💌Andy Mowat

Whispered

Whispered is a platform to help top executives collaborate on insights, introductions, unposted roles and support to find their next role and build their career.

Founder

Host of "How I Hire" Podcast

Various Companies

Alongside Whispered, I advise great companies and investors
► I collaborate with top investors to identify breakout companies
► I help VC talent teams and companies connect with top GTM leaders
► I advise select companies on GTM strategy

I love learning new spaces but a few I deeply know include:
► HR tech (worked in it for 7 years at Upwork + Culture Amp + now Whispered)   
► GTM Tech (I am on speed-dial with many GTM tech CEOs)
► Data (I believe data will rewire all of GTM and am passionate about this change)
► AI (I advise a number of AI companies and am building deep in it with Whispered)

A few select companies / firms I've been involved with include:
► Spiff: Commission automation (sold to Salesforce)
► Sendoso: #1 gifting platform
► MadKudu: Lead scoring and signals
► Scratchpad: Changing UX for Salesforce
► Cabal: Helps founders leverage their networks
► Sweep: Customize and scale Salesforce configuration
► Front: Email support and collaboration (advisory board)
► Gong: Call insights and forecasting (advisory board)
► Outreach:  SDR sequencing (advisory board)
► MOPros: Ccommunity site for marketing operations
► ProService: Largest PEO in Hawaii.  Invested at initial acquisition for 50x return
► TestBox: Best demo software 
► Boostup:  Forecasting and pipeline acceleration
► Stack Moxie: No-Code Monitoring for GTM Tech Stacks
► Ampersand:  Deep integrations platform for developers
► Coffee:  CRM 2.0 attacking the enterprise
► Inflection.io:  Marketing automation on top of the data warehouse
► Fullcast:  Driving a revolution in software for RevOps
► Sonar: The first tool for sales ops!
► Bitly: 1 million link signups a month
► The Swarm:  Relationship mapping API powering connections
► Anacapa:  Leading search-fund investment fund
► GTM Fund: Investing alongside 250+ other GTM leaders

Please don’t cold outreach me on investing
Read my writings first and get introduced by someone I know well OR send a keanu emojii

GTM Advisor & Investor / Scout

Carta

(left to found Whispered)
Led 60 person team driving GTM systems, data, strategy and enablement for >$400m ARR.  

Teams included
► Marketing Operations (MOPS)
► Sales Operations (SOPS)
► Customer Success Operations (CSOPS)
► Enablement
► GTM Strategy and Analytics
► Customer Marketing (interim)
► Pricing (interim)
► Paid Marketing (interim)
► GTM Systems

Vice President of Revenue Operations

Gated

Backed by 50 GTM leaders and top VCs, we took a big swing to rewire email to give people back control over their attention.  We built the "noise cancelling headphones" for email and filtered over 2 Billions emails.

We drove a 20x increase in reply rates for senders and sanity for users.

Unfortunately the market on the user side was more niche than anticipated so we wrapped up and open-sourced our code to ensure the mission continues.

Co-founder and CEO

Culture Amp

In addition to Revenue Operations (where I had hired/grew great leaders), I took over the Demand Generation team!   This team ran pipeline growth, campaigns, SEO, content, field marketing, web, design, community and digital marketing

Vice President Revenue Operations & Growth Marketing

Working with all GTM functions, my team of ~25 people drove 10x ARR growth (to a🦄) 

I hired and grew great leaders across:
▸Sales Operations
▸Marketing Operations
▸Customer Success Operations
▸GTM systems
▸GTM Data

Head of Revenue Operations

Created and scaled customer success operations team to drive operational improvements for all post-sale services across $400 million of revenue and team of 220 global employees

Sr. Director: Customer Success Operations

Led Marketing Operations team (concurrent with Customer Success Operations role) during key transition point for Box’s marketing team

Sr. Director: Marketing Operations

Prialto | Amplify People

Built one of the leading administrative assistant outsourcing companies with operations in Latin America and Asia.

Chief Operating Officer

Upwork

As a member of the senior management team at Elance (merged with oDesk), drove operations and initiatives to double annual billings to $500 million

Alpine Investors

Led the firm’s efforts in the HR technology sector while searching for a business to buy and run

Operating Executive

VillaSport Athletic Club and Spa

Led the development of VillaSport from concept to execution, scaling the company quickly from $0 to $40 million in revenue.

Vice President

Led RevOps @ 3x unicorns / Founded Gated ......

I have spent my career building GTM engines for top companies. I led RevOps and Demand Gen at four 🦄  
▸ 2x Scaled from $10M ➡ $100M ARR @ Upwork and Culture Amp
▸ 2x IPO Scale @ Box and Carta

I have a passion for connecting people (hence the 🔌 emoji).  I've advised people on their careers for years and have launched Whispered to make searching for your next exec role less intimidating.

I'm also a big keanu fan .... recently acquired keanu.actor domain ;)

Co-founder and CEO (Chief Email Officer)

Last night we got together an amazing group of OG Culture Amp San Francisco folks for an informal reunion.  It is so special when you’ve worked to build something with folks and to see the friendships built on top of that.  Thanks everyone for coming out !!!

I have spent my career building sales and marketing engines for world-beating companies 🦄 (Upwork, Box, Culture Amp). My teams have sent billions of emails and caused a lot of pain!

Like everyone, I have also been overwhelmed by email.

So I built Gated to fix email for both buyers AND sellers.... and to do some good for the world.  

Gated allows you to focus on the emails that matter.  

Outside of work, I advise growing SaaS companies and am also passionate about:
► Advising early-career folks on their career (returning the favor others did for me)
► Adventure travel 
► Adding to my library of keanu gifs! (if you read this far you know how to customize your outreach to me;)
► Productivity (tools, best practices). 
► Spending time with my family

**if we don’t know each other please make sure you personalize your LinkedIn invite.  I’m just not responding to blank invites

Helping execs land “whispered” roles / 4x unicorn exec

I've built my last two companies on Zapier so when I saw Wade Foster's post on references, I asked him to join us to share how he hires.  

Wade shared so many insights about how CEOs can create a tight hiring process, when they should lean in, and the power of references

Check out the highlights below and find the episode on Spotify, Apple and YouTube

"so many people when they are tying to get hired they think too linearly"

Josh Roth and I discussed the power of networking into ICs 

"I want to hear from my highest performing ICs.  If they can make my highest ICs job easier that is my job too"

see more on our How I Hire podcast on Apple and Spotify

is anyone else feeling this about LinkedIn? 
they no longer promote your content to your followers 
ugh.... starting to think i might actually have to return to X;(

"when I hold back (delay) posting a senior role I find i get better candidates."
Josh Roth explains how he thinks about proactively vs. reactively hiring for senior roles

If you hold a role back how do you get it distributed?
- Josh uses AI to source candidates
- He also leverages Whispered

Most CROs wait until a role opens to start recruiting. Eric Gilpin keeps his next 3 hires on deck at all times.

I sat down with Eric, who runs GTM at G2 to understand how he thinks about executive hiring. 

What struck me most: he's not waiting for openings. He's always building relationships.

Eric shared something that blew my mind. Despite having 20 open roles at G2 that generate thousands of applicants per month, he gets exactly one quality outbound message per month. One. And he forwards every single one to his team because that initiative is exactly what GTM roles require.

But here's where it gets interesting. Eric has a cheat code most CROs ignore: he recruits directly from his customer base. Every time he meets with a customer CRO or CMO, he's evaluating fit. Better yet, he pulls up their Gong recordings to watch how they've interacted with his team over the past two years before ever having a conversation.

His interview process is equally intentional:

→ He sends candidates a 15-slide deck with non-public financial data and OKRs before the second call

→ The final stage isn't a theoretical case study. It's a real collaboration on an actual business problem the company is facing

→ He hires for team capability gaps (AI literacy, emotional intelligence, critical thinking) rather than just role requirements

Eric also shared why he never outsources back-channel references (he needs to control market noise), why executive search agencies are worth the cost for VP+ roles (they have access to the private market of unlisted opportunities), and his specific shout-out to Hunt Club as a recruiting partner.

If you're building a GTM leadership team or thinking about your next executive hire, this conversation is worth your time.

Check out the entire podcast on Apple and Spotify

Melissa Rosenthal (former CRO at Cheddar, Chief Creative Officer at ClickUp) had a hiring problem as a founder. Most candidates didn't work out. She was spending massive time on interviews where resumes looked good but people were total disasters.

So she and her co-founder spent two days vibe-coding a Lovable app that asked candidates two questions on video. The design was specific: you couldn't see the questions before hitting record. No ability to redo unless you followed specific instructions.

Over 1,000 people submitted. 99% were blank videos. They saw the question and couldn't answer it off the cuff. The 20 who actually completed it became her entire qualified pipeline. She made three hires from that batch, including the person who connected us for this conversation.

But screening is just the start. Her real approach comes in the back-channeling.
She won't extend offers until she's back-channeled a minimum 10 people for VP roles: five who worked adjacent to the candidate, two superiors, and two who worked around them. 

She finds the peripheral perspectives most telling because they reveal how someone was actually viewed in the organization.

She's also direct about something most leaders avoid: there's a tenure in growth marketing roles. "You can probably get the most out of them for two years and then you need to move on." Someone who scaled 0-50M rarely has the playbook for 100M-500M. 

And she will "never hire a fractional person" for VP-level roles because at high-growth companies where she's "barely sleeping," fractional means "they're not all in."

Her "biggest project" question is designed to run 15 minutes deep: what you did, who was on the team, what each person's role was, what went well and wrong. When candidates take credit for everything and position themselves as "the center and the hero," it's "a pretty good indication that's not the right person."
If you're hiring senior GTM talent or thinking about your next executive move, this conversation breaks down what works when traditional hiring keeps failing.

Listen to the full conversation on Apple and Spotify podcasts or at whispered.com/podcast

have the honest conversations BEFORE you hire a candidate

Ejieme Eromosele spoke on our "How I Hire" podcast about how she gets to know potential hires...

"before the offer ... i have a keep-it-real conversation about what it is like to work with me / at our company"

this helps people qualify themselves in (or out) 

don't sell sunshine and rainbows...make sure the candidate and you are aligned and save both sides time (and emotions) by having the honest conversations upfront

I've heard this from so many great leaders... that they want to really understand how they work with you

wow that was cool Anthony Enrico to record our podcast
and be on the BIG screen... 
can't wait for it

When I started building Whispered, I wanted to build a platform that execs could use to find hot companies and unposted roles.

I knew data would be key

Having built the data engines at 4 unicorns, I knew all the tools but also that they broke often, required “experts” to maintain, and forced us into constant manual cleanup. 

That’s why we chose Scalestack as the engine under Whispered. Their agentic platform lets us run complex enrichment, scoring, investor mapping, and hiring-manager discovery autonomously. 

We’re not stitching tools together or managing brittle pipelines. We’re building on top of a workflow infrastructure that actually reasons, validates, and improves over time.

The best part: since I have a lean team, we don't have to spend days stuck in fixing broken data
We think about business logic and outcomes — the agents handle the heavy lifting.

Co-Founder & CEO @ Scalestack | Autonomous Revenue Engine. Zero Duct Tape.

Scalestack is an Autonomous Revenue Engine for enterprise GTM workflows at scale. We started with #RevOps as our first wedge because that’s where the pain is the loudest — fragmented data, brittle processes, and an urgent need to use AI for foundational and infrastructural.

But from day one we knew the platform had horizontal potential. If you can orchestrate thousands of #agents to clean, enrich, score, and route GTM data… you can power any complex enterprise workflow.

So when a world-class RevOps leader like Andy Mowat (Carta, Upwork, Box) came to me with the idea of building his Whispered on top of our agentic platform, I didn’t hesitate.

What Andy built shows what happens when the infrastructure is solid:
- agents that reason across multiple data sources
- workflows that don’t break every week
- real-time enrichment, scoring, and profiling with zero babysitting
- and a product team that can focus on logic and outcomes, not plumbing

The result is a fully autonomous engine under the hood — one that lets Whispered operate with the speed and precision of a scaled data team, without actually having one.

Because this is what we think where the world is going: workflows become autonomous, humans focus on strategy.

See it for yourself in Andy’s short video here (him explaining the agentic workflows, and the actual workflows and agents in action), and grab the full case study in the comments.

And the best...I am SO grateful for the relationship I have built with Andy, someone that I respect deeply and who has pretty neat ideas all-the-time.

Thanks Andy!

how are companies interviewing for AI fluency?

based on great work by Christopher Gannon and Captivate Talent + insights from guests on our podcast...  here is a playbook for how you can prepare

https://lnkd.in/giGA_Eud

I’ve heard similar sentiments from 3 people I trust in past 24 hours.  
It is scary how low LLM switching costs are

I feel like Alexa’s  last ~10 years of crappy experience (including the past few post ChatGPT) has blown any brand value they had.  Bet this launch is a flop. 

They had millions of devices in homes and blew their lead

"i keep finishing as silver medalist... how do i fix that"?
we brought Whispered members together to discuss on Friday
and learned a TON of new tactics

Our newest playbook is linked in the comments... hot off the presses.

What tactics do you use to differentiate yourself in the interview funnel that we are missing?

"If a recruiter introduced you in one sentence, what would you want them to say?"

we had the amazing Beth (Rabenstine) Gentile join our Whispered member huddle today and this was the question....

I'll DM the insights from it to anyone who adds in their description 👇

Parents make great leaders...
I've often heard the advice... "when you become a parent, you become more mature" .... Patricia DuChene and I chatted about this on our "How I Hire" podcast

check out the clip below and listen to the whole episode on whispered.com/podcast

"The two things I'm looking for is motivation and coachability.... I'm willing to stretch people that far mostly because people stretched me"

On this thanksgiving holiday.... I love this sentiment from Josh Roth on how people can grow in their careers

Josh also talks about the hardest stretches in sales careers!

See the whole episode at whispered.com/podcast

Got a new 🔥 role with a hyperscaler
Have AI + GTM chops?  Submit via the link and we'll share your profile directly with the hiring manager

have a really cool new role with an AI cloud infrastructure compny
interested.... submit via the link
we'll share top profiles directly with the company

I've chatted with a few execs who have accepted roles but worry either
1. Companies / roles can still change in advance of start date
2. They want to confirm situation on the ground is as it was sold

My belief is that you need to go all-in on a role just as you would want a company to do so... but in this market I understand why people are protecting themselves.

Fascinated for people's thoughts on a difficult topic.

taplio

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