How are you planning to get good at GTM?
Gil Dibner

In our work with early-stage companies, we often invest in technical founders with little or no go-to-market (GTM) experience under their belt. If these companies are going to scale, they eventually need to build a GTM team capable of scaling the business through all the activities that comprise GTM (sales, marketing, customer success). How does this happen? In our experience, this usually happens within one of four basic paradigms:

1. The natural-born GTM founder. Not all founder teams lack GTM talent. Sometimes one of the founders brings substantial GTM capabilities to the table. If this is the case, it’s a good thing.

2. Hired-gun proven senior GTM leader. Sometimes, founding teams that lack innate GTM talent bring on a senior GTM leader to build out that function. While possible, this is rarely successful. Skilled GTM leaders with substantial sales expertise are rarely interested in joining early-stage companies. They are often expensive and expect a mix of high cash compensation and meaningful equity. They are often accustomed to working with more resources than an early-stage company can provide, and they can get frustrated with the uncertainties inherent to early-stage. An experienced and capable GTM leader who is able to succeed in an early-stage environment, is willing to roll up their sleeves and dig in to the work, and is affordable by a young company is a true unicorn. So rare as to be nearly impossible to fire.

3. A bet on a rockstar junior GTM hire/team. A third potential pathway to success can be to hire one or more junior GTM professionals. This is distinct from the “senior GTM” pathway because these GTM hires have never led a GTM operation. They might have experience, but not as leaders. Because they are unproven, these professionals need to bring a ton of hunger, curiosity, and energy to their roles. For these hires, the appeal of the role is the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an exciting company, to shape its trajectory, and to grow into a much more senior GTM role as the company scales. The deal is simple: the company offers the hire(s) growth opportunities (and equity compensation) that would be impossible at a larger company; and the hire offers the company a level of energy and commitment that a more experienced hire would never be able to bring to the table. This pathway is a lot of work: it is difficult to identify and recruit this sort of very promising junior GTM talent, it requires a ton of energy from the founders to help that junior person succeed, and the risk is high. But it can be done - and when done well, it can be magic.

4. Founder metamorphosis. The final pathway we have observed is the most complex of all. Some non-GTM founders make a conscious decision to transform themselves into GTM leaders at their own companies. This is basically founder-led sales with afterburners. Needless to say, this pathway can only succeed when it is highly intentional. Learning a new complex set of skills and intuitions is very challenging, all the more so when trying to run your own company. This works well only when the founder involved is fully committed to the process, working with a series of advisors and coaches, and is supported by other, strong co-founders. Most importantly, it can not be forced. The transforming founder must genuinely want to learn how to master the GTM skillset. While challenging, it can be very rewarding. We’ve seen in happen.

Why does this matter? As an early-stage company begins to find product-market fit and attempts to scale, it will need to scale up its GTM capabilities. This doesn’t happen automatically. It can only happen intentionally. For founders, understanding these four possible paradigms and deciding which one fits their specific situation best can be helpful. No one pathway is best, but failure to choose the right pathway for a specific company can spell disaster. Founders should have open and honest conversations with each other and with their investors to determine which GTM paradigm can work best in their specific case.

I hope this framework is helpful, and if you think I’ve left out a viable pathway - please let me know!

Gil Dibner

Revenue Durability in the LLM World
Everything about LLMs seems to make revenue durability more challenging than ever.

A Robotic Future for Retail Grocery, Finally.
Why we invested in Finally.

A Digital Fabric for Maritime Trade
Why we invested in Portchain.

Three Keys to the Kingdom
The sometimes-competing and sometimes-aligned goals that early-stage founders must manage.

More blogs

Israel / Cybersecurity. Cyera raised $300M, with Sequoia, Accel, Redpoint and Cyberstarts all participating, for its AI-based platform to “help organizations understand the location and movement of data in their networks.”

Spain / DevOps. Onum raised $28M, led by Dawn Capital, for its real-time data observability and orchestration platform.

UK / Fintech. Mimo raised £15.5M, led by Northzone, for its financial management platform targeting SMBs.

Germany / Nuclear. Proxima Fusion raised €20M, led by Redalpine, for its new approach to nuclear fusion technology, based on “quasi-isodynamic stellarators” (a doughnut-shaped ring of precisely positioned magnets containing plasma).

Israel / Software. PVML raised $8M, led by NFX, for its platform that helps enterprises securely analyze, share and monetize sensitive data, eliminating the potential for data privacy issues.

Sweden / ClimateTech. Photoncycle raised €5M, led by Lifeline Ventures, for its novel solar storage technology, which converts solar energy into green hydrogen and stores it in solid form, enabling months-long storage.

ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

Step aside, Copilot. Google announced the launch of Code Assist, powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro with its million-token context window, last week. It remains to be seen whether or not Google can forestall the momentum of Github Copilot (or other new entrants, like Cognition’s Devin), or if Code Assist will fall by the wayside like AWS’ CodeWhisperer.

Energy for AI. Great episode of Odd Lots this past week digging into the boom in electricity demand from AI datacenters, and what utilities can do about it. Energy demand has been flat for decades, and now all of a sudden utilities need to manage a sharp acceleration. That’s a challenge when new power plants can take years and years to get up and running. This is why you see the hyperscalers aggressively acquiring access to energy, like Amazon’s purchase of a nuclear-powered data center campus in Pennsylvania just over a month ago.

Generative copycats. Generative AI’s worst-kept secret, according to the latest from The Information, is that everyone is stealing from one another. The best way to fine tune your model? Ask ChatGPT questions, and use those responses in your training data. Or ask Claude. Or Mistral or Llama. Or use OpenPipe to automate the process across all of them. The question remains - what kind of risk are these companies taking? OpenAI has said that they won’t litigate, but perhaps they’ll get more litigious when growth slows? Time will tell.

HOW TO STARTUP

How can you 10X? An oldie but a goodie from Elad Gil that came across my desk this week so wanted to share. Product roadmaps and distribution plans are often incremental. Do x, then y, then z, each of which has a linear impact on the value of the product/company. As Gil recommends, it can be useful to get out of this linear frame of reference and instead ask yourself: what would it take to 10X? How do I create a big step function change in the value of the product (or the value of the company)?

Search Disruption. An excellent deep dive on Perplexity AI, how the $3.1M seed round came together in late 2022, and how they’re trying to steal Google’s lunch. Since then, they’ve raised over $100M and generated enough buzz to put Google on its heels. If you haven’t used it, try it out. And for another take, try out the “browse for me” experience with the Arc browser.

HOW TO VENTURE

Subscale IPOs. Is the era of “subscale” IPOs over? Or right around the corner? Gokul Rajaram quotes the latest Meritech Capital report on the scale of IPOs. The takeaway from the report? Companies with less than $700M annualized revenue underperform after going public (netting negative absolute returns). Public markets seem to want growth, efficiency and scale. Big tech players give public markets investors all three. The argument for investing the marginal dollar in a brand new, “subscale” IPO is getting harder and harder to make.

AI at Sohn. Missed this last week, but worth highlighting. There were some interesting conversations posted last week from Sohn 2024. This conversation with Daniel Gross (Pioneer Fund, prev. AI at Apple) and Eric Steinberg (founder of Magic.dev) stood out as one worth watching if you care about what AI is capable of, and where it might be going.

Groundcover's CEO, Shahar Azulay, was interviewed about how eBPF will revolutionize observability.

Lunar.dev is hosting API Nights in NYC on April 29, a networking event featuring a fireside chat on "The Future of AI and APIs" - with Amir Shevat, GP at Darkmode Ventures and Iddo Gino Founder of RapidAPI. Request to join the event here.

Vault Platform has a new partnership with Ethisphere.

Aquant
Enterprise Business Development Representative - DACH (Remote Germany)

Finally
Global Partnerships Manager (London)

Planable
Customer Success Specialist (Bucharest)

Reco
Account Executive (US Remote)

More jobs