Kyle Norton

📈 CRO 📈 @ Owner.com (Hiring), SaaS GTM Advisor & Investor

As CRO for Owner.com, Kyle leads a team of world class go to market professionals who help independent restaurants grow their direct, online takeout and delivery channels. He currently owns the sales, partnerships, onboarding, demand gen, revenue operations and enablement portfolios.

Kyle is also a Limited Partner (GTM Fund, Stage 2 Capital), Advisor, and Angel Investor for several SaaS-focused funds and startups, where he shares his insights and expertise on scaling, selling and servicing SaaS products.

Additionally, Kyle is a founding member and Co-Chapter Head of the Toronto chapter of Pavilion, a global community of revenue leaders and operators and host of the Revenue Leadership Podcast.

💥 Owner.com Sales Open House 💥 

I'm in town next week and hosting a Sales Open House on Thursday, January 15th, 2026 at 6:00-8:30 PM ET! 

Come check out our brand new Toronto Sales Hub located at 185 Spadina Avenue, 3rd Floor, Toronto for an evening designed specifically for early career sales professionals in the community, with a special focus on Sales Development Reps (SDRs) and Business Development Reps (BDRs).

🗣️ Hear directly from those who’ve done it and what it really takes to go from XDR → AE → Leadership
🤝 Networking with local sales professionals
🍕 Food, drinks and opportunity to meet like minded folks in your sales community!

🚀 Drop in & meet our team, mingle with other sales professionals in Toronto, and be part of this amazing sales community!

If you’re planning to attend, please fill out the registration form below to secure your spot.

📈 CRO 📈 @ Owner.com, Host of the Revenue Leadership Podcast & SaaS GTM Advisor & Investor

🏢🏢🏢 I'm hiring an Office Coordinator! 🏢🏢🏢

With our beautiful new Toronto HQ now humming and a massive sales hiring push underway (20+ reps in the next 75 days), we need someone exceptional to help make this office run like a well-oiled machine.

Owner.com is on a roll right now and we're gearing up for a transformational 2026. A big part of that transformation is building a world-class in-person experience for our Toronto team.

I'm looking for a proactive, detail-obsessed Office Coordinator who takes genuine pride in creating a space where people love to work.

What you need to know about this role at Owner:
🌍 You'll be the heartbeat of our Toronto office. From ordering supplies to coordinating catering to greeting guests — you're the person who makes the magic happen behind the scenes.
🎉 You'll help plan and execute incredible events. Team lunches, offsites, team-building activities — you'll be instrumental in bringing our culture to life.
🛠️ You're tech-savvy and solutions-oriented. Wi-Fi acting up? Conference room AV issues? You're calm, resourceful, and get things sorted.
💙 When we say we're customer obsessed, that extends to our internal team too. You genuinely enjoy creating a welcoming, seamless experience for employees and visitors alike.
🏆 We hold a high bar. This is a performance culture and we expect effort and outcomes. There's pressure in that but you also get to be part of a winning team.
💵 We pay competitively. $96,000 – $127,000 CAD base plus a generous pre-IPO equity package.
🚀 Low ego, high ownership. You're willing to jump in wherever needed — nothing is beneath you and nothing falls through the cracks.

As always, I'm really grateful for the incredible candidate volumes we receive on applications but it's really tough for us to get back to the right candidates in a timely manner. With that in mind, please only apply if:
1️⃣ You have prior experience in office coordination, office management, hospitality, or similar operational roles.
2️⃣ You're genuinely warm, service-oriented, and take pride in creating an exceptional office environment.
3️⃣ You're organized, detail-obsessed, and can juggle multiple priorities without dropping balls.
4️⃣ You are located in Toronto or can relocate. This is 100% in-office.
5️⃣ You're comfortable working beyond standard 9-5 hours when events require it and can handle light physical tasks (we've got an office move coming up!).
6️⃣ You friggin LOVE operations and are energized by solving problems, building systems, and making people's work lives better.

If this sounds like the type of environment that you want to be a part of, shoot me a message and apply below.

I noticed something at 10:30pm last Tuesday that I can't stop thinking about.

One of our Biz Ops team members requested a Slack app install for a side project. It was 1:30am his time. No deadline. No one breathing down his neck. 

He was just excited to build.

When I looked at Slack, there were a bunch of other people online for the same reason. Including me.

I've been accused of being a workaholic but this is something fundamentally different. Psychologist Robert Vallerand's research actually names it: harmonious passion vs obsessive passion. 

Both drive long hours. Only one is sustainable and improves performance.

I recently asked one of our senior product leaders what separates 10X engineers from the rest. I assumed he'd say decision-making or grit.

His answer: "Love of the game."

Some people just can't stop thinking about their work. They ruminate on problems in the shower, on walks, at 2am—until they crack it in some elegant way. You can't train that. You can't incentivize it with comp plans.

Elena Verna once said her job is her hobby. I think we've accidentally built a company of people like that at Owner. And I'm realizing it might be one of our biggest competitive advantages.

In this week's newsletter, I break down: 
→ How to screen for this in interviews 
→ How to attract these people 
→ How to keep them (hint: let them cook)

Link in comments 👇

Here's an uncomfortable truth that actually led to the most unsubscribes I've gotten on a newsletter 😅 

If your RevOps function hasn't fundamentally transformed in the last 24 months, you're already losing. 

Not "at risk of losing." Already losing.

I'm watching a massive divergence happening right now between companies that get this and companies that don't.

The companies pulling ahead share three things:
1. They fixed their data foundations first.
Most companies are trying to bolt AI onto a messy CRM. That's like putting a Ferrari engine in a car with square wheels.

At Owner, we made Snowflake our system of record (not CRM) and put tons of resourcing against data quality. AI is only as good as the data underneath it.

2. Their RevOps leaders think like engineers.
The RevOps leader who isn't in Claude Code, doesn't understand data architecture, and isn't shipping experiments weekly? They're going to be replaced by someone who can.

This isn't me being harsh. It's just the new baseline.

3. They understand the flywheel.
A 4% efficiency improvement doesn't sound sexy. But it compounds into faster growth → more product investment → stronger brand → better talent → more efficiency.

Our reps are 3-4x more efficient than competitors. That gap isn't closing. It's widening.

The conventional wisdom of "let's wait and see how AI plays out" is going to get companies killed.

The reckoning is already here.

I unpacked all of this in my newsletter this week, including what I think needs to change with sales engagement platforms (hint: they need to be rebuilt from the ground up).

Harry Stebbings asked me a question after we wrapped my 20VC episode:
“Who are the best Seed stage founders you’re working with?”

I gave him one name. 

David Patterson-Cole, Founder of DataLane, and made the intro right there.

Last week, DataLane announced their $22.5M Series A led by 20VC.

Here’s why I put my reputation on the line with Harry:

At Owner, we sell to mom-and-pop restaurants. If you’ve ever sold to local businesses, you know the pain.

Your reps spend 30-40% of their time manually researching accounts. Google listings. Yelp pages. Facebook. 

Stitching together data that’s outdated a month later.

It’s slow. It doesn’t scale. And it crushes your unit economics.

David lived this exact problem. He started a food delivery app in college selling to the same restaurants we serve today. He couldn’t find the data he needed then—so he built the solution now.

That’s founder-market fit.

We were Datalane’s first customer and the results for us have been tremendous. 

DataLane is a key factor in the efficiency of our GTM machine.

Better data. Better targeting. Faster reps. More revenue per headcount.

Simple math.

Congrats to David, Ganesh, Harry and the entire DataLane and 20VC teams. 

This is only the beginning.

If you sell to local businesses, talk to them.

A bunch of us at Owner have gravitated to Claude Code over the last few months so this was very confidence building to see!

We’re entering a new era of GTM from ChatGPT > Clay > Claude Code. Here’s how I see the change…

Vice President at Spiralyze | Optimization | CRO for B2B SaaS

Through GTMnow (the media brand of VC firm, GTMfund), I help share content to help companies grow revenue and individuals scale their careers. Subscribe to build, scale, and invest with the best minds in tech.

I host The GTMnow Podcast (top 1% global podcast) and write The GTMnow Newsletter (read by 50k+ operators, founders and investors). 

Tech moats are declining; distribution is the final remaining moat. Your go-to-market strategy and execution determine your outcome. 

--

Passionate people person. Passionate about global education. 
Life is short, and there are 1440 minutes in every day. Make the most of them, make a difference, and enjoy the ride.

Sophie Buonassisi

This is my new favorite line: “Yeses are great. No’s are great. Maybe will kill you.”

Most founders don’t realize how much damage “maybe” does to a business.

Yes, it feels polite and it feels like progress. It also feels safer than rejection. 

But in practice, maybe is just deferred learning.

A clean no gives you clarity, which lets you reallocate time, focus, and energy.

Or it tells you exactly what you need to fix.

What most people don’t realize is that the fastest way to stall GTM isn’t losing deals.

It’s lingering in uncertainty because you’re avoiding an answer.

One of the most practical lessons from my conversation with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser on GTMnow.

SVP Marketing at GTMfund | Host of The GTMnow Podcast

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Key takeaways from my conversation with: Adam Carr, CRO at Apollo ($150M+ ARR, PLG-led). He previously scaled Miro into a $17.5B sales org. 

1️⃣ PLG is an acquisition channel (not a monetization strategy).
PLG pulls users in via value. But usage doesn’t equal revenue. Sales should activate when product signals show scale potential, then guide the buyer to value across the org (not just for one team). Treat PLG as the top of the funnel, and treat sales as the conversion layer.

2️⃣ The most dangerous PLG myth? That sales is optional.
Apollo crossed $100M ARR without a sales org, but Adam is clear: that was the exception, not the rule. If you're scaling GTM, don’t wait for $100M. The earlier you start layering in humans to systematize enterprise expansion, the faster you’ll compound.

3️⃣ To avoid PLG vs. Sales turf wars, build a one-team model.
At Apollo, growth (self-serve) and sales (human-led) run on shared data, shared account ownership, and one customer journey. When everyone sees the same signals and incentives, there’s no “us vs. them,” it’s just one GTM engine.

4️⃣ Slow hiring down to avoid performance debt.
Rushing to hit headcount targets can set you back 12 months. Adam missed hiring goals intentionally to align on what “great” looks like, then built a rigorous process around it. The opportunity cost of bad hires compounds more than you think.

5️⃣ Look for “architects.”
The best modern sellers are systems thinkers. They understand (or want to understand) how GTM workflows operate – how pipeline gets created, how enrichment works, how inbound gets routed. 

6️⃣ Value isn’t delivered at signature, it’s realized through usage.
Many orgs celebrate closed-won. Adam shifts the spotlight to customer milestones – usage, activation, success. Sales gets comped partly on credit consumption. The goal is revenue durability.

7️⃣ Apollo is reimagining the customer success function, replacing CSMs with GTM Engineers.
Apollo is reimagining the traditional CS model. Instead, post-sales is handled by technical operators who run intervention-based playbooks triggered by product signals. 

8️⃣ Product signals are the new GTM operating system.
Apollo maps the customer journey by day 7/14/28 and tracks behavioral signals to trigger human intervention. Whether it's expansion, rescue, or retention, GTM runs on product data. Signal clarity = execution speed.

-- 

🎧 Tune in and subscribe on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you like to listen by searching "The GTMnow Podcast."

💡 GTMnow by GTMfund: Build, scale and invest with the best minds in tech.

SVP Marketing at GTMfund & GTMnow | Host of The GTMnow Podcast

There’s a clear through line across everything we’ve built at GTMfund: democratized access as a lever for impact.

- Access to not only capital, but also world-class GTM support (portfolio companies)

- Access for operators - i.e. the builders of SaaS companies - to financial diversification through investing (LPs)

 - Access for the broader ecosystem to practical GTM insight from the best minds in tech (GTMnow media)

There are barriers for people innovating. 
We’re in the business of removing those barriers. 

If you equip people with the right information, resources, and support - they can fulfill their mission, and accordingly positively impact people and the greater world.

139 countries in 2025 🎙️🙏

From all of us at GTMfund - thank you.

This past year, the GTMnow Network of founders, operators, and investors tuned in to the podcast from 139 countries and 4,114 cities.

A quick shoutout to some of the countries leading the charge:
 🇺🇸 United States
 🇨🇦 Canada
 🇬🇧 United Kingdom

And cities:
 🌆 New York
 🌉 San Francisco
 🌏 Melbourne

We started the podcast from the ground up.
It grew. 
Along the way, we re-acquired Sales Hacker.  
It grew.

And we're just getting started.

We're grateful to everyone tuning in - the GTMnow Network - for helping to shape what the next decade of software looks like.

Claude Cowork is also fundamentally a GTM story. Here’s why.

When software creation compresses, distribution becomes the constraint.

Claude Cowork was shipped in a mere 10 days (wild!).
It started with a simple nudge from Boris Cherny, leading Claude Code: could what had been built internally be scoped down and shipped in just a few days? A small team formed, set an aggressive deadline (“how about Monday”).
Claude wrote Cowork itself. Take a minute to let that sink in 🤯 

Them shipping in 10 days shows how product advantage decays faster. 

In this world, the hardest problems shift upstream:
- Who is it for right now?
- How do you get it into real users’ hands fast enough to learn?

That is GTM. 

Agentic development raises the bar for GTM execution. 

When iteration is cheap(er), feedback speed is everything. Teams that can ship early, message clearly, onboard smoothly, and close the loop with users will outpace teams that are technically strong but less GTM-savvy.

Code is no longer the bottleneck, GTM is. 
That’s why distribution becomes the final moat.

Jordan Crawford has been expressing how we’ve entered a new era. Taking inspiration and learnings from him (full credit to him), these are the eras we’re seeing:

𝐄𝐫𝐚 𝐈: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐟𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐞𝐫𝐚
This is when AI became broadly accessible. It showed up as a conversational assistant that could answer questions, generate ideas, and help people think faster. The interaction was simple: prompt in, response out. The value was speed and cognitive leverage, but the limitation was execution. ChatGPT didn’t understand your real context or operate inside your tools. You still had to copy, paste, and act. AI helped you think, but it didn’t do the work.

𝐄𝐫𝐚 𝐈𝐈: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐞𝐫𝐚
This is when AI crossed into real execution, but only for power users. Developers and technical operators wired AI into scripts, terminals, and early agent workflows. These systems could automate tasks and chain actions, but they required deep technical knowledge. The power was undeniable, but the barrier was high. AI could do work, but only if you knew how to talk to machines.

𝐄𝐫𝐚 𝐈𝐈𝐈: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐞𝐫𝐚
This is where execution becomes accessible without the technical tax. Instead of prompts or commands, you give Claude an objective. It plans the work, executes inside real files, checks its output, and iterates when needed. Context persists across steps.

We've officially entered a new era. 

-- 

✍ More notes on Claude Cowork in the latest The GTMnow Newsletter.

💡 GTMnow by GTMfund: Build, scale and invest with the best minds in tech.

✉️  GTMfund and Jordan Crawford are hosting a private event on Claude Code on Tuesday, February 17th in SF. If you're a founder or an operator owning outbound in vertical SaaS (post-PMF), DM me for access.

AI-led growth can look like rocket fuel…until it isn’t.

It’s never been easier to acquire customers fast, but that growth can mask a deeper problems.

That’s why the next phase of SaaS isn’t about how fast you GROW, but rather how well you ENDURE.

I sat down with Abbas Haider Ali (VP of Customer Success at GitHub) to break all this down for you and much, much more. 

Key takeaways from the conversation:

1️⃣ Expansion is the true test of PMF.
Renewals show customers can tolerate your product. Expansion shows they depend on it. If your early adopters aren’t growing usage or footprint, you’ve sold potential, not value. Look for usage growth, multi-team adoption, and adjacent use cases as your first real PMF signal.

2️⃣ AI-led growth can look like success, but mask fragility.
In the AI wave, explosive acquisition numbers can distract from weak core retention. Abbas calls this “value erosion.” When tech evolves quickly, your own releases can undercut existing usage. That’s why growth is no longer the bottleneck, endurance is.

3️⃣ Build a leading indicator stack for value endurance.
GRR and NRR are postmortems. Build instrumentation that flags value drift before it shows up in revenue. Abbas recommends tracking product usage quality, role-level adoption, and critical path workflows.

4️⃣ Customer Success is entering the 7% era.
AI’s automation of post-sales is shifting the benchmark. The “envelope” CFOs allocate to CS is tightening from 10% to 7% of revenue. 

5️⃣ Use a “waterfall” model to allocate CS budget.
Start with support (rather than outcomes): fund the reactive core first, then invest in onboarding, and finally outcomes. Leaders who skip this sequence often build bloated CS teams that can’t prevent churn.

6️⃣ Monetize your post-sales motion to stretch the 7%.
Want to do more with the same budget? Use premium support and professional services as cost-offsets. Done right, this lets customers subsidize your cost-to-serve.

7️⃣ In early-stage SaaS, aim for "founder-absent readiness".
CS at Seed is about proving customers can succeed without the founder in every meeting. That’s Series A readiness. Abbas frames this as the evolution from “founder-led” to “founder-absent” CS.

8️⃣ If you can’t tie your product to making money, saving money, or reducing risk...you're not delivering value.
Abbas' rule: every durable SaaS company should be able to draw a straight line from product to measurable business outcomes. That’s how you anchor retention, justify spend, and win expansion.

--

💚 Thank you to our incredible sponsor HockeyStack for supporting the podcast. HockeyStack is the AI platform that unifies GTM data to help teams convert, expand, and scale.

🎧 Tune in and subscribe on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you like to listen by searching "The GTMnow Podcast."

💡 GTMnow by GTMfund: Build, scale and invest with the best minds in tech.

Go-to-market deserves the same rigor as product development.

We prototype products, we obsess over UX, we debate pixels…and then we run sales as a loose collection of decks, demos, and instincts.

What Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (COO of Vercel) articulated so clearly in this clip from our podcast conversation is that sales is an experience.

Being sold to is an experience. And if you don’t choreograph it, you’re still creating an experience (just accidentally).

If you treat GTM like a product, the experience is deliberately created.

NOW LIVE! Here are my biggest takeaways from Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (COO at Vercel) on how go-to-market actually scales:

1️⃣ Go-to-market should be treated like a product.

Product teams prototype, storyboard, and obsess over user experience. Most GTM teams do none of that. But being sold to is an experience. If you don’t design it intentionally, you’re still creating one, just accidentally.

2️⃣ Sales motions fail because they’re rarely choreographed.

The strongest GTM teams think in sequences. What experience tees up the next one? When should a whiteboard replace a deck? When does ROI come in? This is product thinking applied to human systems.

3️⃣ AI only helps after you decide what “good” looks like.

Agents are most effective in deterministic environments. If you can’t articulate your best practices, AI will only scale inconsistency. Clarity first, automation second.

4️⃣ Most “lost on price” deals aren’t actually about price.

When Jeanne dug into losses, the real issues were things like missing the economic buyer or failing to quantify ROI. Those are process bugs, not rep failures. Treating GTM like a product lets you debug those bugs systematically.

5️⃣ The forward deployed engineer exists because buyers are overwhelmed.

Customers often know something needs to change but don’t know what to solve first. The people who win bring structure, frameworks, and pattern recognition into ambiguity. That consulting-oriented motion is becoming core, not optional.

6️⃣ Great sales reps aren’t going away in the AI era.

If anything, trust and navigation matter more when decisions feel riskier. The best reps understand an organization’s decision-making better than the organization itself. AI may compress workflows, but judgment remains human.

7️⃣ “Early” is about trajectory (not headcount).

Jeanne joined Google, Stripe, and Vercel later than most people think. What mattered wasn’t what number she was joining the company, but rather about the company’s growth trajectory. If you’re worried you’re too late, is it ever too late if the ceiling for growth is high enough?

-

💚 Thank you to our incredible sponsor: HockeyStack for supporting the podcast. HockeyStack is the AI platform that unifies GTM data to help teams convert, expand, and scale.

🎧 Tune in and subscribe on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you like to listen by searching "The GTMnow Podcast."

💡GTMnow by GTMfund: Build, scale and invest with the best minds in tech.

After hosting 30+ dinners, I finally got to sit down with the dinner event expert himself. 

If you’re hosting a dinner, there are three non-negotiables Healey Cypher (Founder & CEO of BoomPop) shares:

1. A welcome speech
2. A thank you speech
3. A clear goal and a question to kick things off

If you skip those, he says it’s just people eating together. 

Small details matter more than people think.

I do have to say, we don’t have a great track record of speeches at the end of GTMfund dinners - the night often carries on 😅

“YES is great, NO is great, MAYBE will kill you.” - Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (COO of Vercel)

Founders and early sales teams often avoid clarity because they are afraid of hearing no. But no is information!

As Payal Kadakia famously says: “Failure is an amazing data point that tells you which direction not to go.”

What kills momentum is false hope disguised as progress.

This is one of those lines that sticks because it is painfully true.

NOW LIVE: new episode with Healey Cypher (Founder & CEO at BoomPop) - he’s a multi-time founder with multiple successful exits and helped Atomic scale to almost $800M AUM. 

Now, he’s at the forefront of one of the fastest growing channels for company growth: in-person events. 

My key takeaways from the conversation on what founders and teams underestimate early:

1️⃣ Distribution matters just as much (if not more) as product.
Founders spend years perfecting product, but if you can’t scalably and efficiently reach people, there’s a real chance they’ll never even know your product exists. Distribution is the final remaining moat.

2️⃣ Events are becoming the most effective GTM channel in the AI era.
As AI floods inboxes with perfectly personalized outbound, trust is getting harder to earn digitally. In a world where it’s hard to know what’s real online, in-person experiences are becoming a premium.

3️⃣ You can validate demand before you build.
At Atomic, Healey learned that you can test messaging, pricing, features, and competitive positioning before writing a single line of code. Early distribution signals dramatically reduce risk and shape better products.

4️⃣ Most founders don’t think like their investors.
A solid 20% growth business is not what venture-backed businesses are optimizing for. Founders need to honestly ask whether their market, ambition, and exit potential match venture, or if an alternative funding method is more suitable. 

5️⃣ Most startups fail from internal misalignment, not competition.
The biggest threats are usually unforced errors: lack of focus, poor communication, and misaligned priorities. Culture and communication are not soft topics. They are survival mechanisms.

6️⃣ Offsites are becoming the new HQ.
In a hybrid world, intentional in-person moments are how teams align, build trust, and remember why they’re doing the work. The best companies now plan these moments as part of their operating cadence.

7️⃣ Mental state is a real competitive advantage.
Healey shared a powerful story about elite athletes and micro-positivity. How you respond to small losses compounds faster than almost anything else.

I personally learned a TON, and I think you’ll really enjoy it too.

-

💚 Thank you to our incredible sponsor: HockeyStack for supporting the podcast. HockeyStack is the AI platform that unifies GTM data to help teams convert, expand, and scale.

🎧 Tune in and subscribe on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you like to listen by searching "The GTMnow Podcast."

💡GTMnow by GTMfund: Build, scale and invest with the best minds in tech.

What a list! Honored to be recognized on it alongside incredible women, including Lydia Flocchini and Maja Voje 💛 

Congrats to all and thank you Jonathan M Kvarfordt, MBA and Momentum.io for putting this together.

VP of GTM Strategy & Marketing - Momentum | Founder GTM AI Academy & Cofounder AI Business Network | Business impact ​> Learning Tools | Proud Dad of Twins

View Jonathan M Kvarfordt, MBA’s profile

Day 1 of 4: Sooo excited to announce winners for the Momentum.io 2025 GTM AI Awards/2026 Ones to watch!

I will be releasing names every day this week and will have the final list ready for you when I get done talking about how amazing everyone is.

We had so many submissions and we did not accept everyone, but these were all so good that I had to include them in this years winners.

These are people who were nominated (more than once) from peers in the space and who are admired for work, uplift their teams and community and are also people I think making waves in 2026!

This is an amazing list and I loved seeing both new faces and some of my favorite people on this list who I can for sure say deserve to be here.

Starting with ladies first today and tomorrow and then the dudes on Thursday and Friday!
Elle Segars
Lydia Flocchini
Agnese Jaunošāne
Anastasiia Ivannikov, MBA
Desiree-Jessica Pely, PhD
Renat Gersch
Sarah Sehgal
Andrea Scott
Sophie Buonassisi
Amelia Lerutte
Kate O'Keeffe
Maja Voje
Emilia Möller
Purnima Kumar
Praneet Gill
Galina Fendikevich
Corina Maior
Julia Kaplan
Suzanne Rabicoff
Stefanie Boyer, PhD💧
Marchelle Renee Mooney
Christina Brady
Michelle Curtis
Elaine Zelby
Joy Tang
Lauren Morgenstein Schiavone
Ashley Wilson 
Mandy Cole
Sheevaun Thatcher, CPC
Amanda Whiteside

Congrats to you all, so proud of you and well deserved. 

I am connected to all of you, so please reach out to me and I can get you more graphics and stuff!

Really enjoyed sitting on the other side of the podcast fence (screen) on the Private Equity Marketeer podcast! 

It’s no secret that for the best founders, capital is a commodity. 
So in order to support the best founders, you need to offer other value. 

GTMfund’s flywheel supports this: Fund <> Community <> Media. 

The community is the result of over a decade of relationship building. 

Media represents distribution. We started building a distribution arm at the same time that we launched the fund. Then, we bought back Sales Hacker and relaunched it as GTMnow at the end of 2023.

Then in 2025 we build xVal: our internal platform built to capture and compound the intelligence within our ecosystem and media assets. (“xVal” literally stands for exponential value!)

We break the flywheel down, along with how to create content with a lean team, brand ROI, and much more. 

Thanks for having me on, Matt Curtolo, CAIA and Jacob (Job) Sanderman! Big fan of what you're building.

2026 is here… and so are predictions for it 🔮 

Max Altschuler has a habit of calling the future with uncanny accuracy.
Yes his annual predictions, but truly across everything. 
Even when he sold Sales Hacker to Outreach, he said (without an idea of when or why) that one day he would buy it back. Sure enough, he did.

His 8 predictions from his perspective as GP of GTMfund are linked to in the comments!

This is one of the biggest pieces of advice that we’ve heard across GTMnow:

Go-to-market should be treated like a product. 

Talking with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser really crystallized why so many GTM motions break the moment a company starts to scale.

Most teams do this backwards:

They obsess over product UX, they prototype screens, they debate pixels, and they storyboard user journeys. And then they run sales without the same rigor.

Paul Williamson shared in our conversation how he created the GTM roadmap at Plaid, that took them to $300M ARR. 

What treating GTM like a product actually means in practice:

- You design the experience of being sold to.

Not just the pitch deck or demo, but the sequence. What happens first. What insight lands second. What moment earns trust. Sales is an experience, whether you design it or not.

- You storyboard the journey.

Just like product teams map onboarding flows, GTM teams should map how a buyer moves from curiosity to conviction. Whiteboard session vs demo. Executive conversation vs ROI proof. This should be intentional, not improvised.

- You define what “good” looks like.

If you want consistency, you need a clear point of view on excellence. Otherwise every rep is running their own version of GTM, and you cannot scale what you cannot describe.

- You iterate based on data.

Losses are not just rep problems. Often they are product problems in your GTM motion, missing the economic buyer, weak ROI framing, poor sequencing. Dig into the data. 

- AI only works once you’ve done the thinking.

Agents can replicate best practices, but only after you decide what best practice actually is. An unclear GTM doesn’t get magically fixed by tooling.

The companies that scale are building their go-to-market deliberately, just like a product.

Curious where others have seen this break down or work well in practice.

“Where I’ve really seen sales come to life is when a sales rep knows more about an organization than an organization does itself.” - Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (COO of Vercel)

When decisions feel riskier, buyers lean harder on people they trust.

If you’re hiring sales talent right now, pay extra attention to this perspective.

“Product really matters… but distribution matters just as much.”

As tech moats decline, it’s your go-to-market that determines your growth. And distribution has become the final remaining moat. 

It’s something we’ve been shouting from rooftops for years. And in my recent conversation with Healey Cypher (Founder & CEO of BoomPop) on the GTMnow podcast, he shared the same sentiment. 

He emphasized the importance of distribution and how founders can de-risk GTM by validating messaging, pricing, and demand before building.

Speaking our GTMfund language, Healey :)

Congratulations Karam Khanna and the Eightball AI team!  

Karam is a very special founder and we’re excited to help him shift the global narrative from "AI vs. Education" to "AI for Education."

Eightball AI is directly in the education space, an area I’m deeply passionate about. 
As Mandela famously says, “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

Eightball AI is already proving to have tremendous impact for students, and I’m excited to see this impact continue to scale.

🎉 We just raised a $1.2M pre-seed round at Eightball 

GTMFund is leading the round alongside an incredible group of angel investors including James Beshara (Gusto, Mercury, Clubhouse), and advisors such as Dennis Yang (ex-CEO of Udemy, co-founder of Modal)

I couldn't be any prouder of this moment. The journey has been a rollercoaster from:
1) writing the first lines of code in my college dorm
2) winning AI SF and a few hundred grand
3) getting expelled by my university (because "ai is unethical")
4) lawyering up against the school in order to finish up my last few credits of my degree
5) being news famous for 24 hours (google "eightball ai emory")
6) launching eightball to the public and building out our incredible team
7) turning down a few multi-million dollar acquisition offers
8) raising $1.2M to take a shot at changing education forever

it's been an exciting first 6 months after graduation :)

thank you to GTMfund and all the others who are taking a bet on us and have supported us along the way!

Open article: Announcing GTMfund’s Investment in Eightball AI by gtmfund.com

Announcing GTMfund’s Investment in Eightball AI

This moment on the podcast made me smile last week: 

Jeanne(COO of Vercel ) shared one of the quotes she grew up with and why it stuck with her through decades of building:

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

Sales guarantees adversity…missed quarters, lost deals, and setbacks you cannot fully control.

The leaders who last are not the ones who avoid that reality.

They’re the ones who frame it constructively and keep moving.

We are seeing a real shift in what actually closes deals right now.

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser and I recently talked about the rise of the “forward deployed engineer” and why that role matters more in the AI era.

Buyers are showing up with ambiguity.

They know something needs to change, they are unsure what to solve first, and they are unsure how to decide.

So, the people who win aren’t just selling. They’re bringing structure, frameworks, and pattern recognition into the sales conversations. 

This feels like a permanent change in how complex software gets sold.

What do you think, are you seeing this trend as well?

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