A Letter to Founders

Nobody teaches you this part. You can find courses on product development, fundraising, hiring engineers, building culture. But when it comes to selling your product to companies that have never heard of you, with a team that does not exist yet, using a process you have not built, the advice gets vague fast. "Hire a great VP of Sales." "Find product-market fit." "Build a repeatable motion." As if any of that is a step you can just execute.

The reality is messier than that. Your first few customers came through your network. Someone you knew took a chance. That felt like traction, and maybe it was. But there is a moment, and you may be in it right now, where you realize that the way you got your first five customers will not get you the next fifty. The introductions dry up. The warm leads run out. And suddenly you are in the open market competing against companies with bigger teams, bigger budgets, and brand recognition you do not have.

This is the moment where most founders make one of two mistakes. They either hire too fast, bringing in a sales leader or a team before the fundamentals are in place, hoping that experienced people will figure it out. Or they wait too long, trying to do everything themselves until they are stretched so thin that nothing gets the attention it needs.

Both paths lead to the same place: spending money and time without a clear picture of what is working and what is not.

What I have learned from doing this five times, at companies ranging from 10 people to 500, is that the problem is rarely one thing. It is not just targeting. It is not just hiring. It is not just messaging or pricing or sales process. It is all of them at once, and they are all connected. Your targeting determines who your reps talk to. Who they talk to determines what objections they hear. Those objections shape your messaging. Your messaging affects your win rate. Your win rate determines your unit economics. Your unit economics determine whether your next fundraise works. Pull on any one thread and the whole thing moves.

The founders who navigate this well share a few traits. They are honest with themselves about what they know and what they do not. They resist the urge to copy what a larger company does, because what works at $50M ARR rarely works at $3M. They make decisions with incomplete data but they build systems to learn from every deal, won or lost, so the data gets less incomplete over time. They stay close to their customers even after they hire a sales team. And they treat their go-to-market as a living system that evolves, not a plan they wrote once and execute against for two years.

The hardest part is knowing which problem to solve first. Everything feels urgent. The board wants pipeline numbers. The reps want better leads. Marketing wants a clear target. Product wants to know which features to prioritize. And you are sitting in the middle trying to sequence all of it with limited resources and limited time.

There is no universal answer to that sequencing question. It depends on where you are. It depends on how many deals you have closed and what those deals taught you. It depends on whether your sales motion is founder-led or team-led. It depends on your price point, your sales cycle, and whether your buyers are technical practitioners or business executives. Anyone who tells you there is a one-size-fits-all playbook is selling you something.

What I can tell you is that patterns exist. I have seen enough early-stage security and AI companies to know that certain mistakes repeat with alarming consistency. Hiring a VP of Sales before the founder can articulate who the customer is and why they buy. Building a demand gen engine before knowing which accounts are worth pursuing. Setting quotas based on investor expectations instead of market reality. Treating every lost deal as a product problem when it was a targeting problem. Treating every won deal as validation when it was a relationship.

These patterns are fixable. Most of them are fixable quickly once you see them clearly. The challenge is seeing them clearly when you are inside the company, moving fast, under pressure from investors and employees and customers who all want different things from you.

I spent 25 years inside these companies. ArcSight before and through the $1.5 billion HP acquisition. Duo Security in the years before Cisco acquired them for $2.35 billion. Tanium when we were 60 people. Bromium when the board hired me to turn around the GTM and the company was acquired within a year. Silverfort from under $1M in Americas revenue to over $60M. And now Kindo, where I own every GTM function as CRO.

Every one of those companies looked different from the outside. Every one of them had the same fundamental questions on the inside. Who do we sell to. How do we reach them. What do we say when we get there. How do we know if it is working. And what do we change when it is not.

Those questions do not get easier as the company grows. They get different. The answers at 10 deals are not the answers at 100 deals. The systems that work with 3 reps break with 15. The ICP that drove your first million in ARR may be the wrong ICP for your next ten million. The founders who scale are the ones who keep asking the questions instead of assuming they already know.

If any of this sounds familiar, you are not behind. You are in the thick of it. And the fact that you are thinking about it means you are ahead of most.

Mathew Varghese The Architect of First Revenue