founder-led-sales
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Austin Hughes Is Turning Outbound Sales Into a Product Problem
The Unify co-founder went from finance to product by following a simple instinct: shrink the experiment, watch the signal, and build distribution with the care usually reserved for software.
Adit Abraham Found a Business in the Documents Everyone Else Hated
A failed memory tool, a two-week pivot and 154 days of enterprise courtship taught Adit Abraham a durable lesson: the useful work is often the work nobody wants to brag about.
The CRM Is Remembering It Has Customers
Attio and folk are rebuilding customer software around the context of a relationship, not the upkeep of a database. Their different approaches reveal what the next CRM must remember - and what it should quietly do for you.
Rampd
Rampd is a New York sales consultancy that coaches early-stage technical founders through the awkward, high-stakes phase of selling their own product. Led by co-founder and CEO Darren Lucia, the firm runs hands-on sprints and an accelerator that help founders validate product-market fit, build a repeatable sales motion, and chart a path to their first $1M in ARR. Its frameworks have been pressure-tested across hundreds of Y Combinator-backed startups.
Steijn Pelle
Steijn Pelle is the co-founder and CEO of Lassie, a San Francisco AI company building an autonomous back-office worker that runs the financial admin of independent businesses, starting with dental and medical practices. A Dutch transplant to Silicon Valley with roughly 15 years in startups, he cut his teeth on consumer growth at HealthTap, Coinbase and Robinhood before founding Lassie in 2021. In June 2026 the company raised a $35M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing total funding to $47M, while operating in more than 700 practices across 49 states.
William Sun
William Sun is the co-founder and CEO of Auctor, a New York AI company building the 'system of action' for enterprise software implementation. He dropped out of Johns Hopkins - where he studied biomedical engineering and computer science - and left a job at Meta to start the company, which he built with three co-founders drawn from Google, AWS, Apple, ServiceNow and NASA. In April 2026 Auctor emerged from stealth with a $20M Series A led by Sequoia Capital, with backers including Microsoft's M12, HubSpot Ventures, Workday Ventures, OneStream, Tercera and Y Combinator. Auctor's AI agents capture discovery calls and workshops, turn them into structured requirements, and generate the artifacts - SOWs, proposals, architecture docs, user stories - that consultants used to hand-build over weeks.
Marty Kausas
Marty Kausas is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pylon, the AI-native B2B customer support platform he built after leaving Airbnb and spending 18 months failing at other ideas. Founded in November 2022 alongside Advith Chelikani and Robert Eng, Pylon has raised $51 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator - reaching 1,500+ customers and positioning itself as the definitive alternative to Zendesk for complex, multi-stakeholder B2B environments. Kausas is known for his systematic founder-led sales approach, LinkedIn content dominance, and the bold ambition to build a $10 billion+ public company.