2X is a go-to-market services company that has grown 50% YoY for seven straight years, scaling to roughly 1,200 people, with new investment from Insight Partners last year. On BUILDERS, CEO David DeWolf explains why his prior company, 17-person agentic platform Knownwell, combined with 2X, why he ended up leading the merged entity, and how he is rethinking pricing and AI enablement as services and software collide.

Topics Discussed:

• Why Knownwell's platform collided with 2X's services business

• The investor rationale for combining the companies with David as CEO

• Why outgoing CEO Dom Colasante moved to an active founder role

• A token-cost mechanic in LLM usage most teams miss

• Why 16 years of revenue-share talks predicted today's pricing debate

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Convergence has a mechanic, not vague "AI disruption." Agentic AI removes the overhead of managing disparate silos, so functions once needing separate specialists collapse together. That pulled Knownwell's software into 2X's turf. Map which silos exist mainly to manage handoffs; those erode first, and an adjacent "services" or "software" version of your work can become a competitor or acquirer.

• The generalist AI creates still needs domain judgment. Reinvented workflows work only because specialization moves into agents. The human layer left has to integrate multiple agent-run work streams and catch what agents get wrong. For "AI-native" hires, integration judgment is the differentiator, not tool fluency.

• A concrete cost lesson: attaching a PDF to a prompt is more token-intensive than pasting the text directly, since the model parses the file rather than reading text. Teams scaling LLM use without training on this see costs balloon disconnected from value, the surprise-bill problem Brett raised from his own team.

• Revenue-share pricing fails symmetrically. For 16 years, when his firm offered revenue share the client had strong sales and marketing and wouldn't give up upside; when clients wanted it, they lacked the GTM capability to drive it, which the firm wouldn't underwrite either. The market is settling on paying for delivered outputs, not pipeline impact, since outcome pricing keeps hitting this wall.

• Rigid AI governance backfires faster than none. David's model: clarity on uniquely human work, active enablement beyond tool access, and deliberately loose guardrails. Rigid rules cause under-experimentation from fear of "tripping over a line," costing more in lost output than the risk they meant to prevent.

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Eric Helitzer is the Founder and CEO of SubBase, a B2B vertical SaaS platform giving construction subcontractors and self-performing GCs a system for managing materials, a workflow historically run on email, text, and phone calls. Eric returns to BUILDERS to unpack an ICP that emerged on its own, the "AI wrapper" defensibility question he faced at Series A, and how he stays embedded in sales and support at scale.

Topics Discussed:

• How self-performing GCs became a fast-growing segment SubBase never originally targeted
• Why paid social and paid advertising failed to convert in a relationship-driven buying process
• A phone-first, discovery-led outbound motion and the signal used to separate real pipeline from booked meetings
• Defining the category as a materials operating system rather than a point solution
• Why "is this just an AI wrapper" was the core Series A defensibility question, and how Eric answered it
• Staying embedded in sales and support detail as the company scales past founder-led selling

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

Let adjacent ICPs surface through usage, not planning: Self-performing GCs, contractors who take on their own labor and material risk instead of subcontracting it out, were not a segment SubBase set out to sell. Eric called it "our newest, not a new ICP, but one that we've seen gravitating towards us." Overlap in workflow with existing customers made the expansion visible before it became a strategy.

Qualify for pain on the call, not after it: SubBase reps diagnose the prospect's actual procurement pain during the cold call itself, not just book time. Eric's bar for a correctly pain-funneled call is simple: does the prospect show up to the follow-up meeting. "If that person shows up on a call, that's real pain." A no-show is coaching data on messaging, not a scheduling problem.

Defensibility in an AI-native narrative sits in the data layer, not the workflow: Series A investors pushed on whether SubBase could be replicated as a thin AI wrapper. Eric's answer centered on proprietary data from vendor communication, pricing, and reconciliation across a fragmented industry, something "you can't just rip off of a Claude or GPT." When your workflow looks simple, your case has to rest on compounding data, not interface.

Separate the investor narrative from the customer narrative on purpose: Framing SubBase as an "operating system" answered investor questions about moat. But construction buyers aren't shopping for an OS, they want one acute pain solved. Audit whether category language built for fundraising has quietly become what your sales team pitches.

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CisLunar Industries builds the power electronics that run everything on a satellite, taking raw power and converting it into what a spacecraft's systems actually need, similar to how a laptop's charging block converts wall power into something the machine can use. The company was founded in 2017 with a different mission, aiming to become the steel mills of space by manufacturing usable materials from what's mined in the solar system. That early work led the team to build its own power supply for an experimental foundry, and the flexibility of that system turned into the company's real business: power processing units that run electric propulsion systems on satellites. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Gary Calnan, CEO of CisLunar Industries and a returning guest, to learn how the company pivoted from space manufacturing to power electronics, what it takes to win government contracts as an unknown startup, and the near death experience that nearly ended the company right before Thanksgiving.

Topics Discussed:

• CisLunar's original thesis as the "steel mills of space," built to manufacture materials mined off-world 

• How an internally built power supply for an experimental foundry became the company's actual product

• The EPIC-PPU-1000, the dual mode power processing unit that runs both a Hall Effect Thruster and an ArcJet thruster off one system 

• Using a smaller, paid partner role on an SBIR proposal to borrow credibility as an unknown startup 

• Resubmitting the same proposal multiple times, adding named suppliers each round until it won 

• The near death stretch that cost the team a commercial customer and a government contract at once 

• Using an externally imposed grant deadline to force undecided investors to commit

• The plan to scale from single digit units a month to over 100 a month within two years

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Pay a name-brand player to co-sign your first proposal: With no track record, Gary paid NanoRacks roughly $5,000 to take a small role on CisLunar's phase one SBIR. NanoRacks's existing standing with NASA Marshall functioned as an implicit endorsement of an unproven team. The mechanism: a small paid role, not a free favor, gets a bigger name to formally attach itself to your submission. 

• Resubmit with new suppliers attached, not new copy: The EPIC-PPU-1000 proposal was rejected two or three times with the same core idea. It won only after Lockheed Martin and Safran Space joined as thruster suppliers.

• Shape the proposal before you write it, not after rejection: program officers stake personal credibility on their picks, per Gary.

• Use a real deadline as investor leverage: When CisLunar's only commercial customer and its Space Force contract lapsed simultaneously, the team went to partial pay. A matching NASA grant with a fixed deadline forced fence-sitting investors to decide, and converted into the round's eventual lead.

• Let your core architecture define your second market: CisLunar's power supply used a hybrid digital-analog design to auto-adjust as metal resistance shifts during induction heating.

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Badge is building the infrastructure layer for digital wallets, giving businesses a single integration point to issue, manage, and update loyalty cards, gift cards, and tickets across Apple Wallet, Google Wallet, and Samsung Wallet. The company counts Stripe among its Series A investors. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Eric Senn, Co-Founder and CEO of Badge, to learn how the company found its ICP, built its go-to-market motion, and positioned itself as category infrastructure.

Topics Discussed:

• Eric's path from the consumer app Storr to discovering wallet infrastructure through the airline boarding pass Landing Carrefour as Badge's first major enterprise customer
• The three-platform integration problem across Apple, Google, and Samsung Wallet
• Building the product market fit bingo card to map verticals against company segment
• Why airlines were early wallet adopters and how that shaped Badge's go-to-market focus
• The shift from market education to inbound demand as wallet adoption matured Badge's Wallet Urgency Score and account-based marketing approach
• Matching go-to-market hires to actual deal complexity, not seniority alone
• The naming process behind Badge and modeling the brand after Stripe and Twilio Eric's vision for wallets absorbing every consumer touchpoint over the next five years

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Match sales hires to your actual motion, not a generic enterprise team: Badge's first two go-to-market hires came from Splash, an events company acquired by Cvent, and from Cardlytics and Amex.
• Both backgrounds mirrored Badge's real ICP: long enterprise cycles, acquisition experience, and patience for category education.
• Eric named the exact failure mode this avoids: "you might end up with enterprise guys when you really have a more of a PLG motion." Hire for the validated deal cycle, not the seniority.
• Build a two-axis discovery framework before committing to a vertical: Badge's "product market fit bingo card" plotted verticals, including banking, retail and commerce, and travel and hospitality, against company segment, from SMB to enterprise, then worked the grid systematically. This turns an unfocused TAM into a prioritized sequence of bets instead of chasing whichever prospect answers first.
• Build an internal intent-signal system instead of running broad campaigns: Badge created "the Woo score, the wallet urgency score," a social listening system that pings Slack when a market signal suggests a company needs a wallet solution now, paired with account-based marketing and zero paid ads.
• Use your core creative asset to break one false belief, not to explain generically: Badge's adoption barrier wasn't awareness, it was that buyers assumed the wallet was static. Eric said, "we wanted to invest in video because video shows motion," engineering the homepage hero video to counter that specific assumption.
• Treat naming as an early positioning bet, not a branding exercise: Eric's advice, "look at who you want to be when you grow up," reflects modeling Badge's name and positioning after infrastructure companies like Stripe and Twilio instead of the loyalty and commerce use case Badge started in. Stripe later became a Series A investor.

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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

Sabanto makes a retrofit autonomy kit that attaches to off-the-shelf tractors — converting machines farmers already own into autonomous systems capable of performing field operations without a driver. In this episode of BUILDERS, Craig Rupp returns three years after his first appearance to share what he's learned building the commercial motion for ag autonomy from scratch, in a market where no playbook existed.

Topics Discussed:

• Why Sabanto chose retrofit over building from scratch — and why that decision defined their GTM

• Pioneering a farm-by-farm demo motion in a market where trade shows don't close deals

• Building Sabanto's 12-dealer network and why co-selling was non-negotiable in the early days

• Why change management is a product problem, not a customer success problem

• The Farmer Advisory Board: structure, mechanics, and why sales is never in the room

• What Monarch's collapse reveals about deployment pacing and investor-driven GTM pressure

• Craig's vision for smaller, redundant autonomy systems replacing $1.2M high-horsepower tractors

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Count the change vectors your customer must absorb — then minimize them. Monarch asked farmers to switch brands, switch fuel types, add electrical infrastructure, and adopt autonomy simultaneously. Sabanto's retrofit model collapses that to one: the autonomy layer on a tractor they already own, service, and trust. When Craig designed the product, he was designing the adoption surface too. Founders entering operationally entrenched markets should map every change vector before locking in architecture.

• In a "show me" market, the demo is the sales motion. Video doesn't close. Trade shows don't close. Craig drove to farms across the US in a three-quarter ton truck, had the system running in under two hours, and left it for a week or two before a farmer would buy. The unlock wasn't features — it was: can I see it on my land? For founders selling physical or deeply operational technology, the on-site proof-of-concept is the primary revenue activity.

• Be present for every early channel installation — not to audit, but to train the trainer. Sabanto's 12 dealers handle installation, training, and support. But early on, Craig's team was on-site for every install, training the dealer to train the end customer. You can't delegate institutional knowledge you haven't compressed yet. Channel doesn't scale until your learning is transferable.

• Structure your advisory board so sales can't contaminate it. Craig's Farmer Advisory Board has about 20 members selected for candor. Monthly, his COO runs the session alone — no marketing, no sales. Opens with the top five problems engineering is working on, then hands the mic to customers. Most founders run advisory boards as a brand exercise. Craig runs his as a direct engineering input.

• Deployment pacing is a GTM decision. Craig's read on Monarch: investor pressure drove volume before support, distribution, and bug resolution could keep pace. His countermodel — 10 units over the first six months, then 50 — isn't ops discipline. It's a market trust calculation. In hardware and deep tech, burning early adopters poisons the category at first contact.

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Reco is an AI SaaS security company that helps enterprises discover and secure the AI agents and applications spreading across their SaaS environments. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Ofer Klein, Co-Founder and CEO of Reco, to unpack the two sequential bets that reshaped the company's direction, and the operating discipline — borrowed from his time as an Israeli Air Force pilot — that he uses to validate every major GTM decision before scaling it.

Topics Discussed:

• The two sequential bets: securing the SaaS layer first, then AI security, and why each one only felt obvious in hindsight

• A customer who had built their entire security practice around Reco, and how Ofer handled that conversation mid-pivot

• The three-part validation framework Ofer runs before doubling down on any bet: pipeline, purchase, adoption

• Reframing security spend as a mandate the buyer's leadership has already funded, not a new budget request

• Why roughly eighty percent shadow AI usage is the predictable result of strict blocking policies, not an anomaly

• The specific headcount and complexity thresholds (2,500 vs. 25,000+ employees) that forced Reco to rebuild its commercial team for enterprise motion

• Why the AI security category will keep fragmenting into specific use cases rather than consolidate into one buyer-desired platform

• Timing the RSA Conference spend to actual market pull rather than internal conviction

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Test pipeline with the "kitchen table" filter, not enthusiasm: Ofer's litmus test is whether a prospect has real budget and is already evaluating competitors. If they love the pitch but there's no budget conversation happening, "it means they're bullshitting you." Founders selling into security or infra should qualify only on active competitive evaluation, not expressed interest.

• Sell into an already-funded mandate, don't create a new budget line: Reco's fastest deals came from connecting to a commitment the customer's CEO had already resourced, like a stated goal to save a billion dollars through AI, not from pitching security as new spend. Founders should map their product against budgets that already exist.

• Treat shadow usage as a measurable byproduct of policy, not a rogue-actor problem: Roughly eighty percent of a typical customer's AI usage was happening outside sanctioned tools before Reco engaged, driven directly by strict blocking. Founders in security or compliance should build the sanctioned path as the differentiator, not the enforcement layer.

• Re-underwrite your team against the next stage's deal complexity, not the current one: Reco's shift from sub-2,500-employee commercial deals to 25,000-plus employee enterprise accounts required replacing sellers and managers who had performed well at the smaller stage. The tell isn't past performance, it's whether that person has sold at the buyer sophistication the next stage requires.

• Resist "one platform" category thinking, even when the buyer asks for it: Ofer said buyers consistently want a single solution that secures everything, but that outcome has never materialized and he doesn't expect it will. Founders should design roadmap and messaging around the specific slice they win, not a mythical all-in-one.

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GlobalComix operates a digital comics platform that brings stories from more than 330 publishers and 25,000 independent creators around the world to readers on their phones. In this episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Henrik Rydberg, CEO of GlobalComix, to learn how the company is building the licensing infrastructure and creator tools needed to bring one of the last major entertainment categories to fully digitize, and why GlobalComix increasingly thinks of itself as a "publisher operating system" rather than a consumer app.

Topics Discussed:

• Why comics are one of the last major entertainment mediums to go digital

• The licensing complexity behind working with 330+ publishers across countries and languages

• GlobalComix's shift from a consumer product to a "publisher operating system"

• Why aggregation, not individual publisher platforms, wins in a fragmented market

• The role of translation and manga localization in the fight against piracy

• How movie and streaming releases drive traffic back to source material

• The 50/50 revenue split between creator content and publisher IP

• GlobalComix's expansion into merchandise as a new revenue stream

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Enter through the strategic problem, not the department that mirrors your product. Henrik calls pitching the licensing team directly "the most boring way to enter," and where they see the least success, because the real value is strategic: expanding into an untapped market. With Japanese manga publishers, that pitch becomes a shared fight against piracy, since less than 1% of manga has ever been officially translated to English. Find who owns the strategic problem your product solves, even if it means skipping the department with the matching title.

• Turn adoption resistance into an ICP filter, not an objection to overcome. Henrik targets publishers confident enough in their own IP to see digital exposure as additive, not cannibalizing: a reader who discovers a story online still buys the hoodie or the movie ticket. Publishers protecting print at all costs are the wrong first customers. In channel-conflict-sensitive industries, qualify prospects by their confidence in their own asset, not by pitching harder to the fearful ones.

• Your moat might be supply, not software. Publishers found it easy to spin up their own platform, then discovered they lacked enough catalog to make it consumer-compelling alone, which is why an aggregator model wins in a fragmented market. If a customer can clone your interface fast, check whether your real defensibility sits one layer down, in the supply you've aggregated.

• Give customers proof they can see, not proof you tell them. GlobalComix's tools let publishers and creators watch traffic lift directly off UTM-tagged links, so the link between action and result lives in their own dashboard. In a low-trust industry, a visible feedback loop converts faster than a case study.

• Compete for the budget line, not the seat at the table. GlobalComix measures itself against every use of a reader's attention, not other comics platforms, the same logic Henrik cited when referencing Netflix positioning against sleep. Define your competitive set by what's actually competing for the customer's time or budget, since the wrong comp set caps how big you let yourself think.

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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

Knox Systems has built a path around one of the most exclusive certifications in enterprise software. FedRAMP, the security standard required to sell cloud technology to the US federal government, has fewer than 500 companies holding it worldwide, versus more than 10,000 apps on the AWS Marketplace. Earning it independently typically takes three years and roughly $3 million. Knox compresses that to 90 days at 90% less cost by letting customers inherit authorization from its own infrastructure, which carries 16 sponsorships across agencies including the Army, Air Force, Navy, DHS, Treasury, and VA. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Irina Denisenko, CEO of Knox Systems, to learn how she built this model and how the government's relationship with Silicon Valley has shifted.

Topics Discussed:

• How Knox lets customers inherit federal sponsorships instead of building authorization from scratch 

• The acquisition behind Knox's core technology, which hosted Adobe's federal environment for over a decade

• Why FedRAMP has become a competitive differentiator with commercial enterprise buyers

• How Knox judged the market large enough despite only 500 existing FedRAMP holders

• The shift from convincing buyers FedRAMP matters to meeting buyers already sold on it

• Knox's strategy of partnering with 3PAOs and GRC platforms instead of competing with them

• How Silicon Valley's relationship with the federal government has shifted since enterprise AI

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Make your tagline an operational guarantee, not a slogan: Irina turned "90 days for 90% less" into a literal SLA on the homepage. The discipline behind it: "over-index on say what you're gonna do, do it in the time that you said you would do it, and then rinse and repeat." Provocative claims work only if the operating model can satisfy them every time.

• Prove the moat with cross-industry customers, not hypotheticals: Knox's authorization helped Sierra AI reach FedRAMP High and brought Armis, a company heavily focused on OT cybersecurity, into the federal market through Knox's platform.

• Track inbound conviction as a market-maturity signal: Irina measures GTM motion by what share of conversations start with buyers already sold on the category. Knox is now at three-in-four, up from the inverse a few years ago, and expects it to flip again at saturation. Track this ratio as a leading indicator of how much market education your sales motion still requires.

• Become a customer of the incumbents you'd otherwise compete with: Knox didn't build its own GRC tooling or displace 3PAOs. It became a Vanta and Drata customer and works alongside 3PAOs on complex cases, while putting engineering effort into autonomous cloud management instead. In a regulated market, coexisting with established players can open more doors than disrupting them.

• Let acquired infrastructure define your speed advantage: Knox's 90-day timeline exists because its core technology is 15 years old, built to host Adobe's federal environment before Knox opened it to other applications. When evaluating M&A, weigh whether a target's infrastructure maturity creates a structural edge competitors can't replicate organically.

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Scala is reimagining how operators run customer experience and contact center operations, shifting the model from software as a service to what its founder calls intelligence as a service. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Ardie Sameti, Co-Founder and CEO of Scala, to learn how a decade scaling healthcare technology company Accolade shaped his decision to start over and build an AI-native operations platform from scratch.

Topics Discussed:

• Why operational fragmentation at scale, not a single bad decision, created the gap Scala was built to fill

• Why Scala held off adding headcount even while tracking ahead of its investor-approved hiring plan

• The shift from software as a service to intelligence as a service, and why proprietary data is the real moat

• How Scala attributes closed deals back to specific channels before scaling spend on any of them

• The guardrails Scala applies to AI avatars and outbound to avoid the brand cost of generic AI spam

• The long-term vision: an autonomous operations agentic platform where humans supervise fleets of AI agents

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Resist headcount growth even when you're ahead of plan. Ardie's go-to-market and marketing leads were tracking ahead of their investor-approved hiring milestones, but chose not to add headcount anyway, because every new layer between founders and prospect calls dilutes the firsthand signal driving product and positioning decisions. Founders should treat being "ahead of schedule" as a reason to slow hiring, not speed it up

• Build a per-person output multiplier into headcount planning, not just budget. Scala's internal framework reframes each hire's expected output as a multiple of what the same role would have produced a few years ago, the same way Ardie now expects to operate at several times his own historical output. Founders should use this to decide which roles get automated versus hired for.

• Attribute every closed deal to its actual source before scaling spend on any channel. Scala tracks which deals originated from warm network intros versus AI avatar-driven inbound versus paid social, and only increases investment in a channel after it has produced enough closed deals to justify the cost. Founders should build this kind of deal-level channel attribution before assuming a new GTM motion is working.

• Apply explicit guardrails to AI outreach the same way you would onboard a junior SDR. Scala intentionally avoids blasting AI avatars at scale, instead targeting them using intent signals like active buying patterns and in-market status, with guardrails on what the AI is and isn't allowed to say. Founders should define those boundaries before scaling AI-driven outreach volume.

• Architect around proprietary data and workflow context, not the model layer. Ardie's view is that frontier models are now a commodity anyone can access, so the durable advantage is the specific data, workflows, and context a company accumulates inside its customers' operations. Founders should evaluate moats by asking what data a competitor cannot replicate, not which model they've shipped.

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Nearly half of working Americans and their families get health coverage through a small or medium-sized business — and for most of them, that means choosing from one to three rigid, off-the-shelf plans that may not fit their needs at all. Angle Health is changing that. As the first AI-native health plan and vertically integrated healthcare benefits platform, Angle Health delivers fully customizable health insurance to SMBs through an insurance broker channel — with a median renewal rate increase of just 5.5%, at a time when most small businesses are absorbing 11–20%+ increases year over year. In this episode of BUILDERS, we spoke with Ty Wang, Co-Founder and CEO of Angle Health, about the hard-won channel pivot that unlocked their distribution, the unified data infrastructure that makes custom plan design economically feasible at scale, and what it actually looks like to rebuild a broken system from first principles.

Topics Discussed:

• Why going direct-to-employer failed — and what the pivot to broker-channel distribution revealed about the market

• How Angle Health delivers fully custom health plans to SMBs when no legacy incumbent can do this economically

• The unified data infrastructure that enables AI to automate plan design, underwriting, eligibility, and claims administration end-to-end

• How Angle Health is rebuilding care pathways — moving procedures like infusions from hospital settings to in-home settings at a fraction of the cost

• The discipline of running a deliberately lean team at scale, and how Angle Health decides what to prioritize

• The long-term vision: a healthcare experience that is seamless, fully transparent on cost, and actually affordable for every American

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Your initial distribution thesis is a hypothesis — treat it that way. Angle Health launched in 2021 going direct to small business owners and pivoted fast when it became clear the model wasn't working. The problem wasn't product-market fit — it was that SMB owners needed a trusted, unbiased advisor to guide their benefits decisions, and that role already belonged to brokers. Rather than build around that reality, Ty learned it the hard way. The lesson isn't "use channels" — it's to stay lean enough in your early distribution experiments that you can read the signal and change before you've over-indexed on the wrong motion.

• The dominant access point in your market is almost always the right wedge, even if it's not where you ultimately want to play. Ty is explicit that building a health plan was never the goal — it was the mechanism. The health plan is the primary way the majority of Americans access and pay for care, so controlling that layer is what makes everything downstream possible. Founders disrupting heavily intermediated or regulated industries should map the flow of access in their market and ask: what is the chokepoint everything else runs through? That's usually the right place to start, regardless of where you eventually want to go.

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