The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast interviews well-known tech executive, VC, and founders - the expert operators in the trenches who have ‘been there, done that’ to build some of the fastest-growing software companies. Every week, a guest joins Sophie Buonassisi to dissect their stories, revealing expert insights around what worked, what didn’t, and how things actually went down.
This podcast is produced by GTMnow, the media brand of GTMfund - sharing insight on go-to-market from working with hundreds of portfolio companies backed by over 350 of the best go-to-market executives. GTMfund is an early-stage VC fund focused on investing in the most exciting, up-and-coming B2B SaaS companies across the world. The LP network consists of VP and C-level Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success leaders from companies like DocuSign, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Snowflake, Okta, Zoom, and many more.
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Episodes
648 episodes
Inside Merge: The $75M Bet on Open Source AI (Powering OpenAI, Netflix & Uber) | Shensi Ding, CEO
The Co-Founder & CEO of Merge joins GTMnow to break down how she built a company that now powers integrations for OpenAI, Perplexity, Netflix, Uber, Mistral, and enterprise logos like Mastercard, JP Morgan, and Amex, backed by $75M from Acc...
The Blueprint for a High-Performing Sales Team | Brian Le, Notion
Are your sales compensation plans driving the right behaviors or causing your best reps to quit? In this episode of GTMnow, Brian Le (Global Sales Compensation Partner at Notion) breaks down how to build a scalable sales comp operating system.<...
VC: How a 2-Person Fund Runs Like a Startup (Memos, KPIs, R&D) | Vanessa Larco, Premise (ex-NEA)
"Investing in companies that OpenAI won't kill." That's Vanessa Larco's thesis, and in this VC bonus episode of GTMnow she breaks down exactly how she decides what survives. Vanessa, founder and GP at Premise (formerly a longtime partner at NEA...
Why a $1.2B exit felt like his biggest failure, and the customer-obsession thesis behind Agency
A $1.2 billion exit is the dream. Elias Torres calls it his biggest failure. The Drift co-founder joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to unpack why the headline number felt hollow, what he learned in the quiet stretch afterward, and why he jumped...
From DeepMind to 200 Customers in 20 Countries: Building the Execution Layer for Sales | Adam Liska, CEO of Airspeed
The single most expensive sentence in sales is "I'll follow up on that." Adam Liska joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to break down the "execution gap," the space between knowing what to do in a deal and actually doing it, and why that gap is w...
VC: How Benchmark Picks AI Winners - Max 10 Bets a Year, 5 Partners | Chetan Puttagunta (GP)
Benchmark's Chetan breaks down why the path from $0 to $100M has collapsed from five years to under two, and the one thing that is actually getting harder in the AI era: reaching your first million in revenue. In this VC bonus edition of the GT...
Ads in ChatGPT Are Coming. What B2B Marketers Should Do Right Now | Keith Delany, CEO Primer
LinkedIn CPMs just hit $800. AI is flooding every channel with content. Outbound is dying. So where should B2B marketers actually spend their ad budget right now?Keith Putnam-Delaney, co-founder & CEO of Primer, joins Sophie to brea...
He's Seen 300+ Sales Comp Plans. 90% Make the Same Mistake | Siva Rajamani (Everstage CEO)
Most sales comp plans are quietly broken, and the people running them have no idea. Siva Rajamani, CEO of Everstage, has visibility into 300+ enterprise comp plans, and he says 90% of companies make the same mistakes. In this episode he breaks ...
"We Don't Fund Good Companies" : A $1.5B VC Explains Why | Ben Lerer, Lerer Hippeau
Ben Lerer, Managing Partner and Founder of Lerer Hippeau, has built one of New York's most influential early-stage venture firms across nine funds and nearly $1.5B in AUM. In this VC edition of the GTMnow podcast, Ben sits down with Max and Pau...
How Esper Is Building the Operating System for Government Policy | Maleka Momand
Maleka Momand, co-founder and CEO of Esper, joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to break down what it actually takes to build and sell software to government. Esper is the operating system for government policy, serving as the system of record fo...
How He Built a $250M Company With Zero Employees | Ben Cera, Polsia
One Person, $10M+ ARR, $30M Raised: How Ben Cera Built Polsia (AI Operating System) SoloBen Cera, founder of Polsia, just raised $30M at a $250M valuation while running the entire company alone. His AI agent handles his emails, manages ...
The $575B AI Bet (Biggest Since the World Wars) and the New Two-Buyer Reality in Software | Tomasz Tunguz, Theory Ventures
AI Infrastructure Spending is Insane: Hyperscalers Betting $575B on the Data Center Race | Tomasz TunguzThis year's data center infrastructure spending will be the 5th largest infrastructure project in history (bigger than everything ex...
SEO Is Not Enough Anymore: Webflow's CEO on the Rise of AEO | Linda Tong
The future of websites isn't a builder problem anymore. It's an agent problem.In this episode of GTMnow, Sophie Buonassisi sits down with Linda Tong, CEO of Webflow, to unpack how the entire web is being rewritten for a world where huma...
Inside Reevo's $80M Bet to Kill the $10B Frankenstein Stack | David Zhu, Cofounder & CEO
AI is rewriting go-to-market and most companies are still operating with a “Frankenstein stack.”In this episode of GTMnow, we sit down with David, founder & CEO of Reevo, to unpack how AI-native companies will replace legacy GTM sys...
VC: "Software Is Basically Worth Zero Now" | Tyler Hogge, Ex-Pelion
Tyler Hogge helped take Divvy from zero to a $2.5B acquisition by Bill.com. Now, as General Partner at Pelion Ventures, he argues that charging for software is dead, per-seat pricing is collapsing, and the next decade of venture-scale companies...
How AI Will Go From Influencing 20% to Making 90% of Your Decisions | Steve Lucas, Boomi CEO
Boomi was founded in the early 2000s by Rick Nucci, acquired by Dell in 2010, and then spun out to Francisco Partners and TPG Capital in 2021. Today it powers 30,000+ enterprise customers globally and moves more data per second than the entire ...
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Okta's CRO: From $850M in Losses to $760M Profit (The AI Agent Bet) | Jon Addison
Okta's CRO Jon Addison joins GTMnow host Sophie to break down the full story behind Okta's remarkable revenue turnaround, the launch of Okta for AI Agents, and the go-to-market playbook that's carrying them from $3B toward a $5B ARR target....
VC: Inside a16z's $1.7B Infrastructure Bet | Jennifer Li, General Partner
Jennifer Li, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), breaks down why the firm allocated $1.7 billion of its latest $15 billion fund specifically toward AI infrastructure, and what she's betting on next.Jennifer has backed ElevenLabs f...
How Figma Scaled From $2M to IPO | Kyle Parrish (First Sales Hire)
Kyle Parrish joined Figma as the first-ever sales hire when the company was doing $2M in ARR and helped scale it to $950M ARR. Figma then went on to IPO (FIG). But the path there was anything but smooth.In this episode, Kyle br...
How AI Killed the Discovery Call | Sam Senior, Founder & CEO of TestBox
AI isn't just changing how we sell. It's changing how buyers make decisions before they ever talk to you.Sam, Founder and CEO of TestBox, joins Sophie on GTMnow to break down exactly what's happening to the B2B software buying process ri...
VC: Your First VC Meeting Will Be Agent-to-Agent | Auren Hoffman (Flex Capital)
Auren Hoffman (Flex Capital) joins the GTMnow podcast to share some of the most contrarian takes in tech today, from why AI moats are gone, to why your next VC meeting will be with a bot, to why AI is secretly going to trigger a baby boom.<...
How One Hackathon Took Zapier’s AI Usage From 10% to 97% | CEO of Zapier
Wade Foster is the CEO of Zapier, a company that sits between 7,000+ apps and runs millions of automations every single day. That gives him a front-row seat to how companies are actually adopting AI, not just talking about it.In this epi...
VC: Investing at Inception in the Age of AI Agents | Ed Sim (Founder & GP, Boldstart)
Ed Sim has been a VC for 30 years. He's backed companies like Clay, Front, BigID, and Snyk. He writes What's Hot in Enterprise IT every single Saturday, 489 weeks in a row. And right now, he says this is the most exciting and terrifying...
How Sophos Scales Customer Success for 600,000 Customers in a 24/7 Cyber Threat Environment, with Teresa Anania, SVP of Customer Experience
This episode was recorded prior to Teresa Anania’s move to Chief Customer Officer at Verint. At the time of recording, she was SVP of Customer Experience at Sophos.Teresa Anania (CCO at Verint, formerly CCO at Sophos) joins GT...
