Sophie
Buonassisi

Somewhere in a filing cabinet, there is a degree in Criminology and Police Studies from Simon Fraser University. Sophie Buonassisi knows exactly where it is. She just hasn't looked at it in years.

Instead, she's at a desk in Vancouver running one of the most influential go-to-market media operations in B2B tech. The GTMnow Newsletter lands in 58,000 inboxes every Friday. The podcast - rebuilt from the ruins of the Sales Hacker brand she helped rescue from Outreach.io - has logged 622+ episodes. The community of founders, investors, and revenue leaders who follow her work? Somewhere north of 50,000.

None of this was in the plan. But then again, Sophie Buonassisi has never been particularly interested in plans. She's interested in signals - patterns that most people miss because they're moving too fast or too narrowly.

Her first job was as a soccer referee at age 13. Not because she wanted the money, but because she liked being in the middle of things - making judgment calls in real time, owning the field. That instinct never left.

By 15, she was waitressing. She'd keep waitressing through university, through the early career years, longer than anyone expected. Later, she'd say it was the single most formative professional experience she had - that the relentless customer-reading, the instant feedback loops, the managing-chaos-with-a-smile skillset translated directly into B2B sales and go-to-market thinking.

A criminology degree later, she joined Environment and Climate Change Canada as a project analyst. She co-developed a national engagement framework. She represented the Enforcement Branch on Indigenous working groups. It was serious, important work - and it was completely misaligned with where her brain actually wanted to go.

So she left. Got a job in tech recruiting. Then decided to move to Europe entirely - and did, decamping to Northern Italy (Trentino Alto Adige) for three or four months, learning Italian from scratch, then meandering through Ireland, England, and Malta before coming home and deciding: tech, for real this time.

When Sophie joined Spiralyze, it was as the first GTM hire in the building. That's the kind of role most people either sprint from after six months or use as a launching pad for their career. She used it as a laboratory.

Over four and a half years, she went from Head of Growth to VP of Optimization - working alongside 100+ software companies including Oracle and Sophos, applying predictive conversion rate optimization at scale. She taught herself SEO. She built out the go-to-market function from scratch. She ran side consulting work simultaneously because she was curious and because sitting still felt wrong.

When she eventually posted a farewell note, people noticed. She had built something at that company, and the tech world had started noticing her - not just the company.

In 2023, a role opened at GTMfund - an operator-led venture firm backing pre-seed to Series A B2B SaaS companies with $500K-$2M checks, backed by 350+ top GTM executives. The position was VP of Marketing. More than 400 people applied.

Sophie Buonassisi got the job.

She didn't get it because she had the most experience. She got it because she applied the same optimization frameworks she'd built at Spiralyze to the application itself - treating the hiring process like a conversion funnel and herself like the product being tested. It worked the same way it always worked: data plus instinct plus genuine curiosity.

Within months, she was doing more than managing a newsletter. She was re-architecting how GTMfund thought about media entirely.

The newsletter started in 2018 as a simple weekly email. By the time Sophie arrived, it already had an audience. What she brought was architecture.

In 2023, GTMfund did something unusual: they reacquired Sales Hacker - the beloved practitioner community that Outreach.io had purchased and allowed to atrophy - and folded it into GTMnow. That meant inheriting a podcast with a rich history and rebuilding it into something bigger. 622+ episodes later, the GTMnow Podcast drops every Wednesday. The newsletter follows on Friday. The Inner Circle - a private subscriber network - hums along in the background.

The editorial output is relentless and tactical. "How Figma Scaled From $2M to IPO." "The Founder-Led Sales Playbook." "How Buyers Now Decide Before Talking to Sales." "The GTM AI Operating System." These aren't listicles. They're the kind of pieces that practitioners bookmark and founders re-read quarterly.

In 2025, Sophie led the formal rebrand - The GTM Newsletter became GTMnow, with a Product Hunt launch and a positioning shift: this wasn't just a newsletter anymore. It was a media brand with a point of view about how the future of go-to-market gets built.

Sophie's writing doesn't hedge. When she covers AI adoption, she publishes 30+ use cases from practitioners who've tested them. When she writes about venture, she names numbers and trends instead of gesturing vaguely at "market dynamics."

Sophie Buonassisi doesn't perform ambition. She just keeps moving toward things that are interesting. That meant leaving a stable government career. That meant a four-month detour to learn Italian in a region most people couldn't find on a map. That meant building a side consulting practice while holding down a full-time VP role.

Her writing has a particular warmth to it - the kind that signals she's been on the other side of every piece of advice she dispenses. Not performatively relatable, just actually relatable. She's a founder-friendly operator who lives inside the tension between data and instinct and has learned to trust both.

She's been on a nonprofit board in the education sector for over a decade. Most people don't know that about her because she doesn't lead with it. But it's there - the same thread that runs through the newsletter, the community work, the mentoring: the belief that education compounds, that information shared freely comes back around.