BUILDERS

Nauta is building the data infrastructure layer for global supply chain, starting with mid-market shippers who manage 600+ suppliers across 40+ countries but lack a single source of truth. Co-founded by Valentina Jordan, who spent six and a half years at Rappi, Nauta targets the $200M-$2B revenue segment where companies face enterprise-level complexity without enterprise resources. In this episode of BUILDERS, Valentina shares how Nauta moved from Excel automation to building data pipes that connect 12-13 stakeholders touching a single product—and why they refuse to run POCs.

Topics Discussed:

• Why shippers with ERP, TMS, and WMS systems still run operations in Excel

• The tribal knowledge crisis: 20-30 year operators retiring with undocumented institutional knowledge

• Nauta's no-POC policy and why it requires contract exit clauses instead

• The cost reduction vs. revenue generation framework that escapes pilot purgatory

• Building familiar interfaces (Excel-like tables) over novel UX for conservative industries

• The shift from hiding AI capabilities (January 2025) to leading with them (eight months later)

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Distinguish symptoms from root cause pain in discovery: Most enterprise buyers surface symptoms, not problems. A client reporting penalty costs isn't revealing the root issue—just downstream impact. Valentina uses the five whys methodology to drill into actual pain: "A client can tell me, hey, I'm paying X amount of dollars in penalties. That's not necessarily the root cause, it's just a symptom of the actual pain." This prevents building features that address surface-level complaints while missing the structural problem. The real issue might be data fragmentation across systems, lack of visibility into supplier performance, or decision-making bottlenecks—each requiring different solutions.

• Structure POC alternatives that demand mutual commitment: Nauta kills traditional POCs entirely because "it implies that they are testing us and that it's not a collaborative process." Instead, they offer contract exit clauses if expectations aren't met while requiring upfront commitment. This only works when you have proven results and can confidently deliver value. The insight: POCs create evaluator-vendor dynamics where the burden of proof sits entirely on you. Paid engagements with performance-based exits create partner dynamics where both parties invest in success. For early-stage companies without case studies, this won't work—but once you have repeatable results, test this approach.

• Layer revenue generation on top of cost reduction: Nauta starts every engagement with 3-4 cost reduction KPIs—penalties, reconciliation time, manual labor automation—then transitions to revenue generation through fill rate optimization and cash-on-cash improvements. "You need to go beyond just cutting costs. That way you transition from a nice to have to a must have." Supply chain has historically been viewed as a cost center; proving top-line impact changes budget conversations entirely. This matters because cost reduction has a ceiling (you can only cut so much), while revenue generation creates expanding budget headroom. Map your product capabilities to both from day one.

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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

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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

Podero builds software that enables European utilities to trade device flexibility—EVs, heat pumps, and batteries—on energy markets, generating trading revenues while reducing consumer bills by 20-30%. The company navigates a uniquely complex B2B motion: they must sell utilities, secure API access from device OEMs, and ensure utilities successfully roll out consumer-facing products—all simultaneously. In this episode of BUILDERS, Chris Bernkopf, Co-Founder and CEO of Podero, breaks down how they escaped pilot purgatory with innovation departments, built a "10x better than doing nothing" business case that reaches commercial stakeholders, and why their 2026 strategy centers on radical simplification through deletion.

Topics Discussed

• Origin story: from Raspberry Pi heat pump experiment to YC-backed utility infrastructure software

• The "three miracle problem" go-to-market challenge and how they de-risked all three dimensions in parallel

• Sales cycle mechanics: 6-12 month closes, avoiding innovation department traps, and multi-stakeholder orchestration

• Market structure: 2,000 addressable utilities in Europe, 120 customers required for unicorn trajectory

• Channel strategy evolution: cold outreach to re-engagement focus in a contained prospect universe

• 2026 GTM thesis: simplifying value propositions by deleting products and messaging

• How YC learnings posted on bathroom doors maintain organizational discipline

• The grid capacity fork in the road: expensive scarcity vs. cheap abundant renewable energy

Justin Fineberg built a 500,000+ follower audience on TikTok and Instagram before launching Cassidy, an AI automation platform for non-technical users. By consistently creating content about AI and technology, he turned inbound interest into his initial customer base and market validation. In this episode of BUILDERS, Justin breaks down how he leveraged short-form video to identify product opportunities, the mechanics of maintaining authentic audience relationships while monetizing, and how to transition from social-led distribution to scalable B2B SaaS go-to-market.

Topics Discussed:

• Leveraging ChatGPT's launch as an inflection point to ride mainstream AI interest

• Converting consultant requests into product insights and early customer signals

• The platform mechanics of TikTok vs Instagram for B2B content

• Transitioning from 100% social-sourced revenue to multi-channel B2B sales

• Building repeatable content systems that survive founder time constraints

• Testing product messaging and features through content before formal launch

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Timing content focus with market inflection points compounds growth

• Inbound consulting requests are product requirement documents in disguise

• Content systems must be friction-free or they'll die under operational load

• Good content transcends platform-specific algorithm hacking

• Social distribution creates unfair launch advantages, not permanent moats

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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

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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

Vycarb is commercializing a carbon storage technology that mimics ocean chemistry, converting CO2 into bicarbonate—a stable molecule that remains sequestered for hundreds of thousands of years. Based in Brooklyn, the company operates at the intersection of hard science and market-making in carbon removal, where customers, verification standards, and pricing mechanisms are all emerging simultaneously. Garrett Boudinot shares how Vycarb navigated this complexity: closing their first deals with progressive offset aggregators, pivoting from voluntary ESG buyers to compliance-driven ICPs as market dynamics shifted in 2022-2023, and building international pipeline in Asia Pacific and Europe that became essential when US climate policy reversed in 2025.

Topics Discussed:

• Early customer strategy with Frontier Fund and Milkywire as market-making offset aggregators 

• The 2022-2023 market shift from voluntary ESG purchasing to compliance-driven urgency 

• ICP evolution: identifying customers facing carbon taxes versus sustainability commitments 

• International expansion into Singapore and Asia Pacific compliance markets pre-2025 

• Raising a US climate tech seed round in 2025 during sector-wide funding contraction 

• Scaling pilots iteratively while building verification methodologies for a nascent category 

• Marketing strategy: facility tours, industry-specific PR in cement and aluminum, strategic investor logos 

• Transition from performance metric validation to site-specific commercial design 

• Leveraging strategic investors (Idemitsu, Rio Tinto, Mitsui, Shell) for channel partnerships 

• Building distributed deployment capability from centralized Brooklyn pilot operations

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Find customers where your solution impacts P&L, not just values

• Progressive customers build category infrastructure, not just revenue

• Geographic diversification is risk mitigation, not just expansion

• Centralized demonstration beats distributed ops at early stage

• Proof of execution replaces messaging in nascent categories

• Convert strategic investors into channel partners

• Build verification infrastructure as you scale, not after

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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

Hail has officially surpassed hurricanes and wildfires as the costliest natural disaster in the U.S. over the last 25 years—a shift that became visible three years ago and created a massive market opportunity. Wesley Pergament recognized this trend early and built Sola Insurance around it, transforming how homeowners protect their properties by eliminating the subjective claims process that's plagued the industry. After closing their Series A, Sola has cracked the code on hail insurance: using parametric weather data triggers to reduce claim resolution from months to days, cutting fraud that was driving $15,000-$20,000 deductibles, and building a 100% referral-driven distribution engine through independent insurance agencies. In this episode of BUILDERS, Wesley reveals how they pivoted from tornado to hail coverage in month two, why they've run zero outbound for 18 months while scaling exponentially, and how they're rebuilding policy forms and modeling from scratch to become the go-to natural disaster insurance provider.

Topics Discussed: 

• The data signals that showed hail crossing over as the #1 costliest natural disaster 

• Rebuilding insurance policy forms and modeling around objective weather data vs. indemnity claims 

• How wind and hail deductibles exploded from $1,000 to $15,000-$20,000, effectively excluding roof coverage 

• Why independent agencies are multi-generational businesses where reputation is everything 

• The mechanics of building a pure referral engine that eliminated all outbound for 18 months 

• Creating complementary coverage that's becoming fundamental infrastructure in home insurance packages 

• Using hail diameter, storm duration, and damage indicators to create parametric triggers 

• The strategic sequencing of sales-first, then product, now marketing investments post-Series A 

• Why addressing the fraud problem first unlocked both pricing and claims experience advantages

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Invest disproportionately in first-call onboarding when entering regulated channels
• Use regional conference immersion for channel insight, not lead generation
• Design systematic referral prompts at trust milestones
• Sequence GTM investment around validated constraint-breaking, not best practices
• Rebuild the broken process structurally, don't optimize it incrementally

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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

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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

Astronaut time costs $130,000 per hour, yet a significant portion goes to routine maintenance and cargo logistics rather than breakthrough science. Icarus Robotics is building the robotic workforce for commercial space stations, and despite being just over a year old, secured a deployment partnership with NASA and Voyager Space for the International Space Station in 2027. In this episode, we sat down with Ethan Barajas, CEO and Co-Founder of Icarus Robotics, to understand how they positioned teleoperated robotics as the wedge into a horizontal expansion strategy spanning satellite constellation servicing, space infrastructure maintenance, and eventually cislunar operations.

Topics Discussed:

• Why the shift from NASA-funded ISS to commercial stations fundamentally changes the economics of space labor

• How optical communications via Starlink reduced latency from 800ms (S-band radio relay through GEO) to 100ms, enabling Earth-based teleoperation

• The teleoperation-to-autonomy data flywheel: collecting in-distribution physics data to train high-level movement primitives

• Flight Heritage constraints at NASA and why mainline robotics run on chips that stopped production in the early 2000s

• Collaborating with commercial station developers during design phase to embed robotic-friendly architecture (hatch tabs, fiducials for localization)

• Horizontal expansion thesis: ISS labor as the corpus for intelligent robotics across multi-thousand satellite constellations and space infrastructure

• The biological research unlock: how Keytruda's $25B revenue between 2023-2024 resulted from ISS protein crystallization research

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Time market entry to structural cost shifts
• Stack infrastructure bets
• Build the data moat early
• Influence infrastructure design early

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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

Clockwise is pioneering intelligent time management for knowledge workers, addressing the fundamental constraint that limits all knowledge work organizations: how teams allocate their most finite resource. Founded in 2016, the company has spent a decade solving the problem of calendar inefficiency and meeting overload that fragments productive time. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Matt Martin, Co-Founder & CEO of Clockwise, to learn about the company's journey from a three-year build cycle to serving major software organizations through a product-led growth motion, the strategic decisions behind targeting software engineers as their wedge market, and why the time management problem remains largely unsolved despite being obvious to anyone who's worked in a large organization.

Topics Discussed

• Why time remains the primary economic constraint in knowledge work despite a decade of tooling evolution
• The three-year pre-launch build period and deliberate four-year path to monetization
• Targeting software engineers as the wedge: ROI clarity in heads-down time versus meeting-heavy roles
• The graveyard of calendar productivity startups: UI-focused plays, consumer pivots, and buyer/user misalignment
• Transitioning from pure PLG to blended motion with enterprise inbound and pilot programs
• The stubborn reality of organic growth: why referrals dominate despite extensive channel experimentation
• Building toward AI-powered personalized time agents that embrace individual complexity

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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

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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

Voxel⁠⁠ applies computer vision AI to industrial workplace safety, tackling a $100-180 billion annual problem in the US alone. ⁠⁠Vernon O'Donnell⁠⁠ joined as CEO two years ago facing a company with strong Carnegie Mellon-trained technical talent but a fundamentally broken go-to-market motion. The founding team had pursued an insurance carrier-led channel strategy that seemed logical but created systematic distrust with end customers. Vernon's transformation—shifting to direct enterprise sales, moving upmarket, and obsessing over 14-20 day implementation cycles—drove 50% of customers to expand. In this conversation, Vernon shares the specific pivots he made, why he believes technical differentiation has flattened dramatically in the AI era, and his hard-earned philosophy that founders who cite Henry Ford's "faster horse" quote simply aren't listening carefully enough.

Topics Discussed:

• The $100-180 billion industrial safety problem and why labor shortages amplify injury impact 

• Marrying deep technical AI talent with certified safety professionals who've operated in industrial environments 

• The fatal flaw in insurance-led channel strategies: starting from a position of customer distrust 

• Vernon's three-part transformation: talent changes, direct enterprise motion, upmarket focus 

• Collapsing time-to-value from concept to live results in 14-20 days Why "proliferation of use cases" loses to "excellence in core delivery" 

• The death of technical moats in an era of accessible VLMs and AI coding tools 

• Distribution as delivery: preparing for thousands of locations before winning the 

• Fortune 50 account Expanding from safety intelligence to broader industrial intelligence and robotics optimization

  
  

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Move fast on talent misalignment—severance generosity buys speed: When Vernon transformed Voxel's GTM, he made rapid talent changes while paying fair severance packages without negotiation. His logic: "Why quibble over the margins when you have a bigger problem to solve from a transformation perspective." Enterprise sellers require different skills than partner/channel sellers. Once you know the motion needs to change, talent misalignment won't self-correct. Pay people with dignity and move immediately—the speed gain far exceeds severance costs.

• Insurance-led channels fail when customers fear data sharing: Voxel's initial insurance carrier/broker strategy targeted high-claim customers—logical since they have measurable pain. The execution flaw: companies refuse to share operational data with insurance providers, and the relationship starts from inherent distrust. Vernon kept carriers as validation partners (proving ROI) but built direct sales motion instead. For founders: channel strategies only work when the partner genuinely accelerates trust and access, not when they create structural friction with end buyers.

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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

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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

hema.to is building AI-powered diagnostic infrastructure for cytometry—a specialized area of laboratory medicine analyzing immune system data to detect blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma. Unlike radiology or pathology where AI solutions are abundant, cytometry has remained largely untouched by the AI wave, creating both opportunity and isolation for the Munich-based company. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Karsten Miermans, CEO at hema.to GmbH, to discuss why they're deliberately keeping sales founder-led despite having paying customers, how South America became an unexpected beachhead market, and what it actually means to build infrastructure versus point solutions in healthcare.

Topics Discussed: 

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

// 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

Dextall is attacking a structural inefficiency in construction: the 3-year design coordination cycle that precedes every mid-rise building, combined with the chaotic on-site execution that follows. Founded by Aurimas Sabulis after years running a commercial window company and witnessing construction site dysfunction firsthand, Dextall is building what Aurimas calls a "prefab operating system"—software that connects architectural design directly to factory production of building exteriors. In a market where less than 1% of U.S. mid-rise projects use prefab (versus 75% in Scandinavia), Dextall is bridging the 3-4 year gap between design inception and approved drawings while manufacturing building components that arrive on-site as "Lego blocks." In this episode, Aurimas shares the hard lessons learned from building in construction's unforgiving risk environment.

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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