Podcast
BUILDERS
Hosted by Front Lines Media · EN
Welcome to BUILDERS — the show about how founders get new technology adopted.
Each episode features a founder on the front lines of bringing new tech to market, sharing how they broke into their industry, earned early believers, built credibility, and unlocked real technology adoption.
BUILDERS is part of a network of 20 industry-specific shows with a library of 1,200+ founder interviews conducted over the past three years.
For the full network, visit FrontLines.io.
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www.FrontLines.io/FounderLedGrowth — Founder-led Growth as a Service. Launch your own podcast that drives thought leadership, demand, and most importantly, revenue.
66episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
How Mach identified non-traditional OEMs as its fastest revenue channel after auditing where closed deals were actually coming from | Colin Hurd
Yesterday00:23:21Summary readyMach builds the autonomy stack for the off-highway world — the heavy equipment running agriculture, land care, mining, logistics, construction, and defense. Founded on technology roots going back to 2013, Mach integrates hardware and software directly onto existing OEM platforms, giving mid-market equipment manufacturers a fast path to autonomous operations without building it themselves. The company's first commercial deployment was with GUSS Automation, a California-based orchard sprayer company that scaled to approximately 200 machines running Mach's technology before being acquired by John Deere in 2025. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Colin Hurd, CEO of Mach, to learn how three companies, a decade of hard lessons, and a sharp pivot in go-to-market strategy shaped one of the most pragmatic autonomy platforms operating today.Topics Discussed:The through line connecting Colin's three companies — from physical equipment to autonomy — and why labor scarcity, not compaction or crop yield, was always the real problemHow GUSS Automation's John Deere acquisition validated Mach's commercial model and what "non-traditional OEM" actually means in practiceWhy LiDAR dropping from $80K to $3–5K fundamentally changed the commercial viability of off-highway autonomyThe failure pattern killing autonomy startups: layering EV platform development, new vehicle manufacturing, and autonomy simultaneouslyHow Mach pivoted from chasing traditional OEM timelines to a pull-through model — arriving at OEMs with a committed enterprise buyer already in handGTM Lessons For B2B Founders:Diagnose symptoms versus root causes before locking in your category: Colin's first company solved soil compaction problems before he recognized the real constraint was labor scarcity. "The initial problem I started solving was a symptom of a bigger problem, which was labor challenges — and labor challenges are probably what I will spend most of my career working to solve." The implication for founders is not philosophical — it directly determines your ICP, your competitive set, and your long-term defensibility. If you're solving a symptom, a better-funded competitor solving the root cause will eventually commoditize you. Keep pulling the thread before you build the category narrative.The fastest path to OEM revenue runs through the end customer, not the OEM: Mach spent years building relationships with traditional mid-market OEMs — companies around $1B in revenue with genuine interest in autonomy but multi-year commercialization timelines. The breakthrough came when Colin looked back through the revenue data and noticed the majority of actual closed revenue was coming from a different customer type entirely: non-traditional OEMs and enterprise fleet operators who were closest to the labor problem and moving fast. The tactical shift was then using those enterprise buyer relationships as pull-through leverage with OEMs — arriving at the manufacturer with a committed customer already attached. "We can go to the OEM and say, here's a buyer, here's the technology, and here's the customer." That reversal in sequencing — demand-first, then supply — compressed timelines significantly.// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe 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
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How BinSentry frames every enterprise pitch around executive career risk — not product features | Ben Allen
Yesterday00:25:53Summary readyBinSentry is bringing real-time inventory intelligence to one of the largest and most overlooked supply chains on the planet. The US animal feed industry alone processes over $200 billion in transactions annually — and globally, the number exceeds $1 trillion. Yet most feed mills still rely on humans manually peering into bins to estimate what's there, a workflow Ben Allen's grandfather would recognize from the 1950s. The core problem: feed behaves nothing like a uniform solid. It rat-holes, slants, and forms multiple peaks, making simple sensor-based measurement useless. BinSentry cracked accurate bin-level inventory measurement roughly six years ago using high-end time-of-flight cameras — and is now building the intelligence layer on top of that data across the world's largest animal protein operators. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Ben Allen, CEO of BinSentry, to learn how he sells into one of the most consolidated B2B markets in existence, why he walked away from selling to farmers entirely, and what it actually takes to close enterprise deals when your total US addressable customer base is 200 companies.Topics Discussed:The $1 trillion global feed mill supply chain — and why it still runs on human eyeballs and spreadsheetsWhy feed inventory measurement is a harder technical problem than it looks, and how BinSentry solved itBinSentry's deliberate decision to walk away from the farmer market entirely and go direct to enterpriseThe enterprise-startup mismatch: why selling "speed and innovation" kills deals with large buyersGTM Lessons For B2B Founders:ICP discipline is hardest when inbound arrives from outside it. BinSentry doesn't sell to farmers — not because the demand isn't there, but because Ben spent years earlier in his career trying to make the unit economics work for geographically dispersed sole proprietors and couldn't. The decision to go exclusively enterprise — Cargill, Wayne Sanderson Farms, Aviagen — was the result of that hard-won lesson, not a whiteboard exercise. The discipline challenge Ben names is specific: you get calls, real business interest, and you still have to say no. Founders who haven't done the work of understanding why a segment breaks their CAC model will always rationalize the exception. Founders who have done that work say no faster and spend more time on accounts that can actually compound.Enterprise buyers aren't buying innovation — they're managing career risk. Ben's most pointed observation is about what's actually happening on the other side of the table in an enterprise sales meeting. The executive evaluating your product isn't just asking whether it works — they're asking whether choosing you will make them look good or expose them. Large organizations move at scale, with serious money in motion, and the people inside them are accountable for vendor decisions. When a startup walks in and leads with speed, iteration, and how fast they can change things, an enterprise executive hears: instability, risk, and a vendor who might look different next quarter. The face you show enterprise has to lead with stability, expertise, and credibility — even when the internal reality is far more fluid. Ben's framing: you're not selling the environment you built. You're selling a corporate outcome.// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe 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
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How Zip Security built a vCISO channel by treating consultants as the primary customer, not the middleman | Joshua Zweig
1w ago00:20:49Summary readyThe cybersecurity industry has a problem it created itself. The tools exist to protect most organizations — but deploying and managing them costs seven dollars in services for every one dollar in software license. Multiply that across the eight to ten tools a company actually needs, and you've priced out the majority of the market. Zip Security was built to close that gap with AI and automation. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Joshua Zweig, Co-Founder and CEO of Zip Security, to discuss how he and co-founder Gabbi Merz are rethinking both the product and the go-to-market motion for a segment of the market that's been systematically underserved.Topics Discussed:How Palantir's edge-distributed operating model shaped Zip's internal culture — and where Josh deliberately diverged from itZip's hiring thesis practice: what they took from Palantir, what they changed, and why they run it for every single hireThe three-bucket framework Josh uses to segment the security market — and why company size is the wrong variableGTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Avoid the channel that compresses your price before you've proven your value. Josh made an active choice to skip MSPs despite that being the default playbook for SMB cybersecurity distribution. The reason is structural: MSPs lead with cost sensitivity — the conversation becomes "is this 80 cents a seat?" before you can establish what you're actually delivering. They also serve a bundled model (help desk, device provisioning, security) where Zip's focused security-in-a-box offering doesn't fit cleanly. The channel shapes the conversation, and the wrong channel shapes it badly from the start.Treat channel partners as the primary customer, not the path to the customer. Zip's most productive GTM motion has been building relationships with independent security consultants and vCISOs. Josh's framing was precise: "The right way for us to approach this market is really being laser focused on these folks and thinking about them as much as our customer, if not more than the end user." The structural reason this works: consultants deliver recommendations but don't implement. They hand off a security plan and point at the client. Zip closes that gap — which makes the consultant look better to their client, not just more efficient. Founders building indirect channels should ask whether they're making the partner more valuable to their customer, not just making the sale easier for themselves.Segment by operational security capacity, not company size. Josh's market framework has three buckets: zero-person IT/security teams (where the ops lead or head of engineering is also the de facto CISO), lightly staffed teams of two to five people who have the tools but can't weave them together effectively, and well-resourced teams like Palantir's. His ICP is the first two. A construction company with 800 employees can sit in the same bucket as a 50-person regulated healthcare company — what they share is the absence of the internal capacity to operationalize security. Firmographic proxies like headcount or revenue miss this entirely.// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe 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
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How Avantos positioned against CRM by calling itself an operating system for client management — and why buyers got it immediately | Bassam Chaptini
2w ago00:20:26Summary readyAvantos AI is replacing the fragmented patchwork of CRMs, task managers, and paper-based workflows that financial services firms have relied on for decades with a single operating system for client management. Built on a knowledge graph and AI-native from the ground up, Avantos models the full complexity of financial relationships — client data, the service team, and the products clients hold — as a unified, contextual graph rather than disconnected tables. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Bassam Chaptini, Co-Founder & CEO of Avantos AI, to hear how he and co-founder Rabih leveraged 20 years of financial services experience to identify a massive white space, validated it in stealth with a design partner before officially founding the company in September 2024, and are now expanding from wealth management into insurance, banking, and capital markets with anchor logos including Mercer Advisors, Guardian Life, Vanguard, and SEI.Topics Discussed:Why wealth management became the beachhead — and how Mercer Advisors resolved the market selection questionThe knowledge graph architecture decision: why relational tables broke down and what unlocked multi-entity data modelingWhy CRMs, task managers, and portfolio systems all fail at the same thing — and what "swivel chair" actually costsHow Avantos used Series A design partners at Guardian Life, Vanguard, and SEI to de-risk expansion into adjacent verticalsThe category naming problem: why "CRM" is a hijacked term and what it takes to position as an operating systemBranding into a conservative enterprise buyer: the deliberate calibration between tech credibility and institutional trustWhy enterprise GTM at the foundational layer doesn't require marketing — and when that changesGTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Let the buyer who shows up first tell you which market to enter. Bassam and his co-founder had wealth management, insurance, capital markets, and banking all on the table simultaneously. What broke the tie wasn't analysis — it was Mercer Advisors arriving with a clear mandate. The president of Mercer came in saying what they had in place didn't work and wanted to co-build something new. Avantos partnered with them in stealth to validate the platform before officially founding the company. When a specific buyer shows up with that level of urgency and is willing to build with you, that's a stronger signal than any market sizing exercise. The analysis can follow.Relational tables will eventually break your data model — know when to reach for a graph. When Avantos first tried to represent the three-way relationship between clients, the service team, and the products clients hold, they started with traditional relational tables. Bassam is direct about what happened: it got out of control quickly regardless of how you structure it, which is why firms revert to paper. The knowledge graph solved it because it can represent arbitrarily complex relationships between data entities without the model collapsing — and as a side effect, it turned out to be natively well-suited for AI agents, which require rich contextual data to operate effectively. For founders building in any domain with deeply interconnected entities, this is a meaningful architectural lesson about where relational models fail.// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe 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
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How Nominal combined go-to-market engineering and CFO dinners to build a pipeline motion that converts | Guy Leibovitz
2w ago00:21:10Summary readyMost AI finance startups are chasing the same crowded ground — invoice processing, AP automation, SMB-friendly dashboards. Nominal is doing something different. Guy Leibovitz, a three-time founder with two exits, is building AI agents that replace the full manual workload of controllers and accountants — and he's selling it into mid-market and enterprise companies that nobody else is seriously going after. In this episode of BUILDERS, Guy gets into the hard pivots: walking away from a startup ICP mid-cycle, breaking up with customers that didn't fit (and feeling it in the revenue), and building a GTM motion that actually works at the enterprise level — not through brand spend or conference booths, but through a compounding combination of AI-powered outbound, go-to-market engineering, and field marketing that puts the right CFOs in the same room and lets the product sell itself.Topics Discussed:Why Nominal started targeting startups — and the single customer conversation that changed everythingCompeting on the labor budget, not the software budget — and why that reframe changes everything about the dealWhat it cost Nominal in real revenue to fire customers outside their ICP — and why Guy says it was the right callHow Nominal built the Nobu Series: intimate CFO dinners in high-end sushi restaurants worldwide that generate pipeline without a single pitchThe GTM engineering + field marketing combo that Guy calls "unstoppable" — and how they actually built itWhat a go-to-market engineer actually looks like at Nominal, and which backgrounds have performedHow Nominal tracks ROI on every event and marketing activity — and what got cutNavigating the "AI will eliminate your team" conversation directly with CFOsThe single priority Nominal is locked into for 2026GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:Fire customers who don't fit your ICP — even when it hurts the quarter: Nominal made the deliberate call to walk away from customers that didn't fit their mid-market and enterprise ICP. Guy is explicit: it cost them hundreds of thousands in ARR at seed stage, and it hurt. But carrying the wrong customers slows everything — product focus, team energy, positioning. They raised their Series A with traction that actually reflected the market they were going after. If the customer can be better served elsewhere, let them go.Your real competition might not be software at all: Nominal's primary competitor isn't another SaaS tool — it's humans running Excel and offshore BPO teams in the Philippines and India doing the work instead. That reframe completely changes the sales motion: you're not on the software budget, you're on the labor budget. That's a different buyer, a different ROI conversation, and a different reason to act.The ICP pivot rarely announces itself — follow the thread anyway: Nominal's enterprise pivot didn't come from a market map or a board deck. It came from a casual conversation at an event where a friend in energy said "we really need what you're doing." Guy called everyone he knew, followed the chain, and landed his first enterprise customer — Green Street Power Partners — through a founder's neighbor who happened to be their CFO. That customer is still with them two and a half years later. The signal came before the data. Act on it.// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe 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
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How Renterra built an outbound cold calling engine | Andy Feis
2w ago00:21:01Summary readyHeavy equipment rental is a $100 billion market — and until recently, it ran almost entirely on pen and paper or legacy software built 30 to 40 years ago. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Andy Feis, Co-Founder & CEO of Renterra, to learn how five years of management consulting across manufacturing, mining, logistics, and construction led him to one of the most overlooked software opportunities in the country: modernizing the roughly 15,000 independent equipment rental companies that supply the majority of construction equipment in the U.S.Topics Discussed:Why 60% of construction equipment is now rented — up from 20% a decade ago — and the COVID supply chains, rate environment, and equipment specialization trends driving that structural shiftWhy the assumed barrier to selling technology into this market turned out to be a mythHow Renterra built its go-to-market around high-volume direct phone outbound, with Andy personally making 10,000+ cold calls before handing it offThe free, white-glove implementation model Renterra uses to drive product usage and long-term retentionThe sequencing from founder-led sales to first hires to scalable systems — and why it took 12–18 months to get rightHow word-of-mouth has become a meaningful inbound channel without any deliberate marketing investmentWhere AI fits into Renterra's product roadmap as it builds toward becoming the full technology layer for rental companiesGTM Lessons For B2B Founders:Underserved is not the same as resistant: Andy's biggest pre-launch assumption was that a blue-collar, industrial buyer base would push back on adopting software. It turned out to be wrong. "Nine times out of ten when we explain what we're trying to do or show them the product, it's like thank God, we've been waiting for this." The real dynamic in this market wasn't resistance — it was absence. No capital had flowed in to build the right product, so buyers were excited the moment something credible appeared. Founders entering legacy or overlooked verticals should stress-test whether the assumed adoption barrier is real or whether it's a story the market tells itself because no one has tried yet.Post-close usage is the metric that actually matters: Renterra's number one success metric after closing a deal is product usage. That single north star drives everything about how they handle implementation — free of charge, fully white-glove, unlimited training, unlimited support, with the explicit goal of getting customers live and seeing value as quickly as possible. Andy's logic: "Once we have a customer up and running, using the system well, we have them for a very long time." The free implementation is expensive, but it's deliberately framed as an LTV bet, not a cost center. Founders who charge for implementation or treat it as a hand-off risk optimizing the wrong variable — closed deals look like revenue until churn reveals they weren't.// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe 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
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How Rembrand repositioned away from "product placement" to unlock a completely different media buyer and budget | Omar Tawakol
2w ago00:26:01Summary readyRembrand is building a new media category called in-content advertising — using AI to insert brand products seamlessly into existing video content, from social creator clips to premium TV shows and films, in a way viewers can't detect. The founding insight is blunt: ad industry executives were going home and paying to avoid their own product. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Omar Tawakol, a serial founder who previously built and sold multiple companies including BlueKai, to hear how he's applying three decades of experience in digital advertising to one of the category's hardest unsolved problems — and what it cost him to learn the difference between a great sales team and actual product-market fit.Topics Discussed:The consumer behavior signal that made building Rembrand obvious — and urgentWhy in-content advertising is a fundamentally different category from product placement, and why that distinction determines which buyer you reachThe technical problem with inserting brands into high-quality video at scale that existing AI models weren't built to solveWhy $1M+ in multi-country, multi-year renewals still wasn't product-market fitHow Rembrand shifted from building proprietary AI infrastructure to a data moat strategy on fine-tuned open source modelsThe category creation trap: why chasing the bespoke, high-customization deal nearly killed scalabilityWhat balanced team composition actually looks like when you're building in a fast-moving categoryGTM Lessons For B2B Founders:Category naming is a buyer routing decision, not a branding exercise: Omar spent years calling Rembrand "virtual product placement" before realizing the label was sending him to the wrong room. Product placement is a bespoke, negotiated, content-owner-driven transaction — no standardization on supply, demand, measurement, or purchase mechanics. In-content advertising plugs into existing media buying infrastructure: video budgets, Nielsen/Kantar measurement, programmatic pipelines. The name change wasn't semantic — it changed who picked up the phone and which budget got unlocked. Founders building new categories should define the name by where it routes the buyer's mental model, not by what the technology does.Repeat revenue can mask a founder-dependent business: Rembrand had multi-country repeat purchases across multiple campaigns, over $1M, every signal pointing to product-market fit. Omar concluded he was wrong. The reason: experienced founders get relationship-based allowance from early clients that first-time founders don't. Customers were buying Omar and his co-founders, not a repeatable product motion. True fit, in his definition, means buyers have a named budget line item, clear measurement criteria, and a plan to allocate spend to that line item annually — without Rembrand in the room to shepherd the deal. The pressure test isn't renewal rate. It's whether the deal happens when you're not there.// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe 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
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How Extend built a four-pillar marketing org mapped to four distinct B2B2B growth motions | Guillaume Bouvard
2w ago00:24:40Summary readyExtend's model is built on a specific bet: that banks want to offer their SMB clients a better expense management product but won't build it themselves. Extend builds that product and sells it to the bank, who then distributes it to their business customers as their own offering. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Guillaume Bouvard, Co-Founder, COO & CMO of Extend, to hear how 12 years at American Express became Extend's most underrated distribution asset, why he structures his entire marketing org around growth motions rather than functions, and what he's learned about the only marketing investment that actually moves the needle in a B2B2B fintech model.Topics Discussed:How Extend's Amex alumni network became its primary bank acquisition channel in the early yearsThe B2B2B distribution model: why Extend sells to banks and lets them distribute to SMB clientsHow Guillaume maps Extend's four marketing pillars directly to four distinct growth motionsWhy partner activation is Extend's highest-leverage marketing investment right now — and where past attempts failedWhy distributed bank sales forces make traditional field enablement structurally unworkableWhat a first-time CMO should do before launching a single campaignHow founders should hire a marketing leader: the case against job postingsGTM Lessons For B2B Founders:Convert your operator network into a structured distribution channel before building any outbound motion. When Extend launched, Guillaume didn't build a prospecting sequence to reach bank executives. He called people he'd worked alongside at Amex who had since moved into product and executive roles across the financial services industry. That network was the direct result of his time in Amex's strategic planning group — a small team that worked directly with the CEO and the full executive suite, giving him exposure to senior relationships across the industry well before he needed them. The lesson isn't "use your network." It's more specific: founders with deep operator backgrounds at market-defining companies are sitting on a distribution asset that compounds over time as those colleagues move into decision-making roles at prospects. Map that network before you build anything else.Structure your marketing org around your actual growth motions, not around standard marketing functions. Guillaume runs four parallel growth motions at Extend: selling directly to banks, acquiring SMB customers through those bank partners, acquiring a smaller volume of SMB customers directly, and retaining and growing the existing customer base. Every marketing pillar and every team member maps to one of those four motions. The insight for B2B founders is that most early marketing orgs are built around what marketing departments are supposed to look like — brand, demand gen, content — rather than around how revenue actually enters and expands in the specific business. Before making a single marketing hire, map your growth motions first, then design the org to serve them.// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe 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
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Why IO River hired a VP of sales one month after founding | Edward Tsinovoi
2w ago00:16:45Summary readyAkamai once made the decision to freeze its entire network for a full year. No changes. No deployments. No innovation. The cost of another major outage — like the ones that had already knocked critical services offline — was simply too high to justify any forward movement. Edward Tsinovoi was inside that decision. And what it revealed to him wasn't just an operational problem at Akamai. It was a structural failure baked into the entire Edge CDN industry: every company, from mid-market to enterprise, was running its traffic through a single edge provider, and that single point of dependency made the whole architecture too fragile to evolve.Edward left Akamai with his co-founder and started IO River to solve it. The thesis: give companies an easy button for multi-edge infrastructure — the same strategy that Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and LinkedIn had built for themselves through years of expensive internal engineering — without requiring every company to build it from scratch.In this episode of BUILDERS, Edward shares what it actually looks like to bring a disruptive product into one of the most conservative, risk-averse infrastructure markets in tech — and what he's learned about GTM, messaging, and market sequencing as a first-time founder with 25 years of engineering background and zero sales experience.Topics Discussed:The internal Akamai decision that revealed the CDN industry's structural paralysis — and led directly to IO River's foundingWhy Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and LinkedIn all built multi-edge strategies internally — and why that capability has been inaccessible to everyone elseThe case for hiring a VP of Sales one month in, against conventional wisdom on founder-led salesHow to navigate messaging in a market that wants reliability and predictability above all elseThe specific parenthetical positioning tactic IO River used to bridge a new term to a legacy oneWhy IO River launched in Europe before the US, and what they treated Europe as: a controlled environment to prove the sales motion before crossing to the largest marketThe structural reasons European GTM requires a channel-first approach while US GTM rewards direct selling//Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe 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
Summary
How Vinci4D captured existing budget line items instead of creating new demand from scratch | Hardik Kabaria
2w ago00:24:53Summary readyVinci4D is building the foundation model for the physical world — starting with heat transfer in semiconductor and electronics engineering. Approximately three years into the journey, the team has shipped a product now in use by engineering teams at top-tier semiconductor and electronics companies. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Hardik Kabaria, CEO and Co-Founder of Vinci4D, to learn how he chose his beachhead, how he thinks about physics as infrastructure, and what the GTM motion looks like when you're selling something the market has never bought before.Topics Discussed: The two-axis framework Hardik used to select heat transfer in semiconductors as Vinci4D's beachhead Why Vinci4D's physics foundation model is built ground-up and cannot be replicated by adapting a language model The three competitive buckets in physics simulation — and why the legacy category is structurally constrained, not just underserved How Vinci4D's usage-based pricing model maps to an infrastructure framing rather than traditional enterprise software The "moment of authority" — the behavioral signal that tells Vinci4D a customer has converted from evaluation to dependencyWhy whiteboard sessions with engineering teams matter more than conference presence for this category The long-term vision: physics as infrastructure, judged on throughput the way a database or data center is judgedGTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Score your beachhead on two axes before committing. Hardik didn't pick heat transfer in semiconductors because it was the biggest market — he built a two-axis framework. The first axis: how urgently does the world need to solve this problem, and how fast is the part creation rate? The question he raised was pointed: how many new semiconductor chips launch per year versus how many new aircraft? The second axis: how critical is that specific physics domain to the product's performance metric? Heat transfer in semiconductors hit hard on both — thermal performance is a direct limiter on how fast a chip can run, and manufacturing complexity in semiconductors spans seven orders of magnitude of feature size, from nanometer to centimeter. His forcing question: even if Vinci didn't exist, would the world be forced to solve this? If the answer is an emphatic yes, that's the opening. It may be small, but you can run your train through it.The supply chain is your expansion map — if you pick the right beachhead. Hardik noted that semiconductors sit at the center of every hardware system: phones, laptops, cars, AI training, AI inference. That centrality creates a natural commercial motion. Vinci4D's semiconductor customers are already introducing them to the downstream board-level engineering teams. The beachhead choice wasn't just about where to win first — it was about which win would create the most upstream and downstream pull. Founders building horizontal technology should pressure-test their beachhead by asking: does winning here open doors, or does it create a silo?// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe 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
Summary