Why Technical Founders Hire Marketing Too Late

0:00What I've tried to do is get super deep into what is unique about this product, this architecture, and even more so, how does that relate to the DNA of the company, the DNA of the founder? there's usually some really interesting foundation there and a marketer's job is to deeply connect those dots and then bring that narrative out into the market. Tell that story of why the founders are approaching it this way, what is different about this approach and get customers to have an emotional reaction, which I think is getting lost today in enterprise marketing. We really need that emotional reaction and then B, turn it into a rational decision.

0:50These are difficult rational decisions, right? We're asking for millions of dollars from the customer. So it's got to do both.

0:59Shruti Bhat: Shruti Bhatt didn't begin her career in marketing. She started out as an engineer who was deeply skeptical of it. That perspective shaped everything that followed. Instead of treating marketing as a function that generates awareness, she sees it as a way to turn innovation into customer conviction. In this conversation, we talk about why so many technical teams hire the wrong marketing talent too early, what product market fit actually looks like from the go-to-market side, and how startup leaders can build trust across engineering, product, and sales. I'm Walter Thompson. This is Fund, Build, Scale.

1:35Shruti Bhat: Most founders don't struggle with what they're building. They struggle with explaining why they're the one to build it. You're talking to investors. The product makes sense, but the story doesn't land. Or you're hiring. And people understand the role, but they don't fully buy the mission. It's because there's a gap between what you know and what other people actually hear. The founders who break through can clearly explain why it matters and why they are the ones to do it. That's what I help with through what I call the founder narrative sprint. It's a short structured process to pressure test your story and turn it into something you can actually use with investors talking to reporters, hiring new employees everywhere.

2:14Shruti Bhat: If you're working through that right now, email me. Fundbuildscale at gmail.com. Shruti, thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me, Walter. Great to be here. So your LinkedIn says you started out as a software engineer. I'm curious, what was your first real operating job? I was a software engineer. In fact, I was, I think, way back in the day when QA was a thing. I started off doing QA for one of the storage areas at HP. I remember QA very well. I remember spending weekends in a startup office with my coworkers trying to break things. It was rewarding, but incredibly tedious work.

2:56Yeah, yeah. I got out of there as quickly as possible. and moved on to hacking away at the Linux kernel, which was at IBM. And that was fun, too.

3:05Shruti Bhat: So looking back at your career, which parts of your experience in engineering and product shape how you think about go-to-market the most? Oh, that's such a great question. I think the thing I did when I was working, first of all, QA, and then I made my way into product engineering, product development, And the biggest thing was asking why and not how. I quickly realized that most engineers were jumping directly to how do we solve this problem? And I was the one sitting there saying, but why? Why does this matter? Why does the customer care? And that is the thing I carry with myself into GTM saying, it's not enough to innovate.

3:46We have to really innovate on things that customers care about.

3:51Shruti Bhat: And so now, you know, you were with Observe, you're with Snowflake now. You've taken a company all the way to an acquisition. Looking at that journey now, what special knowledge do you think you have now about early stage decision making? That's a great question. You know, it's interesting. Observe is actually the third startup that I've been at that has been through an acquisition. Observe, obviously, acquired by Snowflake recently. but previously I was at a company called Rovello, got acquired by Oracle, and then at a company called Rockset, which got acquired by OpenAI. And through each of these things, there are some things that are common, some things that are different.

4:30But if you ask me, what are some of the lessons I've taken away? Going all the way back to my roots, when I was an engineer, I hated marketing. I thought marketing was full of fluff. I thought it was full of lies. I thought it never quite represented the product correctly. So I ended up being that engineer who was in a lot of customer calls, going into the real details of how the product works and why it's interesting for customers and how it's different from competitive products. And I think as an engineer, I didn't fully understand what marketing was trying to do. Obviously, I wanted to be upfront.

5:09But as I crossed over to the dark side, went from being an engineer to marketer, I carried that with me. I feel like the best marketing campaigns are built on product truth. They're built on the fundamental architecture, the fundamental things that are different about your product, and that you can pull that thread all the way through to why it's different from others and how it actually solves customer problems. And building that narrative, pulling that thread all the way through comes across as so authentic that customers see it. You know, I've built my entire career on selling or marketing very, very technical products to highly skeptical engineers.

5:54And the thing you have to keep in mind is, well, if the audience is skeptical, you have to be as authentic as you can. So that is my biggest takeaway. And having done this three times over, every single time I've gone into an early stage startup, what I've tried to do is get super deep into what is unique about this product, this architecture, and even more so, how does that relate to the DNA of the company, the DNA of the founder? There's usually some really interesting foundation there. And a marketer's job is to deeply connect those dots and then bring that narrative out into the market. Tell that story of, you know, why the founders are approaching it this way.

6:43What is different about this approach and get customers to have, A, an emotional reaction, which I think is getting lost today in enterprise marketing. You really need that emotional reaction and then B, turn it into a rational decision. And these are difficult rational decisions, right? We're asking for millions of dollars from the customer. So it's got to do both.

7:10Shruti Bhat: How early did you come in at Observe? So when I joined Observe, it was one of the later stage startups. It already had about 100 customers, already had recurring revenue, run rate, established sales team, established go-to-market. So it was already series B. When I joined Rockset, it was pre-product. So just five engineers who had just left their jobs, figuring out what they're going to build. We were still whiteboarding pre-code. We had not even written a line of code. So it was very early. Actually, there was some code, but we hadn't shipped anything to customers. And then at Rovello, it was also pre-launch.

7:58So I would say pre-series A, we were just starting to think about how do we take this to market? What do we call it? What's our positioning? What's our messaging? So I would say I've done all the way from seed to A to B at this point.

8:14Shruti Bhat: When you got to observe, what was working and what wasn't working when you arrived? When I arrived, I found that the company had an excellent product and excellent sales team just going about trying to put the product in the hands of as many customers as they can. what i felt was not really working was um articulating that positioning very crisply and saying why does observe exist for a certain segment of the market versus saying hey we do observability and obviously everybody needs observability so what's special like you know Who exactly are we built for and why do we think they have that unique problem that we can solve?

9:09A good medical example is I like to tell my team, it's not enough to say, you know, we're a painkiller. That's not good enough as a startup. Yeah, if you're motoring, you can go around saying we're a painkiller. But for the most part, you have to really be specific and say, if you have left knee pain and it hurts when you're climbing up the stairs, we're built for you. and then certainly everybody who has left knee pain when they're climbing up the stairs thinks of you and that I think is something that I felt we could do better when I joined Observe so one of the things we did was deeply understand that the customers that were falling in love with the product where they were pulling product from our hands these were customers that were operating at scale.

9:57So we repositioned around observability at scale. And there's a whole, you know, narrative around our founders and our product DNA and why we built on Snowflake that really brings a new architecture and really says, hey, if you're doing observability at scale, you're going to run into these XYZ problems. And that is why we built a new architecture. that is why we solve it this way. So I would say the whole positioning, targeting, messaging, and the product strategy, the product capabilities got aligned to this at-scale go-to-market, which also helped the sales team to align their entire sales motion and the sales process towards these larger-scale customers and how we help them.

10:48So it just end-to-end touched every part of the company. It sounds like it could just be a marketing campaign, but it's never just a marketing campaign. It touches every part of the company when done right.

11:01Shruti Bhat: When you talk to friends or family about your job and you describe what you do, how do you describe Observe? I tell them if you've ever logged into a bank or any other system that you're trying to do something and it's down and you're frustrated, You know there are a bunch of engineers running around the back end trying to bring it back up as quickly as possible. But it is way too hard to answer two questions. What broke and how do I fix it? That's what Observe does for people operating at scale. You've worked with a number of AI First founders. And feel free to change the names to protect the innocent.

11:40Shruti Bhat: But I do want to talk about some of the common mistakes AI First founders make over and over again. Especially deeply technical ones. What are the top three you've seen most often in your experience? Oh, I am going to talk about this from the perspective of B2B, right? I think for B2C startups, it's completely different. But for B2B enterprise startups, top three mistakes. The number one thing is thinking of marketing in isolation. It's, hey, I'm going to hire a marketer and have them go do some demand gen, go create some buzz, and then suddenly everybody knows about us. I think that's a cardinal sin.

12:23Marketing should be closely tied to product and sales and what the product can do and what sales can actually sell and really go after a very narrow subset of customers that's tightly aligned with product capabilities and the sales machine. And if the sales machine is not built, then marketing should be envisioning what that sales machine should look like for this go-to-market and building it. So I think just thinking of marketing in isolation and saying, okay, go do some marketing is the number one thing I hear. Well, no, that's not how that works. The second thing is, again, related, starting with demand gen.

13:04If you're thinking of it as go do some marketing, you think, let me hire a demand gen person who's going to go generate some leads for my sales team. Oftentimes, demand gen is downstream of product marketing. The best first person to hire is usually a strong product marketer or a leader who has that product marketing background or a product manager who can carry some of that product marketing weight, but answer the hard questions around what is the positioning, what is the targeting, what is the messaging, why should this particular sub-segment of the market or who we're targeting deeply care about what we're doing.

13:50I think if we don't nail that, demand gen is a lot of wasted time and effort. So I see this all the time. I get inbounds from technical founders. I just need to start doing some marketing. Do you know a good demand gen person? You're setting them up for failure. You really are. So I think that's number two. The last one, this is much more of a broader go-to-market thing. I always get these questions around, like, should we do PLG? Should we do sales-led? Should we do, you know, just a whole lot of, just create a lot of content and buzz and then see what happens. I think the answer is never clear on day one.

14:41The answer is listen to the market and listen to your customers and follow that thread. So you start with you have a hypothesis and then you see how do your customers want to buy? How do they want to engage? Sometimes they want to speak or they need to speak to a salesperson. If it's a platform sale, they need to really engage with a salesperson and run it. Sometimes if it's a you know AI thing they just want to touch and play with the product before they'll engage with a single salesperson. It's not obvious. It seems like an easy decision at the get-go but it's never obvious. You have to try a few things, you have to listen to your customers, and you have to work backwards from revenue.

15:29So I always work backwards from what kind of deals do we want to close this year. And if we wanted to close those deals, like if you're looking at multimillion dollar deals, good luck trying to do that with PLG, right? If you're trying to do a lot of small few hundred to thousand dollar kind of transactions, sure, yeah, maybe you can do that with PLG. But put your end of year, what's end in mind, what does success look like? And then start start going backwards from there. It's perfectly reasonable to do it for the first year. I get a lot of concern about this approach saying, oh my God, if I bet the farm on this three years down the line, I'm stuck with this go-to-market.

16:16That's, I think, a mistake to think you're going to get pigeonholed. Startups are evolving so fast. The best thing you can do is plan for where you want to end up and start just working towards that for this year. And you can always evolve it next year. I've typically gone from PLG to PLS to sales-led just very, very fluidly, depending on what the market and the product demands at that point in time.

16:47Shruti Bhat: If you were in that very, very early stage, like on part of the founding team, Not a CMO, just kind of just a founder. Would you be waiting for repeatability before you brought in that kind of full-time marketing person? Or would you be more inclined to kind of let the product person handle it until you got to that point? That's a great question. Repeatability takes a while. I would not wait for repeatability. In fact, I think one of the biggest things that this early product marketing person needs to do is work towards repeatability. But if you wait for that, you can be waiting for a really long time because product teams tend to just want to ship, especially today.

17:34I think this has changed, by the way, Walter. A few years ago, it was different. I look at it today. product managers are much more technical. They're going all in with AI, they're building prototypes, they're shipping things. So they're driving that velocity, which is what they should be doing. So then who is thinking about the repeatability and who is thinking about working with sales? I think that falls on product marketing. So I would hire a fairly senior product marketer fairly early. If I remember correctly, when I was at Rockset and I joined as part of the early founding team, within the year, I had hired my first product marketer.

18:19And we were building the website, testing positioning, building the sales pitch, testing the different segments, working on messaging, building all the different sales flows and working closely with sales. And I think that is critical for sales productivity. If you don't do that, I fear that oftentimes you hire a couple of salespeople, they're thrashing about, nobody's really working with them and understanding their problems and helping them succeed. And then you just keep churning sales out, which in B2B go-to-market, sales is very expensive. So if you're hiring a couple of salespeople, I would put at least one product marketer with some DG leanings.

19:11You have these people who are, the fundamental strength is product marketing, but they understand demand gen well enough that they can work with sales. I would put somebody like that in that pod and call it a GTM pod versus purely sales until it's repeatable.

19:26Shruti Bhat: A lot of founders do definitely mistake early enthusiasm for product market fit. And so from your perspective, what does real product market fit look like from the GTM side? Yeah, that's a good point. A lot of people saying yes or signing up or trying things or even buying initially is not product market fit. I look for a couple of things. One is, of course, we talked about repeatability. repeatability shows up in the form of clustering of accounts that look very similar. So if you can look at a few of your customers and say, hey, I have a lot more of these lookalikes in my pipe. If you win two or three deals, and then you can go find 10 more lookalikes, and all of those just breeze through your sales process, you're starting to see some repeatability.

20:24What happens is in the early days, of course, it's not just this GTM part, right? The founder is very much part of this GTM. In fact, it's all founder-led sales. In enterprise B2B, I'd normally say the first$10 million, you're looking at founder-led sales. So founder is closely involved. Now, a founder is extremely compelling, is very good at explaining their vision, getting people excited. it by definition, that's the founder's job, get people excited to follow them. So they're very good at it. And you'll find that they can go into these deals, use their relationships, their charisma, their sheer passion and enthusiasm, and convince a bunch of customers to come on board and join the journey.

21:10That is not repeatability. Because if the founder got five deals going, that next salesperson cannot find 10 more lookalikes for each of these deals and convince them because each of these founder-led deals look a little different. They don't necessarily have the same personas or the same use cases or the same verticals or the same pain points and yet you know founder pulled a rabbit out of their hat and convinced them that this is going to be great. So then the salesperson really struggles to keep finding lookalikes and close a lot more of these deals. So that is not product market fit. It's when you can keep hiring more sellers.

21:56When your pipeline gets to a point where you have your sales goals, you have your 3x pipeline, and you start saying, wait a minute, at this point, I'm looking at my inbound and outbound pipeline ratios. I can keep adding more sellers. I can split the inbound. You know, I can have my sellers have 50 % inbound, 50 % outbound. I can add yet another seller and yet another seller. And I can keep scaling this way because the motion is very smooth and repeatable. And the customers all kind of look alike. They're willing to stand up and tell their peers that they should use this product. And those are the real signals of product market fit to me.

22:41You'll feel it. People inside the company just, you absolutely feel it when the market is pulling you versus when you're pushing.

22:50Shruti Bhat: Are there some specific metrics or signals that tell you that they're pulling it, that it's real instead of just kind of market noise or, you know, a nice article that gives you a bump? Yeah, it shows up in all the business metrics, by the way. There's a reason why VCs hold you to a much higher bar at Series C than they do at Series A. At Series A, a lot of it is exactly this, right? Can you get some people to buy? Can you get some initial revenue? They don't really look at the business metrics, like what is your average deal size? What is your average deal cycle? Are you able to generate a lot more of these larger deals in shorter time?

23:34What is your magic number, which is basically for every dollar you earn, how much are you spending on sales and marketing? Because look, if you're artificially creating this, your sales and marketing cost is very high and it shows up in all these ratios. It shows up in your magic number. It shows up in your burn ratios. So there's a reason why by the time you get to CVC, all the investors, all the growth around investors are asking for these metrics. And what I've learned having done this three times over is the best companies pay attention to this from the beginning. It's perfectly okay to do unnatural things that seed in A, but the minute you get past A, you start thinking about what does the B round look like?

24:19What does the C round look like? Can I show clustering of accounts in certain verticals, in certain segments? Can I show that my magic number, that's the sales and marketing spend, is within industry averages. Because when it's not, that's a signal that you're still pushing. You're just throwing a lot of dollars at it to make it happen. And then the biggest signal is, of course, you can close these deals without the founder getting involved. You still have the founder getting involved in the largest deals, but you don't need them for 80 % of the deals anymore.

24:57Shruti Bhat: I do want to shift a little bit and talk about technical founders hiring their first CMO. that's got to be a real daunting process when you, because I think like you described it pretty well in the opening, like a lot of engineers are just skeptical of marketing in the first place. So, but everyone knows that you got to have someone in that seat. So for technical founders, if you delay that process for hiring someone to lead marketing, at what stage does that actually start harming the company, do you think? At what stage? It's hard to put an exact stage in terms of like series A, Series B. I mean, I imagine by Series A, you have to have someone full time, I suppose.

25:37Shruti Bhat: But like even earlier stage than that, like before Series A, is it kind of, I mean, it's pre-PREMF, but it's, I mean, it's going to be changed. It's going to be different for everyone, certainly. But like, is there, like what would be like this, what would be like a really loud signal, like a smoke alarm that like, okay, you're early stage, you're pre-Series A, but you have to have someone leading your marketing today. Yeah. I think it depends on so many different factors, though. That's why it's kind of hard to kind of put a stage on it. I think it depends on just the founder themselves and their skills.

26:09A good example is look at Observe. Jeremy Burton's the CEO and he's been a CMO in a past life. So he got away without a CMO all the way up to series B. I was the first CMO that Observe hired, which is very, very rare. But that was because he himself is a very seasoned marketing leader and he knew all of these fundamentals and he made sure that you know he had all of these in place but if it's a very technical founder I think you want to bring somebody in much earlier the reason being I've seen that these founders they tend to get impatient when they're working with somebody who's not able to explain to them why are we spending this money what should you actually expect it's a huge investment it's kind of affecting the morale of everybody in the company it's also affecting the product strategy it's impacting the sales hires so you need a senior partner doesn't have to be a cmo but you need somebody who's senior enough that can operate at the level of the co-founder that can be their partner in crime that can be in these brainstorming conversations, that can be in the boardroom convincing all the investors that this is the right direction for the company.

27:30So if the founder is not coming from a marketing or a business background, I think it really helps to bring in somebody sooner. Having said that, from a company standpoint, I would look for a marketing leader once there's some initial sales repeatability starting to show up. You don't have to wait till it's fully repeatable. All the numbers are there. But the early signals, early indicators are there. It's in the pipe. You're starting to see these kind of deals materializing. You're starting to feel like it's time to hit the gas pedal a little bit more. and you're starting to feel like you want to now scale the entire GTM engine.

28:14At that point, I would look to both bring in a CRO and a CMO, again, because you want these people to work hand in hand and partner closely with this technical founder and build the GTM. That allows the technical founder to focus on what they do best, which is innovate and drive the technology and build something absolutely mind-boggling that nobody has ever envisioned. But for the founder to do that, you need to let them play to their strengths and let them bring somebody in that they can really trust. The biggest thing I think I've seen personally, and I've spoken to so many CMOs, look, CMO, CRO, these are revolving doors in startups.

28:59startups. Just look around you, how many CMOs churn out every year. They barely last one year in a startup. It's the most common thing. Both CRO and CMO roles, one year and they're out, one year and they're out. So I've spoken to a lot of people, both founders, VCs, and even CMOs themselves and why that happens. And the answer is trust. Always comes back to trust. If the CEO or the CTO, the co-founders, they don't fully understand what this person is trying to do, do they trust this person enough to let them do it to actually show the results? Because again, B2B, enterprise sales, it takes time.

29:45It's not that you run a campaign and two months later, you can show a million dollar deal. Average sales cycles are long, so you have to invest. You have to build up. You have to know what are the milestones, what are the early indicators, what are the late stage indicators. And you kind of have to have a very trusted relationship. So when do you hire comes back to what is the experience of the founding team? What is the current stage of the company? Can it afford not to hire? It's not, they often ask me, can I afford to hire a CMO? Well, can you afford not to hire? You get to that stage where you realize I'm spending so much money on sales and marketing.

30:31Can I really afford not to hire a CMO who does this right? And then, you know, finally, oftentimes it just comes to, can you find that trusted person? It's okay to delay the hiring if you can't find that trusted person or to accelerate it if you happen to find a trusted person who's just in the market and you worked with them before and you think they're amazing, it is not uncommon for founders to just make a move and say, I'm going to bring this person in a little bit early because the impact that they will have over the long term is totally worth it. So you just can't time this perfectly, right?

31:07Shruti Bhat: For a B2B AI startup, what should founders actually look for in their first go-to-market leader? And I'm talking about like, you know, traits or behaviors or, you know, something like a win on their resume, whatever kind of like must-haves or kind of something you actually want to see in the room when you're talking to this person? Oh, that's such a good one. Yeah, interviewing this person is hard, especially if you're a technical founder. And most sales and marketing people are very well-spoken and highly polished, so they're going to tell you what you want to hear. So how do you take a step back and listen for the right things.

31:47Typically, to me, the biggest signal is do they care deeply about revenue and sales and the sellers being successful? The last thing I want is marketing saying, oh, I was generating all these leads, I created all these impressions, I was on all these podcasts. But what's the point? The reason marketing is there is to get to revenue efficiently, as efficiently and as quickly as possible. So I look for people who start with what's the revenue, what are the sellers doing? How do we help the sellers be successful? I always come in wanting all my sellers to crush their goals and then saying how do we work backwards and make that happen.

32:34So people who say, oh I generate leads, oh I want to make sure there's a good handoff process between marketing and sales. These are all to me big company mindset where there's less accountability for marketing. It's very easy to say I generated X number of leads, I threw them over the fence to sales, after that it's not my responsibility, I'm not taking accountability. That is absolutely the wrong mindset for a startup. I also find that a lot of very seasoned leaders tend to have these kind of playbooks they've run. They've done it once, they've done it twice, they've been reasonably successful, and they come in with the same bag of tricks and run these playbooks.

33:20I think that also is an anti-pattern. So I would almost interview and try to understand their playbook and then see, are they capable of unlearning everything and starting from scratch and learning what is really special and really works for this startup? And that's hard to do, especially for seasoned leaders. It is very hard to unlearn things and kind of question your own assumptions because, hey, the world is new. Every year, I mean, especially right now, everybody's seeing it, everything changes. And for a startup, every year, everything is different. And every startup is unique. I've done three, no two of them were alike in any which way.

34:05All three of them, very different, very, very unique, very special in their own ways. And the question is, can you find somebody who sees that and who cares deeply about the founder, about the team, about understanding the DNA of the product and bringing that to life.

34:27Shruti Bhat: What's one way a CMO can build credibility with a technical founding team without trying to come off as the smartest engineer in the room? I'm sure you've been in this situation because you've been on both sides of this equation with like an engineer, you've been the marketing leader. And so I've also seen marketing people come in and kind of just, you know, trying to burst through that wall of skepticism or resistance with the technical folks. Do you have any frameworks for that or an approach you use for building trust with technical people when you're not building the thing yourself? Yes, I think, again, very, very simple, basic stuff, right?

35:09It's relationships. You have to deeply understand the technical founder, the product team, deeply. like sit down with them, listen to their problems, listen to what they're struggling with, see how you can help them. A good example is even when I joined Observe, for example, you know, we were working through some of the repeatability and scaling and the next phase of scaling. But invariably, when some of these things are happening on the go-to-market side, the product team feels the pressure, right? They're now having to work on deals or ad capabilities that were not necessarily in the original roadmap because, oh, now there's this customer who's asking for that, or now there's another deal that needs something else.

35:55And product team starts feeling it. Sales team is feeling it. So different people, technical leaders, founders, they're all feeling it in different ways. So the credibility building comes from having genuine empathy, truly sitting down and saying, what is your day like? What is keeping you up at night? What are you struggling with? What feels hard? What feels easy? If I could do one thing, if I had a magic wand to do one thing and I could change one thing for you, what would that be? And that empathy, again, for me comes from I've been in their shoes. I understand how hard it is when you're left holding the pager or you're left kind of, you know, building features that you never signed up for.

36:37So I come in with that, relationships, empathy, genuine intellectual curiosity on what's going on, what's going on with this team, how can I help them? And it doesn't take that much time. I never did the 90-day listening tour. It usually happens within the first week. The first week you've spent enough time with everybody in leadership. If you're, again, operating at the right level, you have the trust, they quickly start kind of brainstorming with you and then it's on you as the marketing leader to take a step back and say i see a thousand problems which one do i want to solve which one is the most important one for this company at this point in time every startup has a thousand burning fires it wouldn't be a startup otherwise right uh that's why it's fun um now it comes back to the marketing leader to say, out of these buyers, which one do I want to go focus on?

37:38And is that the most leveraged path for the company? Does that really help the product team? Does that really help the sales team? Does that really help the founder or the CEO with their next fundraise? And ultimately, all of this only matters if you're helping customers. So does that really, really help customers? So in the first week, if you show that you have genuine customer empathy and genuine empathy for all the teams and you deeply understand their problems and you're thinking about how to solve them. A ton of credibility. But in the first month, you've got to action it. It's not enough to just say, yeah, I understand or show you understand.

38:14You now have to come up with a strategy, a solution, take that first step, do something in that very first month. That's one win. It's a small win, but people see that it's a win. you're moving in the direction you said you would. In the first quarter, there's a slightly bigger win. You have to, again, action it. You've got to live, you know, monthly, quarterly. First quarter, there's another bigger win. Now you've earned enough credibility to go for the, you know, full year win. But if you start with a full year thing and you don't really start with the first week, first month, first quarter, people aren't going to sit around waiting for you to execute on the full year.

38:58Shruti Bhat: And just to kind of close out this topic, what's the fastest way a go-to-market leader can lose trust with the founders? Oh, there are so many, Walter. I think the fastest way, especially in a startup tends to be, let me go do this 18 month long initiative. You're not going to see any results for the first week, first month, but trust me in 18 months from now, you'll see the fruit of our labor. Give me a big budget. Give me a big team. Let me go make a big investment. And ultimately, you'll see this. I think people have stopped saying 18 months. Now in the AI world, I see 12 months, six months.

39:49I think even six months asking for a big team, big investment and saying, you know, hang on for six months. Even that is just an easy way to lose trust. In a startup, you cannot do strategy without execution. So you got to start showing results week one, month one. And you have to build those relationships. You have to build trust by doing what you said you would do. And you have to break it down. You have to figure out the milestones. You have to deliver every week, every month. I think the fastest way is always that. Give me a big budget. Give me a big team. Wait for six months.

40:32Shruti Bhat: Profits ensue. It'll happen right now. Saying trust me, it'll happen is the easiest way, I think, to lose trust. In most situations, probably. In most situations, right? Show, don't tell. Right. In most situations, yes. Shruti, this has been such a fantastic conversation. We've covered so much ground. I really appreciate the time today. Thank you. Absolutely. This was so much fun. Thank you, Walter, for having me. The Fund Build Scale theme was written by Michael Tritter and performed by Michael and Carlos Chárez. Michael also composed Ocean, the track he heard at the top. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe and leave a rating.

41:09Shruti Bhat: It helps more people find the show. You can get the Fund Build Scale newsletter on Beehive, follow along on Instagram, and if you have a guest suggestion or a question, reach me at fundbuildscale at gmail.com. Thanks for listening. Fund Build Scale is a production of Truth and Soul Media, LLC.