At nineteen, Alex McNaughten was an intern at a startup. His boss kept giving him more responsibility. Within a year, he says, he had won a multimillion-dollar account, was managing it, and was leading the sales team. There are gentler ways to discover whether you enjoy management. A swimming lesson usually begins with somebody explaining where the edge is.
McNaughten left university for that work. The career arrived before the instruction manual. Selling, he could learn by selling. Leading required a different kind of learning: other people now had to succeed, too. A good week at his own desk could no longer stand in for a good week across the team.
He is now co-founder and co-CEO of Grw AI, alongside Alistair McLeay, with Daniel Ash as co-founder and chief technology officer. McNaughten leads the company's go-to-market work. The business builds software for sales teams, but his interest begins with the person sitting in the manager's chair. He has occupied that chair, advised others in it, and spent years interviewing people about what makes it so difficult to stay there.
The promotion with no rehearsal
In a public reflection on his first leadership role, McNaughten described relying on his gut to judge deals. Without systems that made the work visible, trouble arrived before he could see it clearly. By the time a struggling deal became obvious, the useful moment for intervention had passed.
“You don't get a ramp. You get a number.”Alex McNaughten, on first-time sales leadership
That is a compact description of a peculiar promotion. The reward for doing one job well can be responsibility for several jobs one has never done. A seller develops personal methods: how to prepare, how to ask, when to follow up. A manager needs methods other people can use. The distinction sounds tidy until somebody hands over a team and a quarterly target on the same afternoon.
McNaughten's response has taken several forms. Before Grw, there was consulting. Then came a business concerned with finding and developing salespeople. Later, there was a podcast. These efforts share an interest in making a profession easier to enter and harder to misunderstand. The people expected to produce revenue need something more useful than another reminder that revenue is expected.
First the playbook, then the people
His author biography dates the founding of Sales Leaders to 2019, after six years building teams for other businesses. It describes work with more than 140 technology companies across Australia and New Zealand. The consulting business put him inside many versions of the same problem: companies needed a revenue function that could grow beyond the habits of a few capable individuals.
A 2021 interview with Growth Acumen introduced him at twenty-seven, already working across more than eighty businesses. The subjects were practical ones: sales playbooks, operating costs, sales cycles, hiring, and expansion into new markets. This was the period before the AI company, when his product was largely his own time, judgment, and ability to help a team change how it worked.
A playbook is an unfashionably modest object. It asks people to agree on what happens next. Who is the customer? What does a useful first conversation accomplish? How does a new employee learn the job? A company can have persuasive sellers and still have poor answers. Consulting gave McNaughten a way to work on those questions across different businesses.
Revenue consulting
Hiring and learning
Co-founded in May
Continuing the conversation
In 2021, according to that same author biography, he co-founded Apprento with Scott Freeman. Its focus was hiring and learning. A webinar with AbilityMap described recruiting from nontraditional talent pools, developing people's sales skills, and placing them in roles. The premise leaves room for someone whose previous job title does not announce that they can sell.
On his podcast, McNaughten has questioned the habit of hiring people who resemble the interviewer. Some predictors of performance, he observed in conversation with Freeman, are difficult to spot in an ordinary interview. Charm can get itself invited back for a second meeting. Whether it will do the actual work remains another question.
His hiring advice is correspondingly specific. Define the job's requirements before meeting candidates. Use a consistent process. Include an exercise. These are small safeguards against a familiar temptation: deciding that somebody feels right, then constructing an explanation afterward. For a founder who entered sales almost by accident, opening the door to unexpected candidates has a particular logic.
A microphone on the manager's desk
McNaughten also hosts the show now called 13 Jobs: The Chief Revenue Podcast, formerly Rev-Up Sales. Its subjects include forecasting, pipeline, AI, and the systems behind revenue teams. The title is a useful little joke about a job description that has learned to multiply.
Early conversations already contained the themes that would turn up in Grw. In February 2022, he spoke with Todd Caponi about sales leadership. In another episode, he asked David Brock why he had written Sales Manager Survival Guide. The conversation returned to the difficulty of finding time to coach while carrying the rest of a manager's workload.
That question matters because coaching is easy to endorse and awkward to schedule. Listening carefully to a seller, identifying a useful change, and helping them practise it require attention. The calendar is already occupied by deals that need attention, too. Merely agreeing that development matters does not conjure an extra afternoon.
The interviewer's role suits McNaughten's professional preoccupations. He asks how people became good at sales, how they improved, and what formal training they received. In an April 2023 conversation with entrepreneur Alex Pirouz, he wanted to unpack sales as a skill useful beyond a single job. The interest extends beyond the moment somebody signs.
The show continues. Its September 22, 2026 episode features Drew Leahy on moving from venture capital to sales leadership. Earlier that year, guests included Jaimie Buss on the transition from representative to manager and Jeremey Donovan on a systems approach to AI. McNaughten keeps revisiting the handover between individual skill and a team's ability to use it.
Three founders, one familiar problem
In May 2023, McNaughten teamed up with McLeay and Ash to build Grw AI. Their backgrounds divided the work: sales and go-to-market experience on his side, product and machine learning expertise from McLeay, engineering and data science from Ash. The founding team put technical capability beside somebody familiar with the working day it was intended to change.
In an early interview on Market Dominance Guys, McNaughten explained that conventional performance-management platforms had felt disconnected from what sales teams actually measured. He had seen the mismatch while working with B2B software businesses. A system could contain the formal machinery of managing performance while offering little help with performance itself.
Grw's early proposition centred on personalised sales coaching. Taylor, its AI coach, could use company playbooks and deal context. The work included preparing for meetings, practising conversations, and analysing calls. The idea was to bring help closer to the moment a seller needed it, rather than leaving improvement to a training session that might occur weeks later.
By December 2024, the company had attracted pre-seed investment from Precursor Ventures, Incisive Ventures, and Investible. Contemporary reporting put the round at NZ$2.4 million and described twenty paying customers across the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. That was a dated snapshot of an early business, rather than a current customer count.
The funding also supported a move from Auckland to San Francisco. For McNaughten, the change meant taking experience developed in New Zealand into a market where many of the company's customers and investors were already based. A consulting engagement travels with the consultant. Software offers a different relationship between the number of people helped and the hours its founder has available.
What happens after a good call?
Grw's current description reaches beyond coaching. It presents itself as the system sales teams run on, handling operational work around deals: preparing, following up, updating the CRM, and supporting pipeline reviews. McNaughten's original problem has acquired a longer list of things to do.
A map of the company's stated workflow, not a measured performance comparison.
The distinction is worth dwelling on. A meeting can go well and still produce a poorly maintained record. A thoughtful question can be followed by a forgotten task. The relationship lives in the conversation, but the next conversation depends partly on the administrative work after it. This is the patch of ground McNaughten has chosen to cultivate.
In 2026, he announced three founding hires in San Francisco: growth, account executive, and customer experience. The roles span getting people interested, helping them buy, and helping them use what they bought. His own company is now navigating the staffing questions he once helped other founders answer.
A small company also makes the division between selling and managing unusually visible. Founders meet customers, recruit colleagues, shape the product, and explain the business to investors. Each activity produces another follow-up. For McNaughten, building Grw means applying his argument about systems to an organisation whose systems are still being built.
The beach was a reasonable alternative
On The First Bet in August 2026, McNaughten recalled the comfortable life he had before committing to Grw: two profitable businesses in New Zealand and a home close to the sea. He and his prospective co-founders first worked together for ninety days, using a funded trial to find out whether the partnership worked.
He explained the subsequent move in terms of possible regret and a downside he believed he could recover from. There was a real opportunity cost to giving up an established business. The attraction was the chance to extend work he already cared about to many more people.
A beach makes a perfectly respectable ending to a business story. McNaughten chose another beginning. His career has moved from learning sales himself to helping others learn it, then toward building something that can carry part of their workload. The nineteen-year-old intern could win an account. The founder's continuing question is how to give the next young manager a better chance of knowing what to do after that.