Ed Brandman spent decades in global financial services before retiring in 2018. His last chapter before stepping away was at KKR — where he joined when the firm had just 390 people and left having helped build it into one of the most recognizable names in alternative assets. Five years later, a conversation with his son (now his co-founder) about the due diligence process pulled him back. That became ToltIQ, an AI-native platform built specifically for private markets. In this episode of BUILDERS, Ed breaks down a GTM that ran entirely on referrals for two-plus years, how a deliberate industry-first hiring policy replaced a sales team, and what founders consistently get wrong when trying to sell AI to financial services buyers who are already overwhelmed.

Topics Discussed:

• Why Ed and his co-founder targeted the front end of the investment workflow — not back-office ops — as the highest AI leverage point

• The deliberate decision to staff 70% of the team, including engineers, from inside the industry

• How ToltIQ generated 8–10 inbounds per week for two years with no outbound motion — and what finally made them add one

• Running a 30-person team against a 100-person competitor using AI internally across the entire org

• The three things Ed tells every founder trying to sell into financial services CIOs

• Why the Frontier model providers (OpenAI, Anthropic) may be the biggest threat founders aren't pricing into their moat

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• The highest AI leverage in financial services isn't where most founders look. Ed's conviction from the start — drawn directly from his time inside KKR — was that the front end of investment workflows (diligence, capital raising, investor relations, sourcing) would yield far more from AI than operational back-office processes. That's the opposite of where most AI vendors pitch. If you're building for a specialized vertical, time spent inside the industry isn't just helpful for credibility — it's how you identify where the real leverage is before you build anything.

• Hire the domain, then train for the tool. 70% of ToltIQ's team — including engineers and the client-facing org — came from inside private markets. Ed's view: if clients can sit across from your team and feel understood before the demo starts, you've already cleared the biggest hurdle in enterprise sales. This wasn't incidental. It was a deliberate hiring philosophy from day one, and it scaled the business before there was a sales playbook.

• Referral growth at this scale requires earning it, not engineering it. ToltIQ had no outbound motion for more than two years and was still fielding 8–10 inbounds per week by the end of 2025. Ed's explanation: the time they invested in onboarding clients — working through problems with them, being transparent about limitations, iterating in the open — made clients want to refer peers. In tight-knit professional networks like private markets, the quality of the relationship drives referrals more than the quality of the product alone. The referral engine sustained the company through 2025 and into 2026 before they felt the ceiling.

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Reevo launched with an audacious compound thesis: tear out the Frankenstack of CRM, sequencing tools, conversation intelligence, data enrichment, and forecasting apps that buries revenue teams in busywork — and replace it with a single unified platform that powers the entire GTM motion from first outreach to closed-won and beyond. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with David Zhu, Co-Founder and CEO of Reevo, to unpack how a 14-person founding team — backed by $80 million and incubated with Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures — is executing that thesis against some of the most entrenched software in the enterprise stack.

Topics Discussed:

• Why sellers spend 70% of their time not selling — and the specific mechanics Reevo is using to flip that ratio

• The "learn, love, advise" framework Reevo applies before making any product decision

• How mapping every GTM persona's jobs-to-be-done as a graph of nodes and edges revealed which sacred cows to kill first

• Why Reevo deliberately deprioritized enterprise and went after breakout-stage companies — and the trust calculus behind that call

• The "discover, build, sell" ICP segmentation framework Reevo's CTO Clement built to maintain focus without surrendering market visibility

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: 

• Build the full jobs-to-be-done graph before picking a product wedge. Before writing a line of code, Reevo mapped every GTM persona — SDRs, AEs, RevOps, marketers, CS — as nodes, with their jobs-to-be-done (prospecting, customer engagement, forecasting, reporting) as edges between them. The goal: look at the complete MECE graph and identify where rerouting edges between nodes makes the whole system more efficient. This is a categorically different exercise than surveying customers for pain points — it forces you to see the system, not just the symptoms, and reveals which tools are genuinely load-bearing versus which are sacred cows you can kill.

• Your ICP strategy should have three verbs, not one. Reevo's CTO Clement built a segmentation framework that maps three verbs — discover, build, sell — onto each market segment. For the core ICP bracket, the team discovers use cases maniacally, builds toward them, and sells when the product is ready. For segments below that bracket, they opportunistically sell and fast-follow with a PLG motion. For segments above, they opportunistically discover use cases but refuse to distort the product roadmap. Most founders conflate these modes — selling up-market while pretending to build for mid-market, or building for enterprise while claiming SMB focus. Separating the verbs by segment gives the whole company a shared language for saying no without losing sight of where the market is going.

• Enterprise trust cannot be compressed — so don't try to sell it before you've earned it. Reevo's framework is explicit: trust equals consistency over time, and you cannot compress time. Rather than burning runway on enterprise deals that require years of track record to close, Reevo went after what the host called "the next rocket ship companies" — growing with them so that by the time they scale, they've scaled on Reevo. The insight isn't just about ICP selection; it's about recognizing that your go-to-market motion has to match what trust actually requires at each market tier.

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John Glasgow spent over a decade as the end customer of enterprise accounting software — at Adobe, Invoice2Go, and Bill.com — before deciding to build the ERP he always wished existed. After Invoice2Go was acquired for $625 million, he applied to Y Combinator with a newborn at home and a single conviction: the incumbents were 25–30 years old, the pain was acute, and nobody was building for the modern tech company. Campfire, the AI-native ERP for growing tech companies, was the result. Customers like Replit and Posthog are scaling on it today.

Topics Discussed:

• Why deep category experience — not just founder energy — gave John his edge at YC

• Getting to paying customers within 30 days of starting the program

• How to identify and close early adopters who pay before the product is ready

• Two years of solo founder-led sales as the only AE and solution consultant

• Why the first AE hire came from an incumbent, not a startup

• Building a credible brand in a category starved of creativity

• The daily LinkedIn content engine that now drives 80% inbound pipeline

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• The best early customers are strangers, not friends. John's network opened doors, but his most valuable early customers came from cold LinkedIn outreach to people he had never met. One replied that his financial reporting was "so bad" he was willing to meet weekly for an hour — no compensation, no equity — just to help build the right product. Warm intros from your network are useful, but a stranger paying for a rudimentary product and demanding you meet weekly is the real PMF signal. Optimize for that.

• If a prospect says "once you ship X, we'll buy" — flip it on them. Don't build to the condition. Ask them to sign now with a contract contingent on that feature shipping. If they won't, they were never serious. John saw founders repeatedly fall into the trap of waiting for one more feature or one more logo before going to market. The "not ready yet" excuse almost always belongs to the founder, not the product.

• Narrow your ICP to the point it feels uncomfortable, then go deeper. Campfire landed on the 50–150 employee Series B/C tech company and refused to move until that cohort was truly happy. In a category where NetSuite and Sage Intacct technically serve everyone, being exceptional for one precise segment is a stronger competitive position than being adequate for many. The up-market and geo expansion came later — only after the core was locked.

• Run founder-led sales all the way to Series A, even in complex categories. John was the sole AE and solution consultant at Campfire for nearly two years — demoing the product himself in a category that traditionally separates AE and SE roles entirely. His reasoning: the feedback loop you control as the only seller is what lets you function as an effective PM when the team is lean. Once you hand that off, you lose the translation layer between customer pain and product decisions. His rule: no matter what AI sales tooling exists, get to Series A PMF metrics first.

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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

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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.

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Medical coding is a mandatory workflow — no code, no claim, no payment. But the US isn't producing enough coders to keep up, payer-side complexity keeps growing, and hospital margins are already razor-thin. Arintra is building the AI infrastructure to take that workflow off the table entirely. In this episode of BUILDERS, CEO and Co-Founder Nitesh Shroff breaks down how Arintra is winning deals in a slow-moving, high-stakes market — with a 6–8 month sales cycle, 100% pilot success rate, and ROI that compounds across the entire revenue cycle.

Topics Discussed:

• The $19,000 ER bill that directly led to founding Arintra

• Why the medical coding shortage + payer complexity + margin pressure have converged into an urgent buying motion

• How Arintra achieves 6–8 month sales cycles in a notoriously slow market — and why that's considered fast

• The metrics behind 100% pilot success: 5–8% compliant revenue uplift, 32% cost reduction, 64% faster collections

• Layered persona messaging: CFO vs. VP of Revenue Cycle vs. Director of Coding

• Expanding the wedge: from autonomous coding into CDI, prior auth, and denial prevention

• The "document, charge, get paid" platform vision

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Enter through the mandatory workflow, not the optimization play. Arintra's wedge isn't a productivity pitch — it's a takeover of a process hospitals literally cannot skip. Medical coding sits between clinical documentation and getting paid; without it, the claim never goes out. Founders should pressure-test their entry point: are you replacing something discretionary, or are you embedded in a workflow that runs regardless? The closer you are to the latter, the less you're selling and the more you're removing a bottleneck.

• Structure your pilot as a conversion machine, not a proof of concept. Nitesh doesn't treat pilots as evaluation stages — he treats them as the first step in a conversion he expects to close. Arintra leads with the pilot proactively, builds to value within 2–3 months, and the numbers do the closing: 5–8% compliant revenue uplift, 32% reduction in coding costs, 64% faster time-to-collect. That's the formula behind 100% pilot success. If your pilot design can't surface clear ROI within a quarter, you're setting yourself up for purgatory. Design the proof, not just the product.

• Messaging hierarchy isn't a nice-to-have — it's a deal mechanic. Arintra sells to a CFO, a VP of Revenue Cycle, and a Director of Coding, and each hears a different conversation. The CFO gets margin and revenue recovery framing. The VP gets operational leverage and compliance. The Director gets technical depth — EHR integrations with Epic, Athena, and NextGen, coding accuracy, workflow specifics. Nitesh's principle: "One message doesn't fit everyone." Founders who default to a single pitch are leaving someone in the room unconvinced. Map your message to each stakeholder's specific evaluation criteria before you walk in.

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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

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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. 

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E-commerce hasn't fundamentally changed since 1996. Same homepage. Same nav tree. Same cart and checkout. Theo Satloff, Co-founder & CEO of Remark, is building from the inside out to change that — replacing the generic, one-size-fits-all brand website with a personalized, consultative shopping experience that adapts to the individual the moment they land on site.

In this episode, Theo gets into how Remark is growing through competitor envy, a proof-of-concept motion built around controlled A/B tests, and deeply personalized outbound that generates outsized response rates. He also makes a case that most AI companies are making a serious GTM mistake by going as horizontal as possible — and why Remark is betting the opposite.

Topics Discussed:

• Why the e-commerce experience has been structurally broken since 1996 — and what actually fixing it requires

• How Remark differentiates from the chatbot category that buyers instinctively distrust

• The A/B test-driven POC motion that converts skeptical brand buyers without requiring a leap of faith

• Why competitor envy has become Remark's strongest inbound signal

• The "old school selling" playbook: handwritten notes, custom Japanese chef's knives, and the LinkedIn moment they didn't plan for

• How Remark maps to two completely different budget lines — and why it matters for the pitch

• The contrarian messaging bet: going narrow and specific when the entire market is racing horizontal

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Make competitor envy your best prospecting tool. Remark's strongest inbound comes from brand buyers who discovered Remark while browsing a competitor's website, went through the experience themselves, and immediately reached out. Theo's team knows these leads have already self-qualified and felt the product firsthand. The implication for founders: if your product is visibly deployed in the wild, the quality of that live experience is a direct driver of pipeline. It's a distribution channel most teams don't actively design for.

• Structure your POC as a controlled experiment, not a pilot. Rather than asking buyers to commit on faith, Remark uses a reduced-cost proof-of-concept period followed by a clean A/B test against the brand's existing solution — and demonstrates 10, 12, 15% more revenue in those controlled comparisons. For any founder selling into buyers who have already invested heavily in their current setup, reframing the first "yes" as a low-risk experiment rather than a platform decision removes the single biggest obstacle in the sales cycle.

• Map your product to the budget line before you walk in. Remark gets purchased out of two entirely different buckets: customer service software (Zendesk, Intercom, Gorgias) and headcount — specifically temp labor spend that brands would otherwise burn on seasonal hiring. Which bucket your buyer is drawing from completely changes your pitch, your champion, and your competitive set. Founders selling AI products should do this mapping before any discovery call, not during it.

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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

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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. 

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AIR is an eVTOL company on a path to making personal aviation a mass-market product — not a commercial fleet play. With a $35M+ order book, aircraft already delivered, and double-digit revenues projected for 2026, AIR is an outlier in a sector where most well-funded competitors have yet to generate meaningful revenue. On this episode of BUILDERS, we spoke with ⁠Rani Plaut⁠, CEO and Co-Founder of ⁠AIR⁠, about what it actually takes to commercialize deep-tech hardware — and why the discipline to follow real purchase orders, not internal conviction, has defined every major strategic decision the company has made.

Topics Discussed:

• Why electric aviation has failed to reach mass market — and the specific friction points AIR is engineering around

• How real inbound demand from the US Air Force, Israeli Ministry of Defense, and commercial cargo operators shaped AIR's unmanned-first strategy — before it was a strategy

• Why AIR is the first eVTOL company to achieve certification — and what most competitors got wrong structurally

• AIR's B2C OEM model and the deliberate use of primes to access B2B and B2G markets without distraction

• The content discipline behind AIR's marketing: only publish events that already happened

GTM Lessons For Deep-Tech Founders:

• Treat lack of revenue as a product signal, not a feature. The common narrative in deep-tech is that staying pre-revenue keeps you agile. Rani rejects this directly: "Six, seven years into development you should be having some serious relationship — AKA money flowing in the right direction." If customers aren't paying for something you can actually deliver, the market is telling you something. Don't mistake the absence of sales for strategic optionality.

• A purchase order is the only valid market signal — everything else is noise. Rani is precise about what "following the money" means at AIR: not LOIs, not pilots, not cooperation agreements with small countries. A real purchase order for a first unit, followed by orders for more units of something you can actually deliver. Founders should draw that same hard line internally about what counts as validation.

• Let customer inbound reshape your go-to-market before you formalize it. AIR's unmanned program wasn't a planned wedge strategy — the US Air Force, Israeli Ministry of Defense, and cargo companies in Asia and Europe came to them organically once the aircraft was flying. Rani's decision framework was simple: if a customer is paying in a significant way for something with a follow-on tail, it's an easy yes. The lesson isn't "be reactive" — it's that real demand surfaces faster than internal roadmaps when you have a working product and short feedback loops.

• Concentrate your innovation surface area or you will fail. AIR innovates on the aircraft platform itself but deliberately uses established components wherever possible — motors, propulsion, materials. Rani's framing is worth internalizing: "If you innovate on motors, propulsion, battery, new materials — the chances for success drop exponentially." For founders building on multiple novel bets simultaneously, this isn't a risk factor, it's a near-guarantee of failure. Decide what you're actually inventing and buy or partner for everything else.

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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.

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OpenHands⁠ is the largest open source platform for agentic software development — giving engineering teams AI automation for the maintenance work that consumes developer cycles without requiring creative judgment: dependency updates, vulnerability remediation, unit test coverage, and code review. In this episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with ⁠Robert Brennan⁠, Co-Founder and CEO of OpenHands, to dig into how a community-first open source project became a commercial platform trusted by some of the world's largest banks and regulated enterprises — and the specific GTM decisions that got them there.

Topics Discussed:

• Why open source was the founding strategy — and the Docker cautionary tale every OSS founder should internalize

• Drawing a hard commercial line: what stays free forever vs. what triggers a paid conversation

• How highly regulated industries became the ICP — not by design, but by following who adopted fastest

• The four-bucket qualification framework their CRO built to stop burning founder time on wrong-fit accounts

• The exact signals that told them founder-led sales had hit its ceiling

• Using GitHub activity, Slack membership, and doc IP tracking as a de facto pipeline intelligence layer

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Draw your open/commercial line before you need it — and make it structurally clear. OpenHands made an explicit decision: everything, including research, goes into the open source. The commercial line is cloud scale and integrations with tools like Slack, Jira, and Linear. That clarity does two things simultaneously — it builds genuine community trust and creates a natural upsell trigger without a pitch. Vague lines (or license switches after the fact) are what destroy OSS communities. Docker gave too much away and didn't build a sustainable business. Others switched licenses under pressure and burned the communities that made them. Robert's team set the line at founding and held it.

• Open source collapses the enterprise procurement timeline in regulated industries. This is the non-obvious wedge. Regulated companies carry blanket approvals for open source that bypass the vendor onboarding cycle — which can run 12+ months. OpenHands was running active conversations inside major banks before any closed-source competitor finished their security review. Engineers on the ground already have permission to bring open source in-house; they don't need to talk to sales or security. That's not a sales hack — it's a structural procurement advantage built into the product decision.

• Your ICP will often find you before you find them — but you have to commit when the pattern shows up. Highly regulated industries weren't the day-one target. They kept showing up because open source removed their single biggest adoption barrier. The GTM move was recognizing that signal early and committing to it: building the product niche around data sovereignty, air-gapped deployment, and on-premise LLMs — the exact requirements that matter to banks and healthcare companies. Following the signal and then doubling down on it is what created defensible positioning.

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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

Frugal⁠ is building the engineering-layer that FinOps dashboards never could. Where existing tools tell you what you're spending, Frugal embeds cost visibility directly into the software development lifecycle — so engineers make better cost decisions before the bill arrives, not 30 days after. In this episode of BUILDERS, four-time founder ⁠Michael Weider⁠ breaks down why AI is quietly destroying SaaS gross margins, how his DevSecOps-era playbook gave him the blueprint for a brand new category, and the deliberate, sequenced GTM he's running to bring it to market.

Topics Discussed:

• Why token costs have turned cloud spend from a pain point into a potential existential problem for AI-native companies

• The DevSecOps analogy: what "shift left for security" taught Michael about where to attack the cost problem

• The gap in the FinOps category — and why engineering-layer tooling is complementary, not competitive

• Why Frugal's data requirements (source code, cloud bills, observability data) make PLG structurally impossible right now

• The exact GTM sequencing: six months of founder-led pipeline, then a growth hire three months ahead of the first AE

• Why cold calling still works in 2026, and what it should actually be measured on in a new-category motion

• The long-term vision: cost context embedded in every engineering decision, the same way security and quality are today

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Your product's data requirements should dictate your sales motion — not your preferences. Frugal needs access to source code, AWS bills, and observability data. No individual developer has the authority to grant that access, and even if they did, cost resonates up the org chart — with the CFO, head of engineering, and CTO — not at the IC level. Michael didn't try to engineer around this with a PLG wedge. He accepted the structural reality early and built a top-down sales motion from day one. Before you commit to PLG or sales-led, map out exactly what permissions and approvals your product requires to deliver value — that answer often makes the decision for you.

• Sequence GTM hires to avoid lighting AE compensation on fire. Frugal launched in May 2025. They didn't hire their first non-engineer until November 2025 — a head of growth whose sole mandate was to build the inbound machine for three months before the first salesperson joined. The logic is straightforward but rarely executed this cleanly: an AE with no warm pipeline spends their time on cold outbound, which is the most expensive way to use that seat. The growth hire is the forcing function that makes the AE productive from day one.

• In a new category, cold outbound is education infrastructure, not a pipeline tactic. Michael was initially skeptical — he'd never answer an unknown number himself — but cold calling is working for Frugal in 2026. The more important insight, though, is how to think about measuring it. When you're building a category that buyers haven't heard of, a cold call that doesn't book a meeting still plants a flag. Share a link, pixel the contact, retarget with content. Measure SDR contribution on pipeline influence across the full funnel, not just meetings booked — that's the old metric for a world where buyers already know the category exists.

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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

Roughly 90% of the world's goods move by sea on vessels powered by technology that, in many cases, hasn't meaningfully advanced since the textbooks Mike Carter studied at Kings Point — which were printed in the 1960s. Mike and his co-founder Steven grew up together in the mountains of North Carolina, spent careers at offshore drilling contractors and energy majors like Shell, and eventually built Fleetzero to solve what they saw as an existential crisis for American shipping. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Mike to learn how two ship engineers are electrifying container ships, bulkers, and offshore supply vessels — and what the go-to-market for deep industrial transformation actually looks like in practice.

Topics Discussed:

• Why batteries beat diesel, ammonia, and methanol on pure economics — not just emissions

• How to run a multi-stakeholder sales process when any one party can kill the deal

• The decision to buy a 265-foot offshore supply vessel to compress the product and team development timeline

• What a three-to-five year payback period unlocks in a market where most green alternatives never pay back at all

• How Maersk and MOL became both investors and operating partners

• Why "do nothing" is the real competitive threat — and how to sell against it

• Fleetzero's expansion beyond propulsion into uncrewed vessel operations and remote ship control

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• In slow-moving industries, your real competition is the status quo — and it requires a different sales motion. Fleetzero doesn't spend much time worrying about other electrification companies. Their primary adversary in every sales cycle is the "kick the can" decision — vessel owners who are intellectually convinced but operationally reluctant to move first. Mike's approach isn't to push harder; it's to maintain the relationship and let improving unit economics do the work over time. Battery prices keep falling, energy density keeps improving, and deals that didn't pencil two years ago are starting to look obvious. Several owners who originally passed have already come back to reopen conversations. The tactical implication: in industries with long adoption cycles, your pipeline management system needs to track relationship quality with dormant accounts just as rigorously as active ones. A "not yet" in deep industrial markets is often a delayed close, not a loss.

• Map every stakeholder with veto power before you run a single sales play. Fleetzero sells to three distinct groups — vessel owners, system integrators, and shipyards — and a champion in one group provides zero protection against a skeptic in another. Mike describes deals collapsing when an enthusiastic vessel owner gets steered away by an integrator with competing interests. His fix isn't a better deck — it's running parallel relationship tracks across all three groups from the start of the process, not as a follow-up motion after an owner shows interest. Founders selling into industries with distributed buying committees should diagram every party who has influence or veto power over the final decision, then treat each as an independent sales motion with its own champion development plan. Letting one relationship carry the deal is how you get surprised in the final stages.

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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

Blue Current⁠ spent a decade doing what most battery startups won't: staying in the lab until the chemistry was genuinely ready. Founded with a single North Star — build a safer battery, whatever that takes — the company scrapped its original technology after early cells literally caught fire, rebuilt around silicon as an active anode material in a fully dry architecture, and emerged with a battery that delivers on energy density, cycle life, safety, and high-temperature performance simultaneously. No trade-offs, no compromises.

⁠Susan Stone⁠ joined as CEO in late 2024, stepping into an early-stage commercialization effort and immediately facing one of the most consequential market shifts in the industry: the EV cooldown. In this episode, she walks through how Blue Current rewrote its go-to-market from scratch, how the Amazon relationship evolved from due diligence partner to anchor investor, and how she thinks about threading the needle across stationary storage, robotics, and mobility with a single battery chemistry and a deliberately constrained set of form factors.

Topics Discussed:

• Why Blue Current's founding philosophy — safety first, technology second — produced a fundamentally different battery architecture

• The one-way door decision that changed the company's trajectory

• How the EV cooldown created a cascading effect that went beyond demand — and forced a go-to-market rebuild from first principles

• The process Blue Current used to evaluate stationary storage: stacking cells into system-level comparisons against LFP incumbents to confirm they had a compelling product, not just a good enough one

• How the Amazon relationship developed and what it unlocked for commercialization and ICP clarity

• Why customers won't pay for safety directly — and how Blue Current monetizes it anyway

• The five-to-ten year vision: gigawatt-hour scale manufacturing

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• The one-way door framework is a forcing function for resource discipline. Susan described using Amazon's one-way door / two-way door mental model as a core decision-making tool at Blue Current. The most consequential example: exiting a co-development agreement with an automotive OEM. The partnership had been a research collaboration where both sides contributed IP — but as the OEM's strategy shifted, the resource allocation kept growing while the long-term upside shrank. Calling that exit a one-way door forced clarity on whether the risk of staying was actually worth it. For founders: codify this framework explicitly. Not every hard decision is irreversible, and conflating the two leads to either reckless pivots or paralysis.

• When your primary market slows, the adoption velocity impact compounds the demand impact. The EV cooldown wasn't just a market size problem — it slowed how fast automotive OEMs were willing to adopt new battery technologies at all. Susan identified this cascading effect early: a contracting market that also lengthens its decision cycles is a compounding headwind. Founders in markets experiencing demand softness should model not just the revenue impact but the elongation of sales cycles and technology adoption timelines. They are usually worse than the top-line numbers suggest.

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