prospects without existing budgets. This eliminated the "we don't have pilot budget" objection before it arose. B2B founders should proactively identify and neutralize common barriers in their sales process, whether through creative deal structures, proof-of-concept funding, or implementation support. Prioritize instant ROI over long-term transformation promises: Amir explicitly avoids "digital transformation" conversations, instead selecting use cases delivering "biggest impact within shortest period of time with minimum obstacle possible." The airline baggage tracking example saved 110,000 hours immediately, creating momentum for expansion. B2B founders should resist selling comprehensive transformation and instead identify narrow use cases with quantifiable, rapid returns that create internal champions. Replicate proven use cases across customers rather than customizing: Once aiOla achieved success with specific applications like CRM data entry or pre-op inspections, they "stop, print, replicate" rather than reinventing for each customer. This approach reduced a two-hour inspection process to 34 minutes in food manufacturing, then replicated across industries. B2B founders should document successful implementations as repeatable playbooks and resist the urge to over-customize for each prospect. Channel success requires speaking the partner's economic language: When working with telcos, Amir demonstrated that his solution increased ARPU by 34% and reduced churn by 17%—the only two metrics telcos prioritize. He built predictable models showing exactly how many units each channel rep would sell by geography. B2B founders pursuing channel strategies must translate their value proposition into the specific KPIs that drive partner economics and compensation. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

In this episode, we're joined by Roeland Delrue, Co-founder of Aikido Security, the fast-growing application security platform that just became a unicorn in under 4 years.  Roeland shares what it really takes to scale a company at breakneck speed, from going 5× year-over-year, to balancing startups and enterprise in one GTM motion, to raising a Series B with a single goal: becoming “unignorable.” We unpack how Aikido uses product-led growth, brutal revenue focus, and buyer-first sales mentality to win in one of the most competitive markets in SaaS. We spoke with Roeland about building for continuous wins, why revenue clarity beats buzzwords, and how Aikido joins the buyer's journey instead of forcing rigid sales methodologies. Here are some of the key questions we address: How did Aikido grow from $5M to $20M+ ARR in one year? What does it mean to build an unignorable company? Why brutal focus on revenue simplifies product, hiring, and prioritization decisions Why joining the buyer's journey beats forcing MEDDICC-style sales processes How product-led trials reduce churn and increase win rates What it takes to scale from unicorn to decacorn (and why $100M ARR is the next real milestone)

Confirm uses organizational network analysis to surface hidden high performers and toxic actors that traditional performance reviews miss - identifying the quiet contributors everyone relies on and the problematic employees who manage up effectively. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with David Murray, Cofounder & CEO of Confirm, to dissect their most painful go-to-market lessons. David shares why leading with methodology superiority torpedoed their early sales, the specific discovery framework that flipped their win rate, and how they segment the four distinct HR buying motions that require completely different sales approaches. Topics Discussed: Why traditional performance reviews are 60% manager bias according to research by Maynard Goff How organizational network analysis identifies introverted high performers and manages-up toxic actors The catastrophic early GTM mistake: positioning against existing processes Discovery frameworks for conservative buyers in compliance-heavy functions Talk ratio targets and silence techniques from clinical psychology applied to enterprise sales Channel testing methodology that identified LinkedIn ads as their primary acquisition driver The four-quadrant framework for HR sales: CHRO vs line manager, company-wide vs HR-only tools Messaging strategies that balance shock factor with substantive education GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Discovery trumps differentiation in category creation: Confirm's design partner had promoted toxic employees and lost quiet high performers in the same cycle—a perfect case study for their ONA methodology. But when they pitched other HR leaders with "here's why your approach is broken," they hit walls. The shift: stop selling methodology, start diagnosing pain. Reference what you've observed at similar companies—"Some folks at your size tell us they struggle with X, is that true for you?"—then let prospects surface their version of the problem. Only after they've articulated their pain do you map your differentiated approach to their specific context. Target buyer timing, not just buyer titles: Confirm identified a specific trigger: HR leaders in their first 1-2 months at a new company. These leaders are hired to make change and need early wins. The outreach question: "How are you looking to make your mark?" This surfaces whether they're hungry for innovation or managing political capital. A newly hired CHRO has different motivations than a 5-year veteran protecting their process choices. Map your outreach to career timing, not just seniority. Enforce 50/30/20 talk ratios in discovery: David's target: prospects speak 60-80% of discovery calls, with 50% being acceptable. If you're talking more than half the time, you're pitching, not discovering. The clinical psychology technique: positive encouragers ("yeah," "huh") plus deliberate silence after open-ended questions. Prospects will fill silence with the real issues—budget constraints, political dynamics, past vendor failures. This intel is gold for multi-threading and objection handling later. Test channel-message fit with minimal spend: Confirm's approach: "do everything a little bit and see what sticks." They found LinkedIn ads with precise targeting (title, company size, recent job changes) delivered qualified pipeline cost-effectively, while other channels didn't. The framework: allocate 10-15% of budget across 5-6 channels for 60 days, measure cost-per-qualified-meeting, then concentrate spend. Plan for 3-6 month creative refresh cycles as audiences develop ad fatigue—this isn't set-and-forget. Map your product to the HR buying matrix: David identifies four distinct quadrants: (1) CHRO buyer, company-wide deployment = traditional enterprise sale, 6-18 month cycles, heavy multi-threading required; (2) CHRO buyer, HR-only tool = shorter cycles but still executive selling; (3) Line manager buyer, company-wide = requires bottom-up adoption mechanics; (4) Line manager buyer, HR-only = SMB-style transactional sale. Confirm operates in quadrant 1—the longest, most complex sale. Most founders don't explicitly map which quadrant they're in, leading to mismatched sales motions and blown forecasts. Use provocative messaging with technical substance: "One-click performance reviews" generated meetings because it triggered both excitement (managers hate writing reviews) and concern (is AI replacing human judgment?). The key: the shock factor gets the meeting, but you need depth on the call. Confirm's explanation: the AI aggregates data from Asana, Jira, OKRs, peer feedback, and self-reflections to reduce recency bias, then generates a draft managers edit. The dystopian concern becomes a feature when you explain the data anchoring. Surface-level shock without technical credibility burns trust. Adjust for organizational risk tolerance by function: HR and healthcare share conservative buying cultures due to compliance, documentation, and legal requirements. David contrasts this with selling to CTOs or engineers who "kick tires and want to break things." This affects everything: longer evaluation cycles, more stakeholders in legal/compliance, emphasis on security and data handling, reference checks weighted heavily. If you're selling to risk-averse functions, adjust your content (white papers, compliance documentation), your timeline expectations, and your change management positioning. Reframe education as extraction, not instruction: David's mental model shift: "I need to learn from them" replaced "I need to educate them." In practice: "I've heard from others that calibration meetings consume 10+ hours per cycle with unclear outcomes. They tried approaches like forced ranking or manager-only decisions. Have you experimented with either?" This positions you as a pattern-matcher across their peer group, not a lecturer. They become receptive to alternatives because you've demonstrated you understand their world through other customers' experiences. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

CalmWave is tackling ICU alarm fatigue—a problem where patients generate up to 1,600 alarms per day because clinicians lack data-driven guidance on setting vital sign thresholds. The company processes 32 million data points daily from a single 14-hospital system by fusing high-frequency vital signs from Philips InteliBridge with EMR data from Epic in real time. This represents 10 billion data points annually at current run rate. Ophir Ronen, a sixth-time founder who previously sold to PagerDuty, built CalmWave by applying enterprise IT operations patterns to healthcare infrastructure. The company secured its first comprehensive system-wide agreement within months of launch and now holds 51 patents with 20 more pending as medical device manufacturers pursue distribution partnerships. Topics Discussed Why middleware interoperability is a prerequisite for clinical safety, not a feature  The technical challenge of fusing 10x more data from vitals systems than EMR systems  Building trust through transparent AI that exposes mathematical reasoning to clinicians  Scaling from 7 million to 32 million daily data points across hospital rollout phases  How CalmWave's common signal format enables data scientists to work with clean datasets  Positioning alarm fatigue as a beachhead into broader hospital operations platforms  The innovation investment arm validation pathway for startup enterprise sales  Extending the signals-incidents-events pattern to energy, defense, and manufacturing GTM Lessons For B2B Founders Interoperability becomes your moat when it's a safety prerequisite: CalmWave couldn't provide safe alarm recommendations using only vital signs data without knowing which medications had been administered that could affect those vitals. This forced them to build bidirectional integration with both Philips InteliBridge (high-frequency vitals) and Epic EMR before addressing the clinical problem. The integration layer itself—which normalizes, enriches, and structures data into their common signal format—became defensible IP. Ophir noted that high-frequency vitals data is "erased on a rolling 30-day basis" at most hospitals, making CalmWave's fused dataset genuinely novel. Founders in healthcare or other regulated industries should identify whether data fusion across siloed systems is required for safety or efficacy, then build that integration capability as core infrastructure rather than expecting customers to solve it. Transparent AI sells better than black box AI in clinical environments: When presenting to 30 senior leaders including a notoriously difficult CMO, CalmWave walked through the mathematical basis of their algorithms—demonstrating exactly how they calculate safe alarm threshold adjustments. The CMO stood up mid-presentation and said, "You guys shouldn't even call yourselves AI. This is math and statistics. I understand exactly what you're doing. Well done. This is truly innovative." This validation from clinical leadership came from showing the work, not from accuracy metrics alone. Founders selling AI into risk-averse environments should build explainability into their core product architecture, enabling clinicians to understand why each recommendation is generated rather than treating interpretability as a post-hoc feature. Innovation investment arms provide validation pathways that bypass procurement: CalmWave's breakthrough came when an innovation investment arm from a major health system reached out after three months of due diligence, then placed them in front of clinicians. Two weeks before signing a comprehensive system-wide agreement, they presented to the C-suite. This pathway avoided traditional vendor procurement cycles. The innovation arm acted as internal champion, pre-validating the startup's approach before exposing them to decision-makers. Founders targeting large healthcare systems should identify which organizations have dedicated innovation or venture arms, recognizing these groups are measured on finding novel solutions rather than minimizing vendor risk. Beachhead problems in enterprise must be urgent enough to overcome startup friction: Ophir explicitly chose alarm fatigue because health systems with IT budgets in the hundreds of millions needed "something compelling enough to make them engage" with a startup. ICU alarm fatigue has regulatory scrutiny, patient safety implications, and nursing burnout consequences that create executive-level urgency. The problem was important enough that clinical leadership would tolerate the integration complexity and vendor risk of working with an early-stage company. Founders should evaluate beachhead opportunities not just by market size but by whether the pain point has organizational consequences severe enough to justify betting on an unproven vendor. Adjacent domain pattern recognition creates non-obvious competitive advantages: CalmWave's team came from building large-scale operations platforms at PagerDuty, where they developed expertise in processing massive streaming data, correlating events, and reducing alert noise. They recognized that ICU alarm fatigue followed the same structural pattern as IT operations alarm fatigue—too many alerts without context. This allowed them to apply a proven architectural approach (signals → alarms → incidents → events) to a new vertical where healthcare incumbents lacked that specific systems thinking. One hospital generates 7 million data points daily; their platform now handles 32 million across multiple facilities. Founders with deep operational expertise in one domain should actively map their architectural patterns to adjacent verticals where incumbents haven't solved analogous problems at scale. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

i6 Group is connecting the fragmented aviation fuel ecosystem-airlines, fuel suppliers, and service providers-through a real-time digital platform that eliminates paper-based processes at over 260 airports worldwide. After launching with British Airways at Heathrow in 2015 and recently closing their Series B with German PE firm Itrium, i6 is proving that even heavily regulated, risk-averse industries can achieve step-function operational improvements through software. In this episode of BUILDERS, Alex Mattos, CEO and Managing Director of i6 Group, breaks down how they navigated decade-long enterprise sales cycles, leveraged strategic customers as Series A investors, and are now building toward profitability to maximize exit optionality. Topics Discussed: The surprising analog nature of aviation fuel operations despite advanced aircraft technology i6's pivot from defense fuel system testing to commercial aviation digitization The multi-party fuel ecosystem: airlines, suppliers, service providers, and logistics chains Strategic approach to landing British Airways and Virgin Atlantic as launch customers Fundamental differences between European fuel optimization vs. US supply chain management models Multi-stakeholder enterprise sales involving fuel teams, flight ops, pilot unions, and CFOs Strategic Series A with customer-investors: British Airways, JetBlue, Shell, and World Fuel Services Series B transition from strategic to PE backing focused on scaling operations and go-to-market Network effects driving compounding value as airport coverage expands Path to self-sustainability and exit strategy considerations GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Target brand DNA, not just budget, for early enterprise customers: i6 deliberately approached Virgin Atlantic because of Richard Branson's reputation for "being entrepreneurial, taking a risk, doing something different." This wasn't naive brand worship—it was strategic targeting based on organizational risk tolerance. When selling complex infrastructure to enterprises pre-product-market fit, a prospect's innovation track record matters more than their budget size. Map your early pipeline based on cultural willingness to partner with startups, not just technical fit. Invest in non-paying reference customers as currency for tier-one deals: Virgin Atlantic became i6's first operational deployment without payment. This wasn't charity—it was strategic capital allocation. The working reference at Virgin directly unlocked British Airways: "we turned up, demonstrated what we were doing...we've done this trial with Virgin and here's the results, and it went really well." For founders selling to conservative enterprises, one live deployment at a credible brand is worth more than a dozen pitch decks. Budget 6-12 months of runway for strategic pilots that generate proof points, not revenue. Create forcing functions with specific follow-up commitments: When British Airways said "if you're still here in six months, come back," most founders would hear soft rejection. Alex heard a calendar commitment and returned "to the day" with results. This precision signaling—we take your requirements seriously enough to track them to the day—separates serious vendors from tire-kickers. When enterprises set conditional bars, treat them as binding contracts and demonstrate execution discipline through exact follow-through. Position for market disruption by maintaining warm enterprise relationships: i6 benefited when an incumbent competitor liquidated, creating urgent procurement needs at British Airways. But luck favors the prepared—they had already established credibility through their Virgin deployment. Maintain enterprise relationships even when deals seem stalled. In concentrated B2B markets, competitive exits, budget releases, and trigger events happen regularly. Your position in the consideration set when disruption hits determines whether you capture the opportunity. Engineer word-of-mouth in concentrated industries through excellence, not marketing: Four months after Heathrow deployment, Dubai airport approached i6 unsolicited: "we've heard great things." In the aviation fuel community—which Alex describes as "surprisingly small"—exceptional execution travels faster than any outbound motion. This changes GTM strategy: in concentrated industries, over-invest in customer success and operational excellence at early deployments rather than spreading thin across many accounts. Your first customers are your sales team. Segment GTM by operational model, not just geography or company size: i6 discovered European airlines optimize for fuel efficiency and real-time decisions, while US airlines (controlling their own supply networks since the late 1980s) prioritize supply chain visibility: "how much fuel did we put in the plane, how much have we had delivered, how much have we got left." These aren't feature preferences—they're fundamentally different jobs-to-be-done driven by market structure. Don't assume global enterprises have unified needs. Segment by operational model and regulatory environment, then customize messaging and roadmap accordingly. Stage investor expertise to match company evolution, not just valuation milestones: Series A brought strategic investors who were actual users (British Airways, JetBlue, Shell, World Fuel Services) for product validation and network access. Series B brought PE firm Itrium for "scaling the business...building and growing our sales and revenue teams." This wasn't opportunistic—it was deliberate staging of capital sources to match capability gaps. Don't optimize fundraising purely on valuation or dilution. Map your next 18-month bottleneck (product validation vs. operational scaling vs. market expansion) and raise from investors who've solved that specific problem. Build for profitability to control your exit timing and terms: Alex's goal is avoiding Series C entirely: "we build and establish a fully self-sustaining business...the business becomes fully sustainable in the next couple of years." This isn't conservatism—it's strategic optionality. Reaching profitability eliminates the forced march toward subsequent rounds, letting you choose between IPO or M&A based on market conditions rather than cash position. For infrastructure plays with long implementation cycles, factor sustainability into your growth model early, even if it moderates topline growth rates. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Amplio operates a two-sided marketplace that helps manufacturers monetize surplus inventory and decommissioned industrial equipment rather than writing off assets or paying for disposal. The company has won contracts with GM and SpaceX despite competing against liquidators with 30-year local relationships. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Trey Closson, Co-Founder and CEO of Amplio, to unpack how the company executed a complete business model pivot from supply chain risk software to marketplace, discovered that enterprise deals close faster than SMB despite conventional wisdom, and built repeatable GTM motions in a fragmented $100B+ market previously dominated by local operators. Topics Discussed: Executing Amplio's pivot from supply chain risk software to surplus inventory marketplace Moving four truckloads of inventory through a WeWork to prove the business model Closing GM and SpaceX inbound from Google Ads as the PMF validation signal Displacing 30-year incumbent relationships through corporate + local dual threading Why enterprise contracts closed faster than SMB deals in Amplio's specific context Scaling beyond founder-led sales to repeatable AE motions Operating a two-sided marketplace: supply acquisition strategy vs. demand conversion GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Manual heroics prove economics before automation: When a customer offered Amplio $25 million in surplus inventory, Trey had no warehouse, no logistics infrastructure, and no playbook. What was supposed to be four pallets became four full truckloads delivered to their WeWork. Trey and one employee physically moved inventory boxes off pallets into their office space, then figured out how to sell it while the WeWork management threatened eviction. The core insight: "the first time solving a problem, it doesn't need to be an automated, efficient process, it just needs to be okay. A customer has a problem, we need to figure out a way to solve that problem." Only after proving they could profitably solve the problem multiple times did they invest in automation and efficiency. For founders, the implication is clear—delay infrastructure investment until you've manually proven unit economics and repeatability, even if execution requires unsustainable effort. True PMF signals come from zero-relationship wins: Trey leveraged 15 years of supply chain relationships to secure initial customers and build product infrastructure. But he identifies the precise PMF inflection point: "middle of last year, we had both GM and SpaceX respond to a Google Ad." These companies had zero connection to Trey or his co-founder, found Amplio through SEM, and chose them over traditional liquidators they'd worked with for years. This is the distinction between "my network will buy from me" and "the market will buy from us." Founders should use their Rolodex to achieve velocity and prove the concept, but recognize that true product-market fit only exists when customers with no founder relationship choose your solution over established alternatives. Enterprise velocity depends on payment direction and urgency profile: Amplio deliberately focused on enterprise after being told by multiple founders to avoid "hunting whales." They discovered enterprise closed faster than SMB for three structural reasons. First, SMBs had unrealistic recovery expectations—wanting $900K back on $1M inventory when market reality is cents on the dollar, creating unresolvable expectation gaps. Second, enterprises had the problem across 100+ facilities with no dedicated owner and urgent mandates from finance or supply chain leadership. Third, because Amplio pays customers rather than charging them, legal review velocity increased dramatically. As Trey explains: "the lawyers thankfully determine, because we're not getting paid by them, that there's low risk for them in terms of signing a contract with us." Founders should map their specific deal structure and customer urgency profile rather than defaulting to SMB-first based on generic advice. Displace entrenched relationships through dual-threading: The surplus liquidation market is hyper-fragmented with hundreds of thousands of local liquidators, many holding 30-year plant-level relationships. Amplio's breakthrough: "partnering together with that person at the corporate level we can indicate not only can we solve the problem locally, but we can also do it across the entire enterprise." They pair the local plant manager with corporate procurement or finance leadership, demonstrating local problem-solving plus enterprise-wide scalability that local liquidators cannot match. This dual-threading strategy neutralizes the incumbent's relationship advantage while showcasing the efficiency and consistency that corporate leadership values. For founders entering relationship-driven markets, identify the corporate stakeholder whose enterprise-wide objectives trump individual facility loyalty. Accelerate trust through predictable execution in low-NPS markets: Industrial liquidation is a "really low NPS industry—nobody loves working with their liquidator." In markets with poor customer satisfaction and commoditized offerings, trust accelerates when you focus on "say-do ratio"—if you commit to something, execute it. Amplio often solves adjacent problems outside their core offering and frequently removes inventory from warehouses faster than economically optimal to make customers "look like an absolute hero." This over-delivery in low-satisfaction markets creates disproportionate differentiation. The tactical implementation: understand what problems the organization is trying to solve beyond your core product, find ways to solve those problems even if not monetizable, and prioritize making your champion successful over optimizing every transaction. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Supersede manufactures structural building products from recycled industrial and agricultural plastic waste, creating drop-in replacements for plywood and OSB. What makes their approach notable isn't the environmental mission - it's the deliberate market sequencing strategy that let them reach the top 10 boat builders globally within months of launch. CEO and Co-Founder Sean Petterson, whose father died on a construction job and who previously built and sold a construction safety equipment company, knew the construction market's reputation for slow adoption would kill them before they could prove their product. So instead of pitching the $12B+ annual US construction market directly, they started with marine applications where regulatory pressure, product toxicity issues, and performance failures created urgent buying windows. In this episode, Sean breaks down how they used trade show metrics to validate product-market fit, why they're absorbing shipping costs to prove regional demand before building plants, and the operational art of scaling manufacturing capacity against pipeline conversion timing. Topics Discussed: Strategic market entry: why marine and RV serve as proving grounds and revenue generators before construction How material properties (waterproof, high density, VOC-free) dictated target application selection The regulatory catalyst: California's formaldehyde ban creating electrolysis problems in boat transoms Trade show execution at IBEX Tampa: converting sustainability pavilion traffic into top 10 builder partnerships Multi-plant expansion strategy: Phoenix for marine, Indiana for RV proximity to Elkhart manufacturing hub The timing challenge: balancing capex on new production lines against uncertain customer adoption curves Using shipping cost absorption as market validation before committing to regional manufacturing Product thickness decisions and the constraint of running 24/7 production on single SKUs Long-term infrastructure goal: lights-out factories in every state to hit 10% US market share GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Map product attributes to urgent pain points, not general market needs: Sean's framework was ruthlessly specific—Supersede's material is waterproof, twice as dense as wood, VOC-free, and has superior fastener retention. Rather than positioning these as generic benefits, they mapped each attribute to acute pain: marine grade plywood costs 3-4x more, leaches formaldehyde and CCAs into water, and California's new regulations were causing electrolysis that corrodes aluminum transoms. This isn't marketing positioning—it's matching physics to procurement urgency. Founders should inventory their product's fundamental characteristics and find markets where each one solves an active crisis. Use expensive distribution as a validation tool before infrastructure investment: Supersede services Florida boat builders from their Phoenix plant despite shipping costs destroying margins. This is intentional—they're paying for market intelligence. Only after customers move from single units to full product lines do they commit manufacturing capex to that region. Sean's calculus: "As long as we have enough comfort in the unit economics to manage shipping costs, we can explore how markets look before sinking too much in." Most founders optimize for margin too early. Supersede optimizes for learning, treating distribution costs as cheaper than building the wrong plant in the wrong location. Create credibility through extreme durability testing, then cascade down: Sean describes pontoon boats with twin 300hp motors hitting 60mph over waves as their "value proposition crucible." This isn't about marine market success—it's about creating an unarguable proof point for every downstream market. When they enter construction, they won't debate whether their product can handle a roof load; they'll show years of data from conditions that make construction look gentle. The insight: win in the most punishing environment first, then every easier application becomes a layup. Most founders do the opposite—start easy, then struggle with credibility when moving upmarket. Sequence markets by sales motion similarity, not revenue size: The marine-to-RV-to-construction path isn't about market size—it's about operational leverage. Sean notes RV has "the same exact process, except they move a little quicker" as marine. Both are concentrated geographies (marine in Florida, RV in Elkhart), both have OEM buyers making high-volume decisions, both value durability and water resistance. This lets them reuse sales playbooks while building revenue. Construction, despite being 10x larger, requires completely different distribution (retail + wholesale), longer approval cycles (two years for major projects), and more diverse buyer personas (contractors, architects, developers, retailers). The sequencing strategy funds the capability build they'll need for construction without the distraction of learning three different GTM motions simultaneously. Treat trade shows as validation metrics, not lead generation: Supersede tracked specific conference-provided data at IBEX: highest searched booth, highest saved, most traffic despite being in the "sustainability pavilion" that attendees typically skip. They didn't just collect business cards—they validated that their value proposition resonated at scale before committing to a multi-plant buildout. Sean converted this signal into partnerships with all top 10 builders by volume within the show cycle. The lesson: use trade shows as market research tools with quantifiable success metrics, not as top-of-funnel activities. If you can't win a trade show in your target segment, you're not ready to scale. Balance production constraints against customer optionality to force prioritization: Supersede faces a counterintuitive challenge—they have demand for multiple product thicknesses but can only run 24/7 production on one thickness per line to maintain efficiency. This forces brutal customer prioritization decisions. As Sean puts it: "Which customer we like better." Rather than viewing this as a problem, recognize it as a focusing mechanism. Resource constraints force you to choose customers who value your core offering most rather than customizing yourself into complexity. Most founders try to serve everyone before proving they can serve anyone exceptionally. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Introducing Revenue Meta—a new series by The Edge Podcast spotlighting DeFi protocols that actually generate cashflows and return value to tokenholders.There aren't many protocols that can answer the simple question: How does your business make money? We're starting with Maple Finance, where CoFounder & CEO Sid Powell breaks down their revenue model, treasury management, and path from $30M to $100M ARR.In this episode:+ How Maple generates revenue through over-collateralized lending+ Revenue allocation: treasury management, buybacks, and building strategic reserves+ The roadmap to $100M ARR and how they grow their loan book* Why Maple is a pure token play, no hidden equity, all value flows to SYRUP holders------

Hubble Network is redefining what's possible in satellite connectivity by connecting standard Bluetooth chips to satellites over 500 kilometers away using advanced antenna arrays and digital beamforming. Founded in 2021 by Alex Haro (co-founder of Life360, which IPO'd in 2019 and grew to 80+ million monthly active users) and Ben Longmier (whose previous company's protocol became Amazon Sidewalk after acquisition), Hubble has launched seven operational satellites via SpaceX and is serving enterprise customers across intermodal logistics, off-grid construction, and outdoor recreation. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Alex to explore how Hubble is building the infrastructure layer for global IoT—positioning as the "T-Mobile of space" rather than competing in device markets. Topics Discussed: The technical architecture behind connecting Bluetooth to satellites: lowering bit rates, optimizing modulation, and deploying hundreds of antennas for digital beamforming SpaceX's rideshare program mechanics and what it actually takes to book satellite launches as a startup Why Hubble deliberately chose to be network infrastructure rather than building hardware for specific verticals The psychology barrier of overcoming Bluetooth's short-range association—even among experienced RF engineers from Google, Amazon, and Starlink Strategic focus decisions when facing unlimited market opportunity across construction, agriculture, mining, logistics, and defense Transparent pricing as a developer-first GTM strategy versus traditional enterprise carrier sales models The transition from Life360's consumer hardware exploration to founding a satellite networking company GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Choose your competitive layer strategically—infrastructure scales differently than applications: Hubble explicitly positioned as network infrastructure, not a device manufacturer. Alex stated: "We're not focused on building the hardware or devices. We very much view ourselves as a networking company." This allows enterprise customers to integrate Hubble connectivity into their existing devices with just a software change to the Bluetooth chip. The result: each B2B customer can deploy hundreds or thousands of devices to their end users, creating exponential reach. For founders building horizontal technology, consider whether competing at the infrastructure layer—even if less immediately tangible—creates superior unit economics and market leverage versus building full-stack solutions. Developer-first positioning requires operational commitment, not just marketing: Hubble's pricing transparency wasn't a marketing tactic—Alex described it as "hardcore to our ethos" because their goal is connecting billions of devices. They explicitly modeled after Twilio and Stripe rather than Verizon or AT&T, making it possible for engineers to validate unit economics independently and start free trials without sales conversations. This wasn't debated internally because both co-founders and the early team aligned on this approach. For infrastructure companies targeting massive scale, half-measures on developer experience will fail—the entire go-to-market motion must support self-service validation and transparent economics. Constraint forces clarity—unlimited TAM demands disciplined ICP filtering: Despite viable use cases across construction, oil and gas, mining, agriculture, supply chain, and defense, Alex emphasized: "In the early stages, focus is the most important thing. Every hour matters and being able to focus matters quite a bit and defocusing yourself can really hurt." Hubble's "sexy hook of Bluetooth to space" generates inbound interest across industries, creating constant pressure to expand. Their active debate centers on which industry leaders are "solving important use cases" with existing customer bases of "hundreds, if not thousands of customers." For founders with horizontal technology, resist opportunistic deals—filter aggressively for partners who provide concentrated distribution rather than one-off deployments. Physical demonstration collapses credibility timelines for counterintuitive technology: Hubble faced skepticism even from sophisticated RF engineers because of hardwired associations between Bluetooth and short range. Alex noted: "Some of the investors that joined our A or B, they passed on our seed and A because they thought, well, I believe in Alex, but is this really physically possible?" Post-launch with working satellites, the conversation shifted from "is this possible?" to commercial terms. The lesson isn't just "show don't tell"—it's that for technically improbable innovations, rushing to demonstrable proof compresses months of explanation into minutes of validation. Founders should potentially sacrifice feature breadth to reach a single, undeniable proof point faster. Operational domain expertise reveals infrastructure gaps others can't see: Alex spent years as CTO of Life360 attempting to build connected hardware for families—smart pet collars, GPS watches for kids, fall detectors—but existing networks had "super short battery life, very bulky, no global coverage, way too expensive." He invested in Ben's previous mesh network company and became a close advisor before co-founding Hubble. The insight wasn't theoretical—it came from failing repeatedly to solve the problem with existing infrastructure. Founders should treat operational frustrations in previous roles as proprietary market intelligence: you've already paid the learning cost that competitors will need years to acquire. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

F2 is the AI platform for private markets investors, automating due diligence and portfolio monitoring workflows with agentic AI. After building ARK into a digital banking platform that scaled from tens of millions to tens of billions in loan volume, Donald Muir developed AI technology to automate debt placement on ARK's marketplace. When upmarket institutional lenders requested access to the AI for their entire deal flow—not just ARK's marketplace deals—Donald recognized the technology's standalone value. In this episode of BUILDERS, Donald shares how he's commercializing enterprise-grade AI for an industry where he personally spent years in the private equity bullpen, and how F2 is addressing the reliability and trust barriers that prevent AI adoption in high-stakes financial decision-making. Topics Discussed How F2 emerged from ARK's internal need to automate debt marketplace screening memos The technical approach to eliminating hallucination in Excel-based financial analysis Replicating private equity's "super day" interview format to prove AI capability with live deal data Sales team composition: hiring ex-finance professionals instead of traditional sales reps AI's role in evolving private equity analysts from menial tasks to system operators Product roadmap from due diligence to portfolio monitoring to deal syndication platform Maintaining operational independence while preserving strategic alignment with ARK GTM Lessons For B2B Founders Solve your own hardest problem first, then productize: Donald built F2's core technology to scale ARK's debt marketplace, focusing on the most difficult engineering challenge—reliable financial analysis of unstructured Excel data—because the marketplace required it. This resulted in technology that foundation models still haven't replicated over a year later. The aha moment came when institutional lenders wanted the AI for all their deal flow, not just marketplace transactions. Organic internal development created category-leading capabilities and validated product-market fit before commercialization. B2B founders should identify which internal operational challenges, if solved, could become standalone products serving the broader market. Design sales processes that mirror how your ICP evaluates talent: Donald replicated private equity's "super day" format where analyst candidates receive a data room, laptop without internet access, and three hours to produce an LBO model and investment thesis. F2 runs identical timed tests—customers send live deal data rooms under NDA, F2 generates investment committee memos using their templates, and presents same-day results. This proves the AI can perform at the standard funds use to evaluate human analysts they hire 18 months before start dates. B2B founders selling into industries with rigorous talent evaluation processes should reverse-engineer those frameworks into product demonstrations that speak to buyer expectations. Prioritize credibility over sales experience in technical markets: Donald's entire sales team consists of ex-finance professionals who lived in the seat—no traditional salespeople. These reps can screen-share investment memos created that morning and discuss them authentically with MDs and principals using industry-specific language. After 4.5 years running go-to-market at ARK, Donald teaches sales methodology to domain experts rather than teaching domain expertise to salespeople. For deals averaging half a billion dollars flowing through the platform, buyer credibility outweighs sales polish. B2B founders in specialized verticals should evaluate whether domain fluency or sales pedigree matters more for their specific buyer personas and deal complexity. Engineer for auditability before optimizing for speed: F2 focused on eliminating hallucination and achieving mathematical accuracy—solving what Donald calls the "reliability and trust" gap—before addressing workflow efficiency. The company name references the F2 keystroke used to audit Excel calculations at 3 AM in the PE bullpen. This positioning directly addresses the barrier preventing AI adoption for investment decisions: LLMs hallucinate, can't do math, and lack auditability. Only after proving the AI produces auditable, trustworthy output did F2 layer on speed benefits. B2B founders building for high-stakes decision environments should identify the fundamental trust barrier and make it the core technical focus before feature expansion. Leverage institutional knowledge as competitive differentiation: Beyond automating existing workflows, F2 enables firms to pipe in decades of institutional knowledge via API—instantly benchmarking new deals against thousands of historical transactions by vertical, revenue size, leverage levels, and management quality. This transforms screening memos from isolated analyses into context-rich evaluations informed by complete firm history. The AI doesn't just work faster; it has comprehensive context that individual analysts manually searching SharePoint folders could never access. B2B founders should identify where accumulated institutional data creates compounding value beyond point-in-time automation. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Parable is building an end-to-end intelligence platform that quantifies how organizations spend their collective time—the foundation for measuring real AI impact. With a thousand data connectors ingesting activity and log data across the enterprise software stack, Parable constructs proprietary knowledge graphs that size opportunities and measure outcomes in hard dollars, not adoption metrics. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Adam Schwartz, Co-Founder & CEO of Parable, to explore why 95% of CFOs see no AI ROI, how his decade running profitable businesses under resource constraints shaped his focus on inputs over outcomes, and why 2026 requires moving AI from CapEx experimentation to measured OpEx. Topics Discussed: Why the 95% CFO stat on AI ROI matters as an arbiter of truth, despite backlash Building knowledge graphs from activity data to quantify collective time allocation across hundreds of people The fundamental problem: enterprises lack quantitative frameworks for operational efficiency pre-AI Running parallel ICP experiments to achieve sales-market fit before product-market fit Why Parable has never lost a POC once leaders see quantitative baselines Market dynamics creating false signals—unprecedented curiosity without buying intent The demarcation between companies treating AI as product work versus those waiting for vendor solutions Why AI transformation demands century-old management structures to be questioned GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Engineer disqualification in momentum markets: Market-wide AI enthusiasm creates pipeline illusion. Prospects will engage indefinitely for education without purchase intent. Adam's framework: "How do we get people to say no to us and not drag us along... They want to keep talking because they want to learn and they want to know what's going on and they are genuinely interested." In enterprise sales during category shifts, build explicit qualification gates that force prospects to reveal resource commitment or disqualify. Extended evaluation cycles feel like traction but destroy unit economics. Use go-to-market as ICP discovery mechanism: Adam intentionally pursued multiple customer segments simultaneously—different company sizes and AI maturity stages—to let data reveal fit rather than rely on hypothesis. His memo to the team: "We're going to go after these three, you know, many different sizes of companies in order for us to decide like, who we like best." The key insight: get to problem-market fit and sales-market fit validation before optimizing product-market fit. This inverts conventional wisdom but works when TAM is massive and the bottleneck is identifying who feels pain acutely enough to buy now. Qualify on organizational structure, not verbal commitment: Every enterprise claims AI is strategic. Adam's hard filter: "Who in the organization is responsible for AI transformation? And if you don't have a one person answer to that question, you're not serious." Serious buyers have a named owner reporting to C-suite with dedicated budget and team. Buying Gemini, Glean, or other point solutions isn't a seriousness KPI—it's often passive consumption of AI as a byproduct of existing software relationships. Look for companies doing five-year work-backs on industry transformation and cascading effects on their operating model. Target post-experimentation, pre-scale buyers: Adam discovered the sweet spot isn't companies beginning their AI journey—it's those who've deployed initial programs and now need to prove value. "The market of people that have started to build AI into their operating model or into their strategy in like a coherent way, there's a team, there's an owner, there's budget... those are the people that we really want to be talking to." These buyers understand the problem viscerally because they're living it. They do product work daily—talking to stakeholders, generating use cases, building briefs, triaging roadmaps. They need your solution to professionalize what they're already attempting manually. Build measurement into your category narrative: The AI tooling market has over-indexed on soft efficiency claims that won't survive renewal cycles. Adam's warning: "There is too much hand waving around soft efficiency gains... you're going to have to renew and you need NRR and I don't think it's going to be that usage of the tool internally by employees and adoption is going to be enough." The last decade over-rotated to "everything drives revenue" due to VC pressure. This decade requires precision: does your product save time, reduce headcount needs, or accelerate revenue? Quantify it. Partner with measurement platforms if needed. Adam's insight on Calendly is instructive—it clearly saves time, but most buyers can't quantify how much, which weakens renewal economics. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Chef Robotics has produced 80 million meals—more than all other food robotics companies combined. The company has cracked what dozens of well-funded startups couldn't: profitable deployment of AI-enabled robots in food manufacturing. In this episode of BUILDERS, Rajat Bhageria, Founder and CEO of Chef Robotics, reveals why he focused on manufacturing before restaurants, how a single contract term change accelerated his sales cycle, and why the food assembly problem requires intelligence that traditional automation can't provide. This is category creation in real-time, with expansion to Germany and the UK planned for 2026. Topics Discussed: Why 60-70% of commercial food labor is in assembly, not cooking or prep The systematic failures of B2C robotics companies (Zume) versus B2B approaches (Miso Robotics) Chef's manufacturing-first strategy to build training data and field operations scale Why six-axis robots with vision outperform gravity-fed dispensers for food variability Reframing contract structure from "site acceptance test" to "trial" for faster closes Trade show strategy: multiple robots across partner booths, not just your own The economics of robotics-as-a-service in traditionally capex-driven industries GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Validate unit economics before building in hardware: Rajat secured early contracts before engineering anything. This wasn't just customer validation—it was economic validation. He identified that robotics companies fail when "they're trying to charge a human salary, but they're not able to provide the full set of tasks that a human is able to do in an eight hour shift." By selling first, Chef confirmed customers would pay for assembly automation specifically, not a general-purpose kitchen robot. For hard tech founders: pre-selling de-risks both product-market fit AND your business model assumptions. Target the labor concentration point, not the obvious automation opportunity: While competitors automated cooking (low labor intensity), Chef mapped the entire food production workflow and discovered assembly consumed 60-70% of labor hours. Rajat's insight: "One person can cook for 100 people or a thousand people. So even though the cooking process can take a while, you're amortizing it over a lot of people." This workflow analysis revealed where ROI actually existed. Founders should map labor distribution across their customer's entire operation, not just automate the most visible or technically interesting task. Build your moat through training data and field operations density: Chef's manufacturing focus isn't just about easier sales—it's strategic infrastructure. Rajat explained: "Today, Chef has done 80 million meals...If we can be really good at food manipulation, we have the biggest data set of training data...as we build more robots, our bill of material gets lower...We have people all over the country servicing these robots, which obviously those same people can service robots in restaurants." For AI-enabled hardware, your moat compounds through deployment volume, not just product features. Reframe risk through contract structure, not just pricing: Chef's breakthrough wasn't discounting—it was renaming their "site acceptance test" to a "trial." Rajat described the impact: "Literally exactly the same thing. It's kind of like you go to your Google Doc and you replace all SAT into trial. That has an immense impact on the sales velocity." The cognitive reframing transformed how buyers perceived commitment risk. For founders selling novel technology: audit your contract language for terms that trigger buyer risk aversion, even when the underlying mechanics protect them. Trade show ROI multiplies through partner booth placement: Rather than maximizing their own booth presence, Chef places robots in partner booths across the trade show floor. Rajat noted this approach yields more deal closures because "the champions saw the thing at the trade show." This isn't about lead volume—it's about removing skepticism. Manufacturing buyers don't believe flexible automation exists until they see it operating. For hard tech companies: distribute proof points across the physical spaces where your skeptical buyers already congregate. Customer success IS your market education strategy: In a nascent category with a "graveyard" of failed predecessors, Chef's market education relies entirely on reference customers. Cafe Spice scaled from 4 to 16 robots and now hosts prospective customer visits. Rajat's approach: give exceptional pricing to customers willing to become advocates. The conversion rate from a skeptical prospect visiting a working deployment far exceeds any other marketing channel. For category creators: your unit economics on early lighthouse customers should account for their sales force value, not just their revenue. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

In this episode, we sit down with Carl Mattsson, VP & GM EMEA at Kong, to discuss one of the most remarkable scaling journeys in the industry. Carl joined Kong when it was at just $1M ARR in the EMEA market and has since spearheaded its growth to nearly $100M ARR. We explore the unique sales principles that shaped the organization, the "heart surrounded by science" culture, and how Carl navigated the transition from a single-product company to a dominant AI-governance platform. Carl also shares the incredible story of a founder's personal commitment that kept him at the company during a critical turning point.

Axenya is rebuilding healthcare around chronic disease prevention through AI-powered continuous monitoring. Covering 100,000 lives in Brazil and processing 95 million clinical inferences monthly, the company pivoted from clinical technology provider to healthcare broker - achieving cash flow positive status before their Series A. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Mariano García-Valiño, CEO and Founder of Axenya, to learn how they spent $3 million building the "perfect product" before discovering no one would pay for it, why they acquired a small broker to unlock their revenue model, and their regulatory-constrained approach to geographic expansion. Topics Discussed: Axenya's shift from infectious disease to chronic disease management through wearables and AI The 12-month zero-revenue period after spending $3 million on product development Why doctors, patients, and health plans all failed as buyers despite clinical validation The broker acquisition that unlocked their business model Performance-based pricing: zero fees upfront, revenue from cost savings only Regulatory barriers determining expansion (Mexico viable, Argentina impossible, Europe requires model redesign) Field-force-driven GTM with 30+ salespeople for complex, high-ACV enterprise deals Path to cash flow positive before Series A and scaling playbook for 2026 // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Plantd is reinventing engineered lumber by replacing trees with rapidly renewable biomass, scaling manufacturing technology that costs 100x less than traditional OSB production. With customers including DR Horton and growing demand across furniture, RV, and international markets, Plantd has attracted partnerships throughout the building materials industry. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Nathan Silvernail, Co-Founder & CEO at Plantd, to explore how his decade at SpaceX shaped his approach to building a capital-intensive hardware company that could transform the $65 billion engineered lumber market.   Topics Discussed Building continuous OSB production systems versus $500M batch presses used by incumbents Securing DR Horton, furniture manufacturers, and building material companies as early customers Managing the bifurcation between OPEX-intensive manual processes and CAPEX transitions to AI robotic vision systems Designing machines for 400,000 panels/year output with sub-one-year payback at scale Navigating opinion-based building inspection processes where "no two blocks in this entire country build a house the same way" The strategic calculus of positioning away from climate tech to avoid green premium assumptions Scaling from pilot production to deploying 25-30 machines to meet current demand pipeline Achieving 70-layer panel construction versus 6-8 layers in timber-based OSB //   Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co   // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Turnstile is reimagining quote-to-cash for the modern B2B world, where negotiated agreements create operational chaos that standard pricing never does. After selling Second Measure to Bloomberg, co-founders Michael Babineau and Lillian Chou experienced the irony firsthand: running a data analytics company while managing their own revenue operations through spreadsheets and manual processes. That incongruence became the catalyst for Turnstile, a self-serve revenue platform designed to support sales-led B2B companies from their first negotiated deal through tens of millions in ARR. In this conversation, Michael shares how they're solving the structured data problem that plagues B2B revenue operations, why eliminating custom development forced genuine platform flexibility, and how they're collapsing a traditionally 3-6 month implementation into a self-serve onboarding that takes minutes. Topics Discussed: Why negotiated B2B agreements create the structured data problem that breaks revenue operations Turnstile's compound startup approach spanning quote-to-cash to revenue recognition The internal ban on custom development that forced true configurability into the platform How supporting non-standard contracts from day one enables earlier market entry than traditional CPQ Revenue leakage and "truth drift" between contract terms and actual customer relationships The rippling-style GTM strategy: start with startups, grow into enterprise with your customers Positioning challenges when your category exists but your ICP doesn't know it yet Building for human operators and AI agents simultaneously on the same platform primitives Agentic dunning and the roadmap toward AI-automated revenue operations // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

For the holiday break we are resurfacing some of our best episodes so far. Here is the best episode of season 3.Kyle left his job as a hacker at the NSA to launch Huntress. He bootstrapped for 3 years and burned all his savings. One of his co-founders quit. He got into an accelerator program, but had to sleep in his car for 16 weeks because he couldn't afford a hotel.Finally, 3 years in he'd hit $1.5M ARR. So he pitched 60 VCs for a Series A—and got 60 'no's. He was forced to raise a small, $1M inside round. But then things changed:2018: $1.5M ARR2019: $5M ARR2020: $10M ARR2021: $20M ARR2022: $40M ARR2023: $70M ARR2024: $100M+ ARRHuntress is valued at $2B.The investors who backed his $1M bridge are up 140x. Now every VC wants to invest—and Kyle's the one saying 'no'.Why you should listen: How to know whether you should keep going or quit.What it takes to get through the first few years at a bootstrapped startup.Why revenue expansion is a huge lever for fast-growth (Huntress has 140% net revenue retention).How starting a startup can impact your personal life and relationships.How to work with partners to sell to long tail SMB customers.Keywordsentrepreneurship, cybersecurity, product market fit, startup journey, military experience, SMB market, funding challenges, automation, human expertise, business growthTimestamps:(00:00:00) Intro(00:2:01) Working at the NSA(00:6:14) A big win in counter cyber terrorism(00:10:00) What gave way to Huntress(00:14:22) Pitching to a startup accelerator(00:16:29) Adopting curiosity(00:21:04) Getting ahead of cyber criminals(00:26:00) Starting to grow(00:32:50) Cult or conviction(00:35:00) It takes grit(00:39:50) Learning from people's lessons(00:42:20) Cockroaches and underdogs(00:46:10) Three strikes, I'm out(00:52:56) Having a military background(00:56:17) One piece of adviceSend me a message to let me know what you think!

My interview with Ali Ansari the founder of micro1.ai, an AI startup that has grown revenue from $8M to $150M+ this year and is on track for a multi-billion dollar valuation. They are working with most of the AI labs and largest tech companies in the world (including Microsoft) to hire human experts to train AI. We've been investing in Ali for years now and it's been epic to see his insane growth and recent traction. Ali and micro1 are at the forefront of the AI revolution.Ali Ansari Founder of micro1.ai on X: https://x.com/aliniikkmicro1 website: https://www.micro1.ai/0:00 Forbes Article, $2.5B Valuation?1:35 Micro1: The AI Platform For Human Intelligence7:18 Micro1's Insane Growth ($8M to $100M ARR in one year)9:54 Are We In An AI Bubble?16:16 Micro1's Long Term Vision20:25 Micro1 Training Tesla Optimus25:20 Why Did You Found Micro1?29:10 The Early Days Ebay Flipping33:08 $15B Market Growing 100%+34:35 Human Demonstration Business (Teaching Robots)37:00 Micro1's Next Funding RoundMy X:   / gfilche  HyperChange Patreon :)   / hyperchange   Disclaimer: I'm an investor in micro1 personally and through my VC firm HyperGuap. This is not financial advice.

Land Life is a technology-driven nature restoration company that restores landscapes degraded by wildfire, overfarming, and urbanization. The company combines proprietary remote sensing, machine learning algorithms, and hardware solutions to deliver end-to-end restoration projects spanning 40 years, monetized through voluntary and compliance carbon markets. With seven validated project design documents on Verra, Land Life has built a business model that requires customers to believe the company will exist for decades. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Rebekah Braswell, CEO of Land Life, to explore how the company navigated from global pilots in Saudi Arabia and the Galapagos to focused geographic operations, evolved its customer base from experimental tech buyers to conservative insurance companies, and repositioned its entire value proposition when climate dropped off corporate priority lists in 2024. Topics Discussed: Land Life's shift from selling technology components to customer-driven A-to-Z project delivery  Remote sensing dashboard that assesses ecological, operational, and economic feasibility before land visits  Securing environmental attributes while keeping land locally owned by landowners  Machine learning algorithms for determining optimal tree species, placement, and timing  Evolution from tech company early adopters to asset managers, financial institutions, and energy providers  The 2024 market standstill: how tariffs and defense spending displaced climate on corporate agendas  Strategic repositioning from "climate" to "resilience" language that connects to infrastructure and defense  Targeting biogenic customers in timber and agriculture with supply shed restoration strategies GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Let customer requirements redefine your product scope: Land Life initially sold discrete technology—cocoon hardware and software tools—to corporations. Buyers consistently responded: "great tech, but we sell shoes online for a living. I need a full project, A to Z." Rather than insisting on their original product definition, Rebekah agreed to plant trees and hire contractors despite "knowing very little at the time what it actually took." The company evolved from a technology vendor to a full-service restoration provider because that's what buyers would actually purchase. B2B founders should recognize when customer feedback reveals a larger market opportunity than their initial product scope, even if delivery capabilities don't yet exist. Target buyers whose operational experience mirrors your delivery complexity: Land Life struggled with tech companies despite strong initial traction because these customers operated on "much shorter term economic cycles" incompatible with 40-year projects. The company found stronger fit with financial institutions, insurance companies, and energy providers—buyers Rebekah described as "familiar with asset management, familiar with physical operations" who could "identify with some of the cycles that we have to manage in terms of planting windows." She told her team: "you know you have a business when an insurance company starts buying your product. These are conservative buyers." B2B founders with long implementation cycles, physical operations, or asset-intensive models should prioritize buyers with analogous operational complexity rather than chasing early adopters who lack relevant mental models. Build transparency infrastructure as core product, not marketing: For customers committing to 40-year relationships, Land Life addressed the fundamental trust problem through systematic monitoring and data sharing. Rebekah identified the specific perception barrier: "people have this image that people are just going out and planting trees and there's no accountability." The company's response wasn't better sales materials but "a data focused and transparent process" that continuously validates project performance. B2B founders selling long-term commitments should invest in measurement and reporting systems as primary credibility drivers, recognizing that transparency infrastructure is product, not overhead. Adapt positioning to buyer priority shifts without abandoning core value: When climate investments "came to a standstill for six months" in 2024, Land Life didn't pivot its business model—it reframed its language. Climate "just dropped on the priority list" as corporations focused on "AI, defense and tariffs." The company shifted to "resilience" positioning that "doesn't use the word climate in it" but connects to infrastructure, defense, and supply chain concerns. Critically, this wasn't invented messaging—Land Life had internally called their engineers "resilience engineers" for years because "you can't bet one climate scenario." B2B founders facing external market shifts should mine existing internal frameworks for language that naturally aligns with new buyer priorities rather than forcing artificial repositions. Expand value proposition beyond primary category benefit to operational impact: Land Life evolved from pure carbon sequestration sales to showing customers how restoration addresses their core operational risks. For biogenic customers—"people who work in timber, food and agriculture"—the pitch became: "if you're surrounded by a degraded ecosystem, it will eventually encroach" on your supply chain. Rebekah explained: "it's not just enough to have a robust supply chain like your field for example. Great that things are healthy there, but if you're surrounded by a degraded ecosystem, you know it will eventually encroach." This connected restoration directly to supply shed stability and de-risking rather than relying solely on carbon credit value. B2B founders should identify how their solution protects or enhances customers' existing operations, not just deliver category-specific benefits. Pursue partnerships to reach scale thresholds faster than organic growth allows: Rebekah emphasized that achieving buyer-required scale through partnerships is now essential: "buyers are looking for scale and it is hard for us, who are in nature based solutions and physical assets, to achieve that overnight." She advocated for "constructive and innovative partnerships where you can bring that scale to buyers, whether it's organic or just through partnering" as the path to "play at a different level." The sector signal is clear: "they want bigger volumes, they want stronger suppliers, and that path goes a lot more quickly when you partner, as opposed to trying to do it alone." B2B founders in capital-intensive or operationally complex businesses should view partnerships as strategic accelerators to reach minimum viable scale, not just growth tactics. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

David Stifter spent 20 years as head of technology at Colony Capital, managing systems for a $60 billion private equity real estate firm. When a longtime AP specialist retired, the company lost its institutional knowledge for coding complex invoices across thousands of entities and tenant relationships. After a year evaluating RPA, template-based approaches, and early OCR solutions, David recognized that structured historical data—invoices paired with their coding—could train AI models to capture implicit business rules. Five years ago, at 40 with young children, he left his executive role to build PredictAP. The company now processes tens of thousands of invoices monthly for firms including Bridge Investment Group, demonstrating how operational expertise combined with AI can solve problems that pure technology approaches miss. Topics Discussed Identifying AI use cases with structured annotated data and human feedback loops  Moving from CTO buyer to vendor founder and discovering which networks actually convert  Building repeatable sales motion after exhausting warm introductions  Technology adoption barriers in real estate and the domain expertise requirement for vertical SaaS  Hiring sales leadership to scale from founder-led to systematic pipeline generation  Solving complete workflow integration challenges beyond isolated technical problems GTM Lessons For B2B Founders Match technical approach to problem structure, not trend: David identified three critical elements for his AI application: structured annotated data from historical invoice coding, recognizable patterns in implicit business rules, and human review as a feedback mechanism. He notes many founders "try to shove AI, the AI hammer to smash any nail, but they're not always the best use case." Six years ago, before modern LLMs, he used historical invoice-coding pairs as training data—solving the annotation problem that plagued early machine learning. Founders should evaluate whether their problem has the structural characteristics that make a given technology approach viable, rather than applying trending solutions to force market fit. Network quality reveals itself when you need something: David contrasts two early investors: a former acquisitions executive who promised extensive connections but delivered "not a single callback" after leaving their role, versus an asset manager who generated "hundreds" of leads through genuine relationships. The acquisitions person experienced "an existential crisis" realizing "my network was based upon my ability to have a massive checkbook behind me." Founders should recognize that network strength isn't tested until you're asking rather than giving—those who built relationships through consistent helpfulness rather than transactional power will see different response rates when they launch. Architect the founder-led to systematic sales transition: After two years of founder-led sales, David "hit that wall" and brought in Steve Farrell, prioritizing experience scaling from $3-5M to $20M ARR over industry-specific expertise. He notes warm intro calls are "very to the point" while cold outreach "starts hostile or skeptical"—requiring entirely different trust-building approaches. The shift required adding BDRs, AEs, and systematic content generation. Founders should hire sales leadership with specific stage experience before network depletion forces reactive hiring, and expect to rebuild positioning for skeptical buyers who lack pre-existing trust. Integrate solutions into existing workflow infrastructure: David emphasizes the failure mode of optimized point solutions: "They have a perfect solution from the technical problem but it's not going to work for this firm because it's not going to fit into their workflow." He maps the complete experience including integration with existing systems, training requirements, user experience, consistency, and speed. Technical superiority in isolation leads to "problems with adoption and retention." Founders should map every system, process, and stakeholder their solution touches, designing for workflow integration rather than isolated problem-solving. Sequence customer sophistication as you scale beyond innovators: David's initial customers were "leading edge folks" from his technology network who understood AI potential. As PredictAP matured, sales cycles became "much longer" with more conservative firms requiring higher proof thresholds. He learned that "initial sales have to be very successful and you have to have customers that advocate for you" because mainstream buyers need extensive social proof. Founders should recognize that early adopter ICP differs fundamentally from mainstream buyers—what closes innovators (technology potential) differs from what closes pragmatists (proven ROI and references), requiring distinct positioning and sales approaches for each segment. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Datawizz is pioneering continuous reinforcement learning infrastructure for AI systems that need to evolve in production, not ossify after deployment. After building and exiting RapidAPI—which served 10 million developers and had at least one team at 75% of Fortune 500 companies using and paying for the platform—Founder and CEO Iddo Gino returned to building when he noticed a pattern: nearly every AI agent pitch he reviewed as an angel investor assumed models would simultaneously get orders of magnitude better and cheaper. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Iddo to explore why that dual assumption breaks most AI economics, how traditional ML training approaches fail in the LLM era, and why specialized models will capture 50-60% of AI inference by 2030. Topics Discussed Why running two distinct businesses under one roof—RapidAPI's developer marketplace and enterprise API hub—ultimately capped scale despite compelling synergy narratives The "Big Short moment" reviewing AI pitches: every business model assumed simultaneous 1-2 order of magnitude improvements in accuracy and cost Why companies spending 2-3 months on fine-tuning repeatedly saw frontier models (GPT-4, Claude 3) obsolete their custom work The continuous learning flywheel: online evaluation → suspect inference queuing → human validation → daily/weekly RL batches → deployment How human evaluation companies like Scale AI shift from offline batch labeling to real-time inference correction queues Early GTM through LinkedIn DMs to founders running serious agent production volume, working backward through less mature adopters ICP discovery: qualifying on whether 20% accuracy gains or 10x cost reductions would be transformational versus incremental The integration layer approach: orchestrating the continuous learning loop across observability, evaluation, training, and inference tools Why the first $10M is about selling to believers in continuous learning, not evangelizing the category GTM Lessons For B2B Founders Recognize when distribution narratives mask structural incompatibility: RapidAPI had 10 million developers and teams at 75% of Fortune 500 paying for the platform—massive distribution that theoretically fed enterprise sales. The problem: Iddo could always find anecdotes where POC teams had used RapidAPI, creating a compelling story about grassroots adoption. The critical question he should have asked earlier: "Is self-service really the driver for why we're winning deals, or is it a nice-to-have contributor?" When two businesses have fundamentally different product roadmaps, cultures, and buying journeys, distribution overlap doesn't create a sustainable single company. Stop asking if synergies exist—ask if they're causal. Qualify on whether improvements cross phase-transition thresholds: Datawizz disqualifies prospects who acknowledge value but lack acute pain. The diagnostic questions: "If we improved model accuracy by 20%, how impactful is that?" and "If we cut your costs 10x, what does that mean?" Companies already automating human labor often respond that inference costs are rounding errors compared to savings. The ideal customers hit differently: "We need accuracy at X% to fully automate this process and remove humans from the loop. Until then, it's just AI-assisted. Getting over that line is a step-function change in how we deploy this agent." Qualify on whether your improvement crosses a threshold that changes what's possible, not just what's better. Use discovery to map market structure, not just validate hypotheses: Iddo validated that the most mature companies run specialized, fine-tuned models in production. The surprise: "The chasm between them and everybody else was a lot wider than I thought." This insight reshaped their entire strategy—the tooling gap, approaches to model development, and timeline to maturity differed dramatically across segments. Most founders use discovery to confirm their assumptions. Better founders use it to understand where different cohorts sit on the maturity curve, what bridges or blocks their progression, and which segments can buy versus which need multi-year evangelism. Target spend thresholds that indicate real commitment: Datawizz focuses on companies spending "at a minimum five to six figures a month on AI and specifically on LLM inference, using the APIs directly"—meaning they're building on top of OpenAI/Anthropic/etc., not just using ChatGPT. This filters for companies with skin in the game. Below that threshold, AI is an experiment. Above it, unit economics and quality bars matter operationally. For infrastructure plays, find the spend level that indicates your problem is a daily operational reality, not a future consideration. Structure discovery to extract insight, not close deals: Iddo's framework: "If I could run [a call where] 29 of 30 minutes could be us just asking questions and learning, that would be the perfect call in my mind." He compared it to "the dentist with the probe trying to touch everything and see where it hurts." The most valuable calls weren't those that converted to POCs—they came from people who approached the problem differently or had conflicting considerations. In hot markets with abundant budgets, founders easily collect false positives by selling when they should be learning. The discipline: exhaust your question list before explaining what you build. If they don't eventually ask "What do you do?" you're not surfacing real pain. Avoid the false-positive trap in well-funded categories: Iddo identified a specific risk in AI: "You can very easily run these calls, you think you're doing discovery, really you're doing sales, you end up getting a bunch of POCs and maybe some paying customers. So you get really good initial signs but you've never done any actual discovery. You have all the wrong indications—you're getting a lot of false positive feedback while building the completely wrong thing." When capital is abundant and your space is hot, early revenue can mask product-market misalignment. Good initial signs aren't validation if you skipped the work to understand why people bought. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Aurelius Systems is tackling one of defense's most critical challenges: cost-effective counter-drone warfare. The company builds lightweight, edge-deployed laser weapon systems with 10-million-x marginal cost advantages over traditional interceptors—shooting down drones for approximately 10 cents versus $2 million per Sea Sparrow missile. With systems priced in hundreds of thousands rather than tens of millions of dollars, Aurelius is proving that commercial manufacturing principles can revolutionize defense technology. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Michael LaFramboise, CEO and Co-Founder of Aurelius Systems, to unpack how his background spanning automotive manufacturing at Chrysler, R&D at Coherent (the largest U.S. laser manufacturer), and defense sales positioned him to build what he calls "the F150 of directed energy systems." Topics Discussed: Why Michael's unusual combination of heavy industrial manufacturing, high-power laser R&D, and directed energy sales made him one of "probably like five people under 70 in the country" positioned to build this company Aurelius's contrarian R&D thesis: build everything from commercial off-the-shelf components first, only upgrading to bespoke when field tests fail The tactical fundraising progression: first prototype to pre-seed, DIU grant in February 2025, Singapore Defense Force joint challenge, Army X-Tech competition wins Government relations as infrastructure: why Aurelius retained a lobbyist six months post-pre-seed and how Congressional support addresses 1-3 year sales cycles Navigating the DOD acquisitions reorg: 100+ technology acceleration organizations consolidating to 10-20 under new PAE structure, with goals of 90-day turnarounds replacing multi-year cycles The demonstration strategy that changed everything: earning signed memorandums from high-ranking officers after shooting down drones in Hawaii and Austin under adversarial conditions (heavy rain, 99% humidity, heat warping, night operations) Founder-led marketing ROI: why acquisitions officers, funders, and engineering talent all follow different channels (LinkedIn vs. X) and require different voices The three-stakeholder sales complexity: when your end user (warfighter), purchaser (acquisitions), and budget authorizer (Congress) are separate entities who don't communicate GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Follow proven playbooks in specialized markets, then execute obsessively: Michael explicitly followed Anduril's early-stage defense playbook, particularly around government relations: "I think it's like following the Anduril playbook for how you do an early stage defense company is probably a very appropriate thing to do." In highly specialized B2B markets (defense, healthcare, financial services), pattern-match to companies that have successfully navigated regulatory and procurement complexity rather than inventing process from scratch. The differentiation comes from execution and technology, not from reinventing go-to-market structure. Treat specialized expertise as infrastructure, not overhead: Aurelius hired a lobbyist six months after their pre-seed—before significant revenue—because defense sales involve three disconnected stakeholders. Michael explained: "your purchaser, your end user, and your authorizer for funds are all separate people that don't know each other... whenever you have these different points, it doesn't expand linearly the difficulty or the complexity of the sales cycle. It expands exponentially." B2B founders should map stakeholder complexity early and staff accordingly. If your buyer doesn't control budget, your user doesn't make purchase decisions, or your champion needs internal air cover, these aren't edge cases—they're your sales model. Demonstration beats documentation when overcoming category skepticism: After decades of directed energy failures, Aurelius spent 2024 conducting nationwide field demonstrations, culminating in adversarial drone shoot-downs in heavy rain, 99% humidity, and night conditions. Michael noted they needed to "clean up the mess that a lot of these other companies have created" with signed memorandums from high-ranking officers. When your category has a failure history, customer education isn't about better pitch decks—it's about systematic proof that eliminates objections through witnessed performance. Plan for demonstration costs and timeline in your first-year budget. Build your R&D thesis around manufacturing reality, not engineering perfection: Aurelius's core principle: build everything from commercial off-the-shelf components, upgrading only when field tests fail. Michael's insight from automotive and laser manufacturing: "you can get 80-90% physics perfection on a system for 2% of the cost" versus traditional directed energy's approach of "400 ARL and AFRL PhDs all coming together to make the most super bespoke, hyper perfect thing ever." They use material processing lasers (identical output at 1/10th the cost of directed energy lasers) and commercial components from automotive supply chains. B2B founders should define their "good enough" threshold explicitly and build cost structure around it—perfection is often the enemy of scalability and margin. Attack market dislocations where wrong-fit solutions reveal unmet needs: Aurelius doesn't compete with Sea Sparrow missiles for shooting down aircraft at 9 miles—they target the dislocation where $2M missiles designed for large ordinance are being misused against $500 drones with 30% effectiveness. Michael identified that "there isn't anything in the market that's been developed for counter drone at any significant distance." The opportunity isn't better missiles; it's purpose-built solutions for Group 1 and Group 2 drones (FPV quadcopters and small planes) where no appropriate system exists. Map where customers are forced to use expensive, inappropriate solutions—that's where new categories emerge. //  Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.  Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

GreenLite delivers private construction plan review as an alternative to traditional city permitting processes. After spending six months testing both sides of the construction permitting transaction, the company identified owner-developers as their ICP and built a business model around Florida's privatization legislation—legislation that has now expanded to nine additional states including Texas, Tennessee, and California. In this episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with James Gallagher, CEO and Co-Founder of GreenLite, to explore how his fifth startup leveraged regulatory shifts, rejected workflow software in favor of outcomes, and scaled by targeting chief development officers at enterprise retailers struggling with permitting delays. Topics Discussed: How GreenLite discovered architects were heavy users but wrong customers due to two-part sales dynamics Why owner-developers became the ICP after six months of customer discovery across applicants and agencies The accidental discovery of private plan review through conversations with Fort Worth and Miami-Dade agencies GreenLite's platform combining regulatory permissions, licensed AEC professionals, and AI-augmented software How natural disasters and AEC talent shortages are accelerating privatization legislation nationwide Cold email strategies that converted enterprise retailers by surfacing acute pain points GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Map two-sided markets to find where purchasing authority and pain intersect: GreenLite pitched a CTO at a major architecture firm who responded positively but said "I just need to talk to my client, my customer." This revealed architects required approval from owner-developers despite being the heaviest product users. James pivoted to owner-developers who "carry the land, carry the construction loans" and feel revenue delays most acutely. The lesson: usage intensity doesn't equal buyer authority. In complex ecosystems, systematically test which party controls budget and feels enough pain to sign contracts independently. Recognize when procurement cycles kill early-stage validation velocity: Cities explicitly told James their "crazy procurement cycles" made early partnership impractical despite genuine interest. State and local education and government sales require specialized expertise and extended timelines that prevent rapid iteration. James chose to prove the model with private sector customers first. For founders: government can be a lucrative eventual market, but unless you have sled sales expertise and 12+ month runway per deal, validate PMF elsewhere first. Capitalize on regulatory tailwinds before markets realize they exist: Only Florida permitted private plan review when GreenLite launched in July 2022. By late 2024, nine states passed enabling legislation driven by natural disaster reconstruction needs and talent shortages in city building departments. James positioned GreenLite to ride this wave rather than selling transformation to resistant agencies. Founders should monitor legislative and regulatory changes in their verticals—new compliance requirements or permissions can suddenly open massive TAMs with minimal incumbent competition. Enterprise cold email converts when you surface non-obvious acute pain: GreenLite cold emailed chief development officers at major retail chains and quick-service restaurants with "Are you missing your openings due to permitting?" The response rate validated that permitting delays—not site selection or construction costs—were a critical path blocker for store rollout velocity. James targeted CDOs rather than real estate or design teams because they own the full development timeline. For enterprise sales: identify the executive accountable for the metric your solution impacts, then lead with how you move that specific number. Validate outcome-based models before building sophisticated workflow tools: GreenLite's customers rejected "another workflow product or system of record" that required API integrations with their ERPs and construction management systems. Instead, they wanted "faster, more predictable, more transparent permits." James built a viable business delivering finished permits through licensed professionals augmented by software, with the AI sophistication coming later. The business was "super viable well before the product was" by early 2023. For founders in industries resistant to software adoption: test whether buyers want tools to operate or outcomes to purchase—outcome-based pricing can achieve PMF faster and command premium willingness-to-pay. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.  Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Sam Liang worked on the team that built the "blue dot" for Google Maps and now he's transforming how we think about meetings with Otter.ai. Fresh off crossing $100M in ARR with a lean team of less than 200, Sam joins us to discuss how Otter evolved from passive transcription to active AI agents that participate in your meetings. Learn practical strategies for building reliable voice AI, implementing enterprise knowledge bases, and deploying AI agents that actually deliver ROI.Resources mentioned:• Otter.ai $100M ARR announcement: https://otter.ai/blog/otter-ai-breaks-100m-arr-barrier• HIPAA compliance: https://otter.ai/blog/otter-ai-achieves-hipaa-complianceSubscribe to The Neuron newsletter: https://theneuron.ai

Dexory builds data intelligence platforms for logistics, using autonomous robots to create digital twins of warehouse operations. With over $280 million raised through a recent preemptive Series C, the company has scaled from a bootstrapped startup to a full-stack robotics operation expanding across Europe and the US. In this episode of Category Visionaries, I sat down with Andrei Danescu, Founder and CEO of Dexory, to unpack how the company navigated early product-market misalignment, cracked the messaging for a category-creating technology, and maintained execution velocity as a capital-intensive business. Topics Discussed: Building in logistics after observing parts tracking failures in Formula One operations The costly mistake: spending years on public space robots before committing to warehouse logistics Why bootstrapping for five to six years forced product discipline before venture funding Messaging shift from autonomous robot capabilities to inventory visibility pain points Zero infrastructure change as a strategic product constraint for live warehouse deployments Geographic expansion strategy using multinational customers for internal reference selling How the convergence of AI adoption, sensor cost reduction, and industry data appetite created market timing Maintaining commercial velocity as the primary metric for Series C readiness in full-stack businesses GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Message to the problem, not the technology stack: When Dexory led with "world's tallest autonomous robots" and "scan 10,000+ pallets per hour," prospects responded with "what does it actually do?" The shift to leading with inventory visibility and stock control—a pain point customers immediately recognized—unlocked early traction. For category-creating products, customers need to map your solution to existing problems before they can appreciate technical differentiation. Andrei's insight: start with the problem customers know they have, then layer in technical superiority once you've established relevance. Turn operational constraints into product requirements: Dexory designed around the reality that warehouses operate as "live businesses" that cannot pause for infrastructure overhauls. Zero infrastructure change became a core product spec, not a nice-to-have feature. This required autonomous navigation in complex, dynamic environments rather than controlled spaces. Founders building for established industries should identify non-negotiable operational constraints early and architect solutions that respect them rather than requiring customers to adapt their operations. Build value expansion mechanisms before closing your first customer: Dexory established infrastructure for continuous product improvement from day one, treating early deployments as ongoing collaborations rather than transactions. Customers influenced roadmap priorities while Dexory delivered incremental value increases over time. This transformed buyers into advocates who took "point of pride" in the technology. The tactical approach: structure customer agreements and product architecture to support continuous delivery cycles that compound value rather than one-time implementations. Use multinational customers as geographic expansion infrastructure: Instead of opening regional offices across territories, Dexory targeted global companies where a European deployment could generate US interest through internal reference calls. Andrei noted this creates "a lot stronger" references "because they're already part of the same company." The expansion velocity this enabled—UK to Europe to US without massive regional buildout—proved critical for a capital-intensive business. Founders should prioritize customers with multi-region operations who can accelerate geographic reach through internal advocacy networks. Treat post-raise execution velocity as your next round metric: After Dexory's Series B, investors returned a month later to find the company "already ahead of plan." This consistent over-delivery on growth targets set up their preemptive Series C. For full-stack businesses where each dollar deployed takes longer to show returns, maintaining commercial momentum signals execution capability that justifies higher valuations. Andrei's warning: the temptation to slow down and "invest a bit more in product" after raising capital is exactly when founders need to double down on commercial traction as the North Star. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Is the $400 billion currently being poured into AI infrastructure a visionary bet or a massive bubble waiting to burst? Vijay Rajendran explains why we are seeing the biggest investment in fixed capital since the railroads, and what could cause it all to come crashing down. In this interview, Vijay and Sean discuss the new velocity of fundraising, where startups hit $100M ARR in months, and the rise of "seed-strapping" (raising once, then profiting). They also debate why VCs are obsessed with "founder pedigree," the structural reasons why European startups struggle to scale compared to the US, and the geopolitical shocks (food and fuel prices) that could abruptly end the AI party. Check out the company: https://gai.ventures

Episode 407 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Seth Rosen, Founder & CEO of CustomMade. A common theme that you'll hear throughout this interview is the importance of resiliency. Sure - the media loves the story of the latest company that has achieved $100M ARR in a month (I'm obviously kidding), but the overwhelming majority of businesses are a grind. It's about taking a bunch of punches, getting back up and figuring it all out. It's not all rainbows and butterflies, which is why I was excited to interview Seth. The story of CustomMade has lots of twists and turns… from rapid growth… to later salvaging the company by structuring a deal with Wayfair to acqui-hire their employee base… to the insanely successful reboot! Today, CustomMade is a leading online custom jeweler that specializes in creating personalized, one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces, such as engagement rings, wedding bands, and more. The platform simplifies the entire custom process, helping buyers create their vision and working with master jewelers to bring it to life. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:11 Importance of Resiliency 01:20 The Right Business Model: Subscription vs Marketplace 02:52 Seth's Background 06:24 Meeting Mike Salguero While Working in Real Estate 12:51 Background Story of CustomMade 20:55 Raising Venture Capital for CustomMade 24:58 Building & Running an Online Marketplace 27:30 The Challenges of Running an Online Marketplace 29:24 Making a Deal with Wayfair 31:33 CustomMade Reboot 36:38 CustomMade Today - The World's Largest Online Custom Jeweler 40:10 What are Lab Grown Diamonds 44:24 SEO & GEO 49:20 Seth's Other Initiatives in the Gem Industry 50:46 Seth's Role as a Venture Partner at WTI

This episode goes deep into the mechanics of scaling a company from steady growth to breakout velocity. Peter shares how Spreedly quadrupled ARR growth in his first year without increasing OPEX, why the “right people pointed at the right problems” is everything, and how to decide which problems are existential versus learn-as-you-go.We dissect how go-to-market organizations evolve from $20M to $100M ARR, the power of focus and role separation, and how to keep silos aligned around one customer story.Peter also explains the shift from “payments orchestration” to “open payments” and how Spreedly's position as the original player in the space gives them unique leverage. We walk through the future of agentic commerce, Google's new agent-to-agent payments protocol, and what it means when agents can transact faster than any human could ever shop.We close out with the Dodgeball acquisition, a primer on fraud orchestration, and a wild story about working an entire night shift at a nightclub during a meltdown launch.Topics Covered:How Peter defines the journey to presidencyThe “right person, right problem” frameworkOne-way vs two-way doors for staffing big problemsHow to scale a GTM org from $20M to $100MWhy open payments replaces orchestrationSpreedly's unique market position and 15-year head startAgent to agent commerce and Google's new payments protocolHow AI changes the velocity of money movementFraud orchestration and Spreedly's acquisition of DodgeballBalancing profitable growth vs growth at all costsPerception vs reality in leadershipPeter's wildest “I never thought I'd see that” story 

If you've spent any time with founders or investors in São Paulo this year, you know the questions filling every conversation.Can Brazil still generate breakout winners? Is AI killing SaaS? Are IPOs even realistic? Is global expansion from LATAM something founders should still aspire to?This episode answers all of them.You'll hear why Brazil went from six $100M ARR companies to more than thirty in just a few years.Why global products that scale across Mexico and Colombia simply break in Brazil.Why AI is both the biggest threat and the biggest tailwind for incumbents with real moats.Why growth investors are underwriting M&A far more seriously than IPOs.Why “right to win” — not the story — determines whether a Brazilian company should ever go global.And what founders must understand now about valuation, exits, efficiency, and investor relationships in a world transformed by AI.And toward the end, you'll hear me bring in the questions our audience asked live — in the room as we recorded this session.This is the episode you'll want to send to your co-founder, your board, and the WhatsApp group where everyone is not fundraising just yet. Comment BRAZIL and I'll send you the link to the full conversation.Dileep Thazhmon from Jeeves and Bruno Maimone from Warburg Pincus sit down with me to map the truths behind the narratives the ecosystem has been circling for months. Join The J Curve Community:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: Weekly deep dives into LATAM's hottest deals, emerging trends, and market intelligence⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: Daily market insights and exclusive founder updates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: Behind-the-scenes podcast moments and quick industry takes⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Hit subscribe⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and share this episode with fellow entrepreneurs and investors

This Week In Startups is made possible by:Sentry - http://sentry.io/twistLinkedIn Ads - http://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartupsPipedrive - pipedrive.com/twistToday's show:Netflix wants to gobble up Warner Bros. Do they just want to own Batman and Harry Potter, or is this secretly about destroying movie theaters?Sure, this is usually a startup show, but news THIS BIG warrants attention! So Lon stops by to tell Jason and Alex about the big Netflix acquisition news, why so many theatrical movie fans are terrified for the future, and why this might face particular regulatory scrutiny both at home and abroad.PLUS… are Googlers gaming Polymarket? This is one scenario in which prediction markets are NOT exactly like stocks.THEN we're looking at some of our favorite startups from the Fall ‘25 Y Combinator cohort (and asking Producer Claude for his picks)… Considering why Perplexity keeps getting sued and how they can stop it… and doing a victory lap for Jason's early investment in breakout AI training project Micro1.Timestamps:(02:05) Netflix buying Warner Bros! Jason, Lon and Alex react.(05:04) Jaytrade Update: J kind of missed the boat on this one(05:36) What does this mean for theatrical cinema?(08:42) Sentry - New users get 3 months free of the Business plan (covers 150k errors). Go to http://sentry.io/twist and use code TWIST(09:52) Jason's pitch to Disney CEO Bob Iger (please send this to him!)(19:36) LinkedIn Ads: Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. Launch your first campaign and get $250 FREE when you spend at least $250. Go to http://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups to claim your credit.(23:29) Is this deal going to get approval, at home and abroad?(25:52) Are Googlers gaming Polymarket?(28:02) Can you do “insider trading” on a prediction market?(29:23) Pipedrive - Bring your entire sales process into one elegant space. Get started with a 30 day free trial at pipedrive.com/twist(37:00) How accelerators like Y Combinator serve as “finishing schools” for startups(37:52) A Quick Look at some of our fav companies from YC's Fall '25 cohort(39:01) Why startups need to “skate to where the puck is going”(40:08) Why sometimes old ideas (like solar-powered aircraft) are often worth revisiting(45:29) Jason's advice for founders (and investors) in the “feel good” or activist space(50:48) Why Lon, Alex, and Claude ALL thought Hyperspell sounds like a hot startup(52:58) Perplexity getting sued again! Why can't they make friends!(57:51) Meanwhile, Meta's signing AI deals with news publications.(59:21) Micro1, which Jason helped to fund, has hit $100M ARR! Why do AI companies need so many experts?Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:(8:42) Sentry - New users get 3 months free of the Business plan (covers 150k errors). Go to http://sentry.io/twist and use code TWIST(19:36) LinkedIn Ads: Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. Launch your first campaign and get $250 FREE when you spend at least $250. Go to http://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups to claim your credit.(29:23) Pipedrive - Bring your entire sales process into one elegant space. Get started with a 30 day free trial at pipedrive.com/twist

Sparrow automates employee leave management—a compliance nightmare that consumes thousands of HR hours annually at companies with distributed workforces. With $64 million in total funding through their recent Series B, Sparrow has achieved 14x revenue growth between their Series A and Series B by solving what became an "insurmountable problem" as states, counties, and cities each passed conflicting paid leave regulations over the past decade. In this episode of BUILDERS, Deborah Hanus shares how she scaled from $1.2 million in her first year while running everything part-time by discovering that the path to enterprise adoption wasn't solving employee frustration—it was quantifying the hidden costs of compliance risk, payroll errors, and retention that director-level HR leaders were desperately trying to contain. Topics Discussed: The regulatory explosion that made leave management unsolvable in-house: overlapping federal, state, county, and city requirements across distributed teams How Sparrow pivoted from a $50-per-leave consumer product to enterprise software after discovering director-level buyers saw a fundamentally different problem than employees Why Sparrow's biggest competitor is internal management rather than other vendors, and how this shaped their entire go-to-market strategy The 4-10x ROI framework: how preventing paperwork errors that cost customers $1 million+ justifies $100K platform investments Scaling from founder-led sales with zero sales background through systematic hiring processes—including reaching out to 100+ candidates for their first sales hire Customer qualification strategy: vetting prospects not just for current pain, but for alignment with the product roadmap 2-3 years forward   GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Map pain perception across org levels to find economic buyers: Employees experienced leave management as "taking me a lot of time"—roughly 20 hours of taxes-level complicated paperwork. Director-level HR leaders, CFOs, and employment lawyers saw something entirely different: retention problems from employees leaving after bad leave experiences, litigation risk from compliance gaps across jurisdictions, thousands spent on employment lawyers for each leave event, and payroll calculation errors when state programs cover partial wages. Deborah's initial consumer product hypothesis failed because employees would only pay TurboTax pricing (~$50), requiring massive volume. The enterprise motion succeeded because strategic buyers owned the full cost stack. Map how pain manifests at each organizational level, then build your ICP around whoever owns the aggregate business impact rather than the tactical workflow friction. Build ROI models around error prevention, not efficiency gains: Sparrow doesn't sell time savings—they sell payroll accuracy. Their typical customer sees 4-10x financial ROI because the platform prevents mistakes that cost significantly more than the subscription. When paperwork is filed incorrectly, employees miss 60-70% of pay for 12-20 weeks, and with 70% of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, employers often make up the difference to prevent attrition. A $100K Sparrow investment typically saves $1M+ in payroll corrections alone, before counting the thousands in hours HR spends with employment lawyers for each leave event. Calculate the true cost of the status quo—including error correction, compliance penalties, and retention impact—not just the labor hours your product eliminates. Design qualification frameworks for roadmap fit, not just current pain: Deborah emphasizes that "everyone has this problem, but not everyone is going to be a fit for the product today and where it's going to be two years from now." Sparrow deliberately vets whether prospects will be excited about their product evolution 3-4 years forward, not just whether they have leave management pain today. This drives retention and customer advocacy as capabilities expand. Build qualification criteria that assess prospect-product alignment across the entire customer lifecycle—including future module adoption, integration depth, and use case expansion—rather than optimizing only for closing deals on current functionality. Treat hiring as systematic sourcing, not urgent gap-filling: Despite being in "back-to-back calls all day" unable to "send order forms fast enough," Deborah took time to reach out to approximately 100 candidates to make their first sales hire. She emphasizes defining what each role should accomplish 5-10 years out, then building sourcing strategies to achieve 50% confidence in that long-term outcome. This intentional approach—coupled with her value of "scaling intentionally"—enabled efficient growth without typical scaling chaos. Resist the startup default of "just hire someone fast." Instead, invest upfront in role definition (including the 5-year trajectory), source systematically rather than opportunistically, and accept lower short-term velocity for higher long-term scaling efficiency. Recognize emotional volatility as statistical artifact, not signal: Deborah reframes the classic startup "highs and lows" through a data science lens: with sparse early data, founders overfit to individual signals. One person saying "your product is stupid" triggers existential doubt; one saying "everyone should use it" creates irrational exuberance. As companies scale and data accumulates, the noise averages out—70% neutral-to-good outcomes with 30% fires becomes manageable rather than anxiety-inducing. She found scaling "much easier than that first year" because "you can sort of plot out your trend line and you can see where you're going." Build systems to accumulate data points faster (more customer conversations, more experiments, more leading indicators), recognize that early-stage emotional swings reflect sample size rather than reality, and make decisions based on trend lines rather than individual data points. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Sure built the technology infrastructure enabling the world's biggest consumer brands to embed complex insurance products directly into their core transactions—from auto purchases to home loans. In this episode of BUILDERS, Wayne Slavin shares how Sure pivoted from a consumer mobile app to B2B infrastructure after insurance executives kept pulling engineers into boardrooms to see the backend, why prospects who choose to build end up on Sure's "wall of shame" after their attempts fail, and the vertical integration strategy that could make legacy carriers obsolete within 20 years. Topics Discussed Sure's founding: turbulence on a Vegas flight led to a prototype that converted 15.91% from ad click to insurance purchase The accidental pivot to B2B infrastructure when insurance C-suites started calling people into boardrooms to see Sure's backend system How Sure became "chameleons" matching each partner's corner radius, modal behavior, and loader effects to avoid breaking product experiences The three failed paths that create Sure's best customers: DIY builds, direct carrier partnerships, and naive marketplace strategies Why buy-versus-build objections signal misaligned incentives—enterprise buyers trading career-safe "buy" budgets for execution-risk "build" projects The vertical integration roadmap: from collaborative carrier partnerships toward turnkey solutions backed by sovereign wealth funds AppleCare as the embedded insurance template: multi-decabillion dollar business now integrated into device selection, storage, color, and financing flows GTM Lessons For B2B Founders Run weekend demand tests before year-long regulatory builds: Wayne built a prototype over a long weekend and drove traffic through Google and Facebook ads to test first principles—do people want to buy insurance online, how soon before travel, how much coverage? The 15.91% conversion rate justified committing a full year to regulatory partnerships before bringing on a team. For founders in regulated spaces, creative demand validation derisks the compliance investment required before launch. Watch what gets pulled into the boardroom: Sure pitched their mobile app to insurance C-suites who responded with polite interest. Then executives started calling colleagues into meetings specifically to see Sure's backend operations system—the infrastructure they'd spent hundreds of millions trying to build. After three or four meetings with the same pattern, Wayne realized the backend was the product. Pay attention when prospects ignore your intended offering but get animated about something else entirely. Target solution-aware buyers who've already failed: Sure's most successful customers fall into three categories: those who tried building themselves and lost institutional knowledge when engineers left, those who partnered directly with carriers who took customers away and sold them competing products, or those who naively tried offering 50 insurance options when California markets now have two viable carriers. Wayne explicitly doesn't consider prospects choosing to build as their ICP—they lack awareness of execution risk and will waste Sure's time before returning years later. Treat build decisions as pipeline, not losses: A prospect from 2020 called yesterday after their DIY attempt resulted in three people leaving the company with nobody understanding how their cobbled system works. Sure maintains a "wall of shame" tracking decision-makers who chose to build and no longer work at those companies. For infrastructure plays with 18-36 month sales cycles, maintain relationships with build-path prospects—they're future pipeline once reality hits. Product integration depth wins embedded deals: Sure's differentiation isn't database speed—it's becoming invisible within partners' products. Wayne describes matching exact corner radius, modal patterns, and loader effects so product teams don't fight the insurance insertion. This requires deep product expertise across partners' stacks. For embedded solutions, technical flexibility that respects existing UX decisions matters more than raw performance metrics. Sure enables complex insurance purchases without customers touching their keyboard—everything pre-filled from partner data. Map internal buyer incentives in enterprise deals: Wayne observed that enterprise buyers face perverse incentives: requesting more budget and resources for build projects looks good internally, but they're unknowingly trading stable "buy" expenditures for career-ending execution risk. Large companies will pay "a bajillion dollars to Salesforce" because it works and removes risk, not because anyone loves it. Help champions articulate how buying derisks their execution versus the alternative—it's not about your product superiority, it's about their job security. //   Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.   Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Alex is an AI recruiter that autonomously handles phone screens, video interviews, and candidate communications at scale for enterprise talent teams and staffing firms. The company rebranded from Apriora after acquiring alex.com for over half a million dollars—a brand investment that immediately increased word-of-mouth referrals and inbound pipeline. In this episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Aaron Wang, Co-Founder & CEO of Alex, to discuss achieving seven figures in revenue through founder-led sales in staffing, their "respectful zagging" approach to standing out in a crowded AI agent market, and building toward network effects that could fundamentally reshape talent matching. Topics Discussed Justifying a $500K+ domain acquisition to co-founders and investors Building candidate experience that drives engagement rather than rejection Design decisions around AI avatars versus voice-only interactions Differentiation strategy in marketing: zagging without rage baiting Hiring framework based on incentive understanding and first-principles thinking Market segmentation between staffing firms and corporate TA teams Long-term platform vision leveraging cross-company recruiting data GTM Lessons For B2B Founders Quantify intangible asset ROI through pipeline metrics, not brand sentiment: Aaron defended the $500K+ alex.com purchase by tracking "huge increase in word of mouth and inbound, which is obviously directly measurable." The previous name Apriora created friction in sharing and referrals. With enterprise contract sizes, removing pronunciation and memorability barriers has concrete pipeline impact. The domain also functions as a balance sheet asset. Founders should evaluate premium domains against customer acquisition cost and deal velocity, not abstract brand value. Extract vertical-specific insights before horizontal expansion: Alex reached seven figures in staffing revenue exclusively through founder-led sales before entering corporate TA. Aaron noted they had "a few key insights into what made staffing particularly relevant as a market." This concentrated approach allowed them to refine product-market fit and build referenceable customers in one segment. Only after achieving clear traction did they expand strategically to corporate TA. Founders should resist premature market expansion—depth in one vertical provides the learnings needed for successful adjacency moves. Structure interviews to surface first-principles thinking across functions: Aaron described having A-player marketers conduct first rounds, then A-player engineers conduct second rounds for the same candidate. This cross-functional approach tests whether candidates can operate from first principles rather than just applying domain playbooks. The key insight: "A players want to work with A players and A players can identify A players. A B player can't identify an A player." Founders should design interview loops that reveal foundational reasoning ability, not just functional competence. Hire for incentive mapping ability over category experience: Exceptional marketers understand "what is incentivizing someone to share or post or like" and how to create mindshare. Aaron emphasized this matters more than HR tech background, citing Vinod Khosla's gene pool engineering concept. You need domain expertise somewhere in the company, but hiring everyone for it dilutes your ability to think differently. Founders should prioritize candidates who demonstrate deep understanding of human incentives and can identify non-obvious differentiation opportunities. Align brand aesthetic with product philosophy to reinforce positioning: Alex deliberately avoided human avatars, choosing nature imagery and green color schemes to make AI feel "grounded" rather than "abstract." This extends their product belief that "bad AI is worse than no AI"—the brand needed to signal reliability and familiarity. Aaron explicitly contrasted this with rage baiting tactics: "not something we're interested in doing." Founders should ensure visual identity and messaging tactics authentically reflect product values rather than chasing engagement metrics that misalign with positioning. Map product roadmap by studying adjacent verticals with faster adoption curves: When discussing category, Aaron compared Alex to Harvey rather than interview intelligence tools. He noted HR tech "tends to lag others" in technology uptake, making legal AI a better predictive model. Just as Harvey expanded from document review to email automation to client portals, Alex views phone screening as "one important, but only one portion of what a recruiter does today." Founders in slower-adopting categories should analyze product evolution in faster-moving verticals to anticipate feature expansion and avoid getting boxed into point solution positioning. //   Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

AGENDA: 04:06 Anthropic's $30BN Investment from Microsoft and NVIDIA 07:01 Google vs. OpenAI: Sam Altman's "War Mode" Memo 15:27 NVIDIA's Customer Concentration: Bull or Bear 22:12 Is "War Mode" BS: Does Hyper-Aggressive Ever Work? 36:12 Sierra Hits $100M ARR: Justify $10BN Price? 46:14 Implementation is the Biggest Barrier to Enterprise AI Growth 01:04:04 Is LLM Search Optimisation (GEO) Selling Snake Oil? What AI is a Fraud vs Real? 01:14:27 Figma Market Cap: Is the IPO Market F****** for 2026    

In this episode of Inside the Network, we sit down with Dean Sysman, co-founder and CEO of Axonius, one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity companies in the world. From struggling with his first startup to building a category-defining unicorn valued at $2.6 billion, Dean's journey is a raw, insightful, and unfiltered look into what it really takes to build in security.Before founding Axonius, Dean co-founded Cymmetria, a Y Combinator-backed deception startup that despite all the efforts, didn't end up leading to a successful outcome. That experience didn't stop him; it made him more grounded, more strategic, and more deliberate. Dean 2.0 didn't enter a hot market. Instead, he went after a boring but foundational problem everyone had, but no one wanted to touch - cyber asset visibility. In just under five years, Axonius surpassed $100M in ARR and raised over $600 million to fund growth and acquisitions.Dean's path has been unconventional from the start. He taught himself to code at 12, won an international robotics competition at 15, and led a team in Unit 8200 by 21. In the military, he learned responsibility the hard way: “If you fail, no one else is coming to help.” That mindset became the core of his entrepreneurial approach. In this conversation, Dean opens up about what most people get wrong about Unit 8200, why the army's bureaucracy actually helped him understand enterprise sales, and how he turned a failed venture into the insight that led to Axonius.We talk about the early days of building Axonius, the decision to go deep into a “Toyota Camry” problem, and how he convinced two close friends from Unit 8200 to bet on a boring idea that became a unicorn. Dean breaks down the evolution of cyber asset management, what it took to define a new category, and why timing and value communication matter more than tech novelty. He also shares lessons from Axonius' first acquisition, Cynerio, and what founders need to understand about getting M&A right: culture, timing, and strategic alignment matter far more than valuation spreadsheets.

In this episode,  Adam Torres and Danny Yeung, CEO and Co-Founder of Prenetics and IM8. Danny walks through his journey from early ventures in F&B and furniture to leading Groupon East Asia, then building Prenetics into Hong Kong's largest COVID PCR testing provider with over $800M USD in revenue. He then explains how IM8, a science-backed daily essentials drink co-founded with David Beckham, reached over $100M ARR in just 11 months. Danny also breaks down his Bitcoin treasury strategy and why he's pairing high-growth health products with long-term digital asset accumulation to build both health and wealth. Follow Adam on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/askadamtorres/ for up to date information on book releases and tour schedule. Apply to be a guest on our podcast: https://missionmatters.lpages.co/podcastguest/ Visit our website: https://missionmatters.com/ More FREE content from Mission Matters here: https://linktr.ee/missionmattersmedia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Limelight is building the infrastructure layer for B2B creator marketing, processing payments and managing campaigns for companies spending six figures monthly on creator partnerships. With $2.1 million in funding from Signal to Noise Ratio, Ascend Ventures, Savion Ventures, and strategic angels including the head of AI at Amazon and the former Chief Product Officer at Lyft, Limelight powers creator programs for Clay, Webflow, ZoomInfo, and Bill.com. In this episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with David Walsh, Founder and CEO of Limelight, to learn how he validated the market by interviewing 100+ creators, why he deliberately chose not to build an agency despite customer demand, and how his platform tracks engagement data at scale to prove ROI for performance-focused buyers. Topics Discussed: The pivot from referral software to B2B creator infrastructure after 100+ creator interviews How creator attitudes shifted from refusing brand partnerships to actively monetizing Clay's playbook: building custom Clay tables for creators before asking them to post Why Limelight chose to power agencies rather than compete with them The data infrastructure required to justify $100K+ monthly creator budgets Tracking organic engagement, converting content to paid ads, and attributing pipeline The split between brand/social buyers and performance/demand gen buyers Launching social listening to challenge legacy social media management platforms GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Validate with 100+ user interviews before pivoting: David didn't just chat with a handful of potential users—he conducted and recorded over 100 interviews with B2B creators, asking detailed questions about monetization interest, partnership preferences, and content strategies. He then repeated this process with marketing leaders. This level of research rigor before committing to a pivot is rare but critical when entering emerging categories. The depth of qualitative research gave him conviction to make a contrarian bet when most creators were still refusing brand partnerships. Build where network effects are structural, not hoped for: David specifically chose a creator marketplace after a previous marketplace failure because the unit economics included built-in virality. When Limelight pays a creator $10,000, that creator has tens of thousands of followers who see the transaction result (the sponsored content). Every payment notification becomes inbound interest. He understood that in consumer marketplaces you compete on supply quality, but in creator marketplaces the supply actively markets your platform. Founders should identify whether their marketplace has structural network effects in the transaction itself, not just theoretical ones. Target micro-creators with niche audiences over vanity metrics: The counterintuitive insight: creators with 10,000-25,000 followers often outperform those with 100,000+ in B2B because deal sizes are $25K-$50K, not $100 sunglasses. Smaller creators have higher engagement rates, unsaturated audiences, authentic expertise in specific domains, and haven't been "bought and sold for" yet. When brands face the choice between a 100K-follower creator at $2,000 per post with 200 likes versus a 25K-follower creator at $1,000 per post with 300 likes, they irrationally choose the larger following. Founders should educate buyers that in B2B, targeted influence within specific buyer committees matters more than reach. Build data infrastructure to win performance buyers, not just brand buyers: Limelight tracks every piece of content in real-time (not waiting weeks for creator screenshots), monitors all engagement and segments it by ICP fit, provides self-reported attribution from demo forms, tracks website traffic spikes correlated to posting schedules, and generates qualified lead lists from content engagement. This comprehensive data layer is what allows demand gen leaders to reallocate spend from paid channels. The market is splitting 50/50 between brand/social buyers and performance/demand gen buyers—the latter has larger budgets and treats creator spend like paid media that requires attribution. Founders entering new marketing channels should build attribution infrastructure from day one, not as an afterthought. Deliberately choose infrastructure over services even when customers ask for help: Despite customers like Webflow, ZoomInfo, and Bill.com spending $100K+ monthly and requesting more hands-on support, David chose to build product and enable agencies rather than hire account managers and become a service business. His reasoning: people have tried to replace agencies in recruiting for decades and failed because buyers want the human in the middle. The bigger opportunity is being the infrastructure that powers all agencies, not competing with them. This fork-in-the-road decision—hire CSMs and influencer marketing managers versus build more product—defines whether you're building a scalable platform or a services business disguised as SaaS. Use your first customer to custom-build product, then scale it: Clay became Limelight's first customer when the platform was early. David essentially custom-built features for Clay's creator program, learning their workflow for building Clay tables for creators, their onboarding process, and their approach to creative freedom. This deep partnership gave Limelight the product foundation to scale from managing 20 creators to 200+ for Clay within nine months, then apply those learnings to other customers. Rather than building in a vacuum, founders should find a sophisticated first customer willing to co-develop the product, even if it means initially building something custom. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here:  https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Jane Technologies built real-time inventory streaming technology that connects cannabis dispensary point-of-sale systems to online ordering platforms—solving a technical problem that hadn't been cracked before in the space. As a West Point graduate and Apache helicopter pilot who found cannabis instrumental in his transition from military service, Socrates co-founded Jane with his brother (a computer scientist) in 2014-2015, deliberately choosing the "pick and shovel" software play over plant-touching operations. Operating in a market where major VCs won't invest, credit card networks won't process payments, NASDAQ won't list your stock, and regulatory missteps can mean federal charges, Jane developed an extreme discipline around capital efficiency and risk management that offers tactical lessons for any founder building in constrained or emerging markets. Topics Discussed: Jane's technical innovation: streaming real-time physical inventory from store shelves to online platforms Regulatory timing: the Cole Memo, state-by-state legalization momentum, and using adjacent players as risk indicators Risk taxonomy: creating frameworks to convert market uncertainty into scored, calculable risk decisions Strategic positioning as infrastructure provider versus licensed operator to manage legal exposure Customer evolution: illicit market operators meeting institutional players in the middle, and what survives Capital structure constraints driving operational discipline: no traditional payment rails, no public markets, limited institutional capital Competitive moat building through regulatory complexity rather than despite it Jane's decision framework on legal gray areas and why "maybe" always means "no" GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Use adjacent players as regulatory canaries, then move decisively: Jane launched after observing the 2013 Cole Memo and early state legalization in Colorado and Oregon, but critically didn't move until seeing Weedmaps and Leafly operate without legal consequences. Socrates explains: "We also didn't want to be the first...No one seemed to be getting thrown in jail at that time. And so we said, okay, let's get some good lawyers. Let's be able to understand our left and right limits, but let's go do this now." This isn't about being first-mover or fast-follower—it's about identifying specific de-risking events that signal the inflection point. Jane watched for: (1) regulatory clarity documents, (2) expansion velocity across state markets, (3) other operators achieving scale without enforcement action. Founders in emerging categories should map these trigger events explicitly rather than relying on intuition about timing. Build compliance infrastructure as a moat, not overhead: Jane deliberately avoided "touching the plant" to stay outside the highest-risk licensing category, positioning as B2B infrastructure rather than a licensed operator. While competitors took shortcuts on compliance to move faster, Jane developed the internal discipline to work within state regulatory frameworks and alongside regulators themselves. The company's philosophy: "go where it's hard." When regulatory complexity is high and shortcuts are tempting, building the compliant solution that becomes the standard creates a defendable position. As markets mature and enforcement tightens, shortcut companies fail while compliant infrastructure survives. The tactical implication: in regulated markets, treat compliance work as product moat-building, not cost center overhead. Structure legal and compliance as core product development. Convert uncertainty into scored risk through systematic information gathering: Socrates articulates the critical distinction: "There's a real difference between risk and uncertainty. Uncertainty is unknown...you try to position yourself to make uncertainty known so that you can decide and score it. Hey, is this a reward or is this a risk?" Jane's framework: (1) identify the unknown factors, (2) gather information to convert unknowns into knowns, (3) score both upside and downside explicitly, (4) decide whether the scored risk justifies action. The company wouldn't cross lines even when competitors did because certain risks (federal charges, business termination) represented non-recoverable outcomes regardless of upside. Implementation: maintain a risk register where each strategic decision explicitly documents what's uncertain versus what's a calculated risk, with clear go/no-go thresholds based on downside scenarios. Capital constraints create competitive advantages through forced discipline: Operating without access to Sequoia checks, IPO paths, or Visa processing meant Jane had to master unit economics and profitability early. Socrates reflects: "This is stuff that traditionally, you go public, you raise billions of dollars, and then you decide how to get profitable. Then you decide what your cost of capital is and free cash flow, man, we had to learn that at a very young age." The result: "really good fundamentals" that scale as the business grows. While competitors in less constrained markets can mask poor unit economics with cheap capital, Jane built sustainable business mechanics from day one. The tactical approach: "ruthlessly prioritize what you do and do not build" and "scrutinize every dollar that comes in and out of the business." For founders with capital access, consider artificially constraining spend to force the same discipline rather than optimizing for growth at any cost. Optimize for survival duration, not growth velocity: Jane's entire strategy centers on outlasting competitors in a market where shortcuts eventually kill companies. Socrates: "This is not a game of speed. This is not a game of size. This is a game of endurance. And you want to just last...if we make a fatal decision and we get arrested or we do a felony or something like that, then the business is probably over." The company explicitly embraced being early, knowing they'd face years before the market fully matured, but positioned to compound advantages while others burned out. Their decision framework: if a strategic choice risks ending the game entirely (legal exposure, existential financial risk, fundamental trust violation), it's off the table regardless of upside. For markets with long regulatory or adoption cycles, model scenarios for 10+ year timelines and ensure your burn rate and strategic decisions support that duration rather than optimizing for 18-month milestones. //  Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM  

Sophos represents one of cybersecurity's most vulnerable companies, founded in 1985 as an antivirus provider and now operating at massive scale with $1.5 billion in ARR and 5,700 global employees. Under CEO Joe Levy's leadership, the company has undergone a fundamental transformation from a traditional product-focused vendor to a services-driven platform that addresses core market failures in cybersecurity. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, we sat down with Joe Levy to learn about the company's pivot to managed detection and response (MDR) services, their $860 million SecureWorks acquisition, and their vision for democratizing cybersecurity strategy across millions of organizations worldwide. Topics Discussed:  Sophos's evolution from antivirus origins through multiple business model reinventions over four decades  The strategic pivot to managed detection and response (MDR) services starting in 2018-2019 Building organizational support for major business model changes through experimental frameworks  Managing channel partner relationships during service transformation with 25,000 global partners  The $860 million SecureWorks acquisition and integration strategy to achieve category leadership  Scale as a competitive advantage in cybersecurity platform operations  The future vision of democratizing cybersecurity through "virtual CISO" services at massive scale GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Address systemic market failures through business model innovation: Joe identified that cybersecurity's core problem wasn't technology quality but post-sale execution. "As an industry we have been really good at buying and selling products, but we've never been good. In fact, we've been terrible at their implementation and their lifecycle management." This insight led to Sophos's services transformation. B2B founders should look beyond surface-level customer complaints to identify fundamental market failures that create opportunities for entirely new business models. Structure major strategic pivots as controlled experiments: When proposing the MDR services pivot, Joe framed it as a measurable experiment rather than a leap of faith. "The conversation primarily consisted of, I want to run an experiment. Here are the parameters of the experiment that I would like to run... This is the investment that I think that we need to make in order to bootstrap it." This approach included specific cost models, growth projections, and profitability targets. B2B founders can reduce organizational resistance to major changes by presenting them as structured experiments with clear success metrics and defined risk parameters. Invest heavily in stakeholder alignment during business model transitions: The most challenging aspect wasn't technical but maintaining relationships with 25,000 channel partners who might view new services as competitive threats. Joe spent a full year ensuring partners viewed MDR as "augmentation and greater opportunity and an opportunity for them to offer tiering to the kinds of services that they're doing." B2B founders making significant business model changes must prioritize extensive stakeholder communication and alignment, especially when changes could affect existing revenue streams or partner relationships. Shift sales focus from product features to guaranteed outcomes: Sophos had to retrain their sales organization for services selling. "The fundamental difference between selling a product and selling a service is... what the expectations of the outcome that service is going to provide for them." Instead of selling technology specifications with implementation uncertainty, they began guaranteeing predictable business results. B2B founders transitioning to services models must fundamentally change their sales approach from feature-based selling to outcome-based value propositions. Use strategic M&A to achieve immediate category leadership: Rather than relying solely on organic growth, Sophos accelerated their MDR strategy through the $860 million SecureWorks acquisition. "It technically makes us the largest MDR operator, pure play cybersecurity MDR operator... on the planet today." The acquisition instantly provided market positioning that organic growth might have taken years to achieve. B2B founders should consider strategic acquisitions not just for technology or customers, but for category leadership and competitive positioning that enables further market expansion. Build scale as a defensible competitive advantage: Joe argues that scale is "an often overlooked but a critically important element when it comes to the selection of information technology vendors." In platform businesses handling massive data volumes and real-time operations, the ability to operate at scale becomes a key differentiator. "The customer should be asking them, what are your strategies in order to be able to scale?" B2B founders in platform businesses should explicitly communicate their scaling strategies to customers and position their ability to handle growth as a core competitive advantage, especially when competing against smaller vendors.   //  Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.  Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Our 225th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 11/16/2025Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and co-hosted by Michelle LeeFeel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.aiRead out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/In this episode:New AI model releases include GPT-5.1 from OpenAI and Ernie 5.0 from Baidu, each with updated features and capabilities.Self-driving technology advancements from Baidu's Apollo Go and Pony AI's IPO highlight significant progress in the automotive sector.Startup funding updates include Incept taking $50M for diffusion models, while Cursor and Gamma secure significant valuations for coding and presentation tools respectively.AI-generated content is gaining traction with songs topping charts and new marketplaces for AI-generated voices, indicating evolving trends in synthetic media.Timestamps:(00:01:19) News PreviewTools & Apps(00:02:13) OpenAI says the brand-new GPT-5.1 is ‘warmer' and has more ‘personality' options | The Verge(00:04:51) Baidu Unveils ERNIE 5.0 and a Series of AI Applications at Baidu World 2025, Ramps Up Global Push(00:07:00) ByteDance's Volcano Engine debuts coding agent at $1.3 promo price(00:08:04) Google will let users call stores, browse products, and check out using AI | The Verge(00:10:41) Fei-Fei Li's World Labs speeds up the world model race with Marble, its first commercial product | TechCrunch(00:13:30) OpenAI says it's fixed ChatGPT's em dash problem | TechCrunchApplications & Business(00:16:01) Anthropic announces $50 billion data center plan | TechCrunch(00:18:06) Baidu teases next-gen AI training, inference accelerators • The Register(00:20:50) Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun plans to exit and launch own start-up(00:24:41) Amazon Demands Perplexity Stop AI Tool From Making Purchases - Bloomberg(00:27:32) AI PowerPoint-killer Gamma hits $2.1B valuation, $100M ARR, founder says | TechCrunch(00:29:33) Inception raises $50 million to build diffusion models for code and text | TechCrunch(00:31:14) Coding assistant Cursor raises $2.3B 5 months after its previous round | TechCrunch(00:33:56) China's Baidu says it's running 250,000 robotaxi rides a week — same as Alphabet's Waymo(00:35:26) Driverless Tech Firm Pony AI Raises $863 Million in HK ListingProjects & Open Source(00:36:30) Moonshot's Kimi K2 Thinking emerges as leading open source AIResearch & Advancements(00:39:22) [2510.26787] Remote Labor Index: Measuring AI Automation of Remote Work(00:45:21) OpenAI Researchers Train Weight Sparse Transformers to Expose Interpretable Circuits - MarkTechPost(00:49:34) Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture(00:53:33) Watch Google DeepMind's new AI agent learn to play video games | The Verge(00:57:34) arXiv Changes Rules After Getting Spammed With AI-Generated 'Research' PapersPolicy & Safety(00:59:35) Stability AI largely wins UK court battle against Getty Images over copyright and trademark | AP News(01:01:48) Court rules that OpenAI violated German copyright law; orders it to pay damages | TechCrunch(01:03:48) Microsoft's $15.2B UAE investment turns Gulf State into test case for US AI diplomacy | TechCrunchSynthetic Media & Art(01:06:39) An AI-Generated Country Song Is Topping A Billboard Chart, And That Should Infuriate Us All | Whiskey Riff(01:10:59) Xania Monet is the first AI-powered artist to debut on a Billboard airplay chart, but she likely won't be the last | CNN(01:13:34) ElevenLabs' new AI marketplace lets brands use famous voices for ads | The VergeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

ClearCOGS is creating a new category in restaurant technology by bringing predictive analytics to an industry that operates almost entirely on retrospective data. With $3.8 million raised, the company analyzes 100 million data points daily per restaurant to forecast demand and optimize prep decisions. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, we sat down with Matt Wampler, CEO and Co-Founder of ClearCOGS, to explore how his experience turning around failing Jimmy John's franchises led him to build forecasting software that's fundamentally changing how restaurants operate—and how he's defining a category that doesn't yet exist. Topics Discussed: Matt's transition from 21-year-old Jimmy John's franchisee working 110-hour weeks to identifying systematic inefficiencies in food prep decisions across five locations Why restaurants remain stuck in reactive mode while sports betting and fantasy football have sophisticated predictive analytics ClearCOGS's data infrastructure processing 100 million variables daily—from 15-minute POS intervals and weather patterns to dew point and local events The product discovery process where Matt's co-founder kept asking "why" until every feature request collapsed into one core problem: uncertainty about tomorrow's demand Category creation through the Restaurant AI podcast despite no clear attribution model Building in public on LinkedIn as an enterprise lead generation channel that landed major brands within six weeks The ICP evolution from enterprise fast-casual chains (15-1,000 locations) to a freemium Toast integration targeting independents GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Let outsiders interrogate your domain expertise: Matt wanted to build dashboards restaurant operators requested. His technical co-founder repeatedly asked "why do you want that dashboard?" then "why do you need to see that?" Every answer eventually reached the same root cause: operators didn't know who would walk in tomorrow, making food prep, ordering, and staffing decisions inefficient. This pattern held across dozens of restaurant brands. The yin-yang of insider knowledge plus relentless outside questioning revealed the actual problem worth solving versus building a feature graveyard of requested tools. Reframe category education through familiar high-stakes analogies: "Predictive analytics" meant nothing to restaurant operators. Matt's breakthrough was pointing out the cognitive dissonance in their lives: they studied dozens of variables and probabilistic forecasts for fantasy football lineups but ran six-figure businesses on Excel sheets and gut instinct. This wasn't explaining predictive analytics—it was exposing the absurdity of having better forecasting tools for fantasy sports than for their livelihood, making the gap visceral and the solution obvious. Convert forecast errors into customer intelligence touchpoints: When ClearCOGS's predictions missed, the team initially spent weeks reoptimizing algorithms. The pivot: immediately call the customer, acknowledge the miss, and say "we're on it." Customers didn't expect perfection from a system replacing Excel and guesswork—they valued having someone actually watching their operation. In a software landscape where vendors disappear post-sale, proactive error acknowledgment became relationship acceleration. Every miss became an opportunity to demonstrate attentiveness that competitors couldn't match. Segment messaging by incentive structure, not org chart: ClearCOGS discovered the messaging split wasn't finance versus operations—it was franchisors versus franchisees. Franchisors earning royalties on top-line revenue needed consistency and scalability messaging. Franchisees and on-ground operators living on bottom-line profitability needed waste reduction and margin improvement messaging. The same product solving the same problem required different value propositions based on how buyers were compensated, not what department they sat in. Test public vulnerability as enterprise sales acceleration: Matt had zero social media presence before ClearCOGS. He started posting about struggles and failures on LinkedIn. Within six weeks, a major restaurant brand reached out for partnership discussions. Later, he posted their first website draft asking for brutal feedback—50 people responded with detailed reviews, video walkthroughs, and unsolicited legal advice. When he launched the Restaurant AI podcast with unclear ROI, he treated it as category education infrastructure. In oversaturated B2B markets, authentic struggle documentation cuts through polished competitor noise and creates asymmetric enterprise access that paid channels can't replicate. //  Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.  Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Defense technology has shifted from a social liability in Silicon Valley to commanding 35-40% of venture capital allocation—up from a historical 10%. This isn't just trend-following; it reflects fundamental market dynamics as SaaS becomes hypercompetitive and AI lowers barriers to entry, pushing capital toward deep tech where moats still exist. Blacklake, a defense holdco based in Austin, helps emerging defense companies navigate government procurement and expand into Europe, Asia-Pacific, and allied markets. In this episode, Jeff Crusey, EVP of Technology & Acquisition at Blacklake, reveals the emerging defense tech playbook, explains why lobbying ROI dwarfs traditional GTM spending, and details what actually matters when hardware meets government procurement. Topics Discussed: Why VC capital is rotating from SaaS to deep tech and defense The defense tech go-to-market playbook versus enterprise SaaS mechanics SBIR grant programs as non-dilutive capital for hardware development Lobbying and appropriations as core revenue drivers, not nice-to-haves Field deployment and operator feedback as the only viable iteration strategy Investor evaluation criteria for hardware-intensive defense businesses Emerging threat vectors in Arctic defense and orbital domain awareness GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Launch lobbying concurrent with SBIR Phase 1 applications: Companies initiating lobbying and appropriations work at the moment they apply for SBIR grants hit revenue milestones materially faster than those treating government affairs as a later-stage function. This means seed-stage companies maintain Capitol Hill presence—a pattern that didn't exist five years ago. The talent profile matters: government affairs hires need proven relationships within specific congressional committees and appropriations staff. Initial engagements typically involve external lobbying advisors with established networks, transitioning in-house at Series A when contract pipeline justifies dedicated headcount. This is consistently the highest-ROI channel in defense GTM. Optimize for deployment speed over system perfection: Modern conflict operates as continuous technological adaptation where capabilities become obsolete within weeks, not years. Companies achieving persistent field presence with operators—not laboratory perfection—win iterative cycles. The tactical approach: deploy minimum viable hardware to operational environments, capture real-world performance data and failure modes, then rapidly incorporate feedback into next iterations. This contradicts traditional defense procurement assumptions about "exquisite systems" and requires founders to resist over-engineering before battlefield validation. Solve the prototype funding problem through non-dilutive capital: Defense investors require working prototypes before capital deployment due to hardware risk profiles—fundamentally different from software's low marginal cost of iteration. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem: prototypes require capital, but capital requires prototypes. The solution path combines bootstrapping to early proof-of-concept, then leveraging SBIR Phase 1 grants (tens of thousands) to reach demonstrable prototype stage. Phase 2 awards (single-digit millions) fund production validation. Strategic founders pursue direct-to-Phase-2 pathways when possible, compressing the timeline from concept to validated demand signal. Strip technical complexity from investor communications: Defense founders with deep domain expertise consistently over-index on technical sophistication during fundraising conversations, losing investor attention before reaching commercial traction narratives. VCs evaluate market timing, defensibility, and path to scale—not engineering elegance. The correction: communicate technology at middle-school comprehension levels. This isn't condescension; it's recognizing that capital allocators optimize for portfolio construction, not technical peer review. Founders often feel they're "dumbing down" their innovations, but clarity on problem-solution fit and market size matters infinitely more than technical specifications during early fundraising stages. Treat SBIR phases as progressive demand validation, not just funding: The phased SBIR structure functions as government-backed demand signaling: Phase 1 validates concept feasibility, Phase 2 confirms development viability, Phase 3 demonstrates production readiness for potential program of record status. Investors decode these phases as risk reduction milestones. Phase 1 awards indicate government interest; Phase 2 awards (especially direct-to-Phase-2 or enhanced Phase 2) signal validated customer pull; Phase 3 contracts position companies for program of record awards worth hundreds of millions annually. Beyond capital, SBIR progression provides founder-market fit evidence and customer commitment that traditional LOIs cannot match in defense contexts. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Grant Lee is the co-founder of Gamma, the AI-powered presentation tool that's one of the hottest and most interesting AI startups in the world right now. They're valued at over $2 billion, and they hit $100 million ARR in just over two years, with a lean team of just around 30 people. Unlike many fast-growing AI startups, Gamma has been profitable for most of its history, has not raised significant funding, and they built a massive business in a category most investors dismissed. In fact, one investor told Grant his idea was “the dumbest idea he had ever heard.”We discuss:• How Gamma found product-market fit by rethinking their onboarding• Their process for building a “word-of-mouth machine”• How they leveraged more than 1,000 micro-influencers instead of big names• Why focusing on the “first 30 seconds” transformed their business• Their approach to pricing that led to profitability within months• How Grant thinks about building a durable “GPT wrapper” business—Brought to you by:Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security.Justworks—The all-in-one HR solution for managing your small business with confidenceMiro—A collaborative visual platform where your best work comes to life—Where to find Grant Lee:• X: https://x.com/thisisgrantlee• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantslee—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Grant Lee and Gamma(05:59) The founding story of Gamma(09:52) Achieving product-market fit(15:43) Self-awareness as a founder(17:17) The power of onboarding(20:41) The original insight that led to Gamma(22:42) Founder-led marketing and growth tactics(29:20) Sharing online(37:40) Getting to $100M ARR(41:19) Influencer marketing as a growth strategy(54:08) Virality is not an accident(58:30) Investing in brand before paid ads(01:02:04) Tips for getting started with performance marketing(01:04:49) Prototyping and user feedback(01:16:12) Adapting and moving quickly(01:19:21) The concept of GPT wrapper companies(01:22:16) Deep dive into workflow and model utilization(01:29:06) Pricing strategies(01:34:53) Hiring philosophy and practices(01:43:24) Betting big on high performers(01:45:03) Final thoughts and lightning round—References: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-50-people-built-a-profitable-ai-unicorn—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com

Brought to you by TogetherLetters & Edgewise!In this episode: AI PowerPoint-killer Gamma hits $2.1B valuation, $100M ARR, founder says | TechCrunchWaymo robotaxis are now giving rides on freeways in LA, San Francisco, and Phoenix | TechCrunchInside Netflix House: A Big Bet On Experiential EntertainmentMatthew McConaughey, Michael Caine Team With ElevenLabs for AI-Generated Versions of Their VoicesWorld's first transatlantic thrombectomy heralds new era of stroke treatmentOn November 13, 2026, Voyager Will Reach One Full Light-Day Away From EarthWeird and Wacky: Oreo Just Launched Thanksgiving Dinner-Flavored Cookies—But There's a CatchOpenAI CEO Sam Altman served with subpoena on stage in San Francisco event, watch what happened nextTech Rec:Sanjay - Anker Nano Travel AdapterAdam - Granola.aiFind us here:sanjayparekh.com & adamjwalker.comTech Talk Y'all is a proud production of Edgewise.Media.

Grant Lee was told Gamma was "the worst idea ever heard" by an investor who hung up mid-Zoom—yet he built it to 100 million users and $100M ARR without spending a dollar on advertising.While competitors hired aggressively, Grant's team of seven refused to grow, dedicating 25% of their tiny team to design and personally onboarding every influencer themselves. They reveal how ignoring AI for their first two years, then orchestrating multiple models in ways the frontier labs can't replicate, let them steal the presentation market from Microsoft and Google—going from 60,000 signups in eight months to 50,000 per day. Resources:Follow Grant on X: https://x.com/thisisgrantleeFollow Sarah on X: https://x.com/sarahdingwangFollow Olivia on X: https://x.com/omooretweets Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zListen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYXListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Stay Updated:Find a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Podcast on SpotifyListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.