Swapnil Bhartiya: Launching a new tech product, especially in today’s noisy AI era, takes more than just hype and features. It takes trust, particularly with engineers. But many B2B founders get stuck because traditional marketing falls flat with practitioners. And in the open source world community, traction doesn’t automatically convert to sales. And today we have with us Kamesh Kamaraju, founder of Optima gtm because he has lived through this pain himself and he’s here to share how to fully nail go to market for complex modern tech gamesh. It’s good to have you back on the show.

Kamesh Pemmaraju: Thank you Sapnil. It’s been a pleasure and we have known each other for, I don’t know, close to 20 years now, having been in the open source communities like OpenStack and Kubernetes and Linux foundations and so on for the last 20 years. So pleasure to be here.

Swapnil Bhartiya: You have made quite a career transitioning to head your own company and I have seen your recent post highlighting the major painful points tech CEOs face today. Talk to us about what led to the creation of Optima gtm, why you made this change, and what’s the core idea behind it.

Kamesh Pemmaraju: As you know, I’ve been doing go to market in various roles in the past 20 years. I was at companies like Mirantis and Platform9 and ZeroStack, all startups, right? I’ve worked with founders and CEOs and I’ve seen this over and over again which is that go to market complexity outstrips go to market execution and alignment repeatedly. And what you typically see is that different groups within the company, like product is doing their own thing, marketing is doing their own thing, sales is creating their own stuff. And usually there are disconnects, they’re kind of going in different directions. We see that as one breaking point. And I’ve seen this myself having been in all those roles. I’ve been a product manager, I was in marketing, I worked very closely with sales. I was seeing this day to day and what it was causing from an overall go to market perspective. So that’s one thing I’ve seen repeatedly over and over again. The other thing we see a lot is ultimately if it’s a founder led company, as you said earlier, Sopnil, many of the companies we work with are AI startups or B2B SaaS, startups that sometimes have an open source as their foundation, right? And many times they do. In today’s AI era, pretty much all of the models are moving towards open source, right? So most of them use open source as well. And what we find is the founder becomes the bottleneck because everybody’s depending on him to be in a sales call or make that product roadmap decision or that marketing campaign decision. And that’s not going to scale either. Right? So that’s the other issue we see. So we have seen these patterns over and over again. And the root cause for all of this vapnil and the reason why we started Optima GTM is because GTM or go to market is not treated like a product with a life cycle. It’s a discipline, it’s a process, it’s a framework. Most of these founders tend to be technical people, right? They’re engineers and they’re pretty good at creating products. And you know how to create a product. You have a life cycle for a product. You have requirements, you have development, you have testing, you have customer adoption. That’s a life cycle. And founders really understand that. But when it comes to translating that same discipline to go to market, it doesn’t happen. And this is from pure personal experience and having discussions with various founders. Since I started Optima gtm, it’s painfully obvious that this is happening across the board. It’s not. Unless you really reach the point of maturity where that’s become a kind of a DNA of the company. I don’t see that happening. And that’s what we’re here to fix. We’re here to fix the go to market systems problem, the end to end life cycle problem, the alignment, the trust and the ability to ultimately hit the goals of the company. Right. Why are you here? You’re trying to get to market, you’re trying to get adoption of your product, you’re trying to improve your pipeline, you’re trying to improve your win rates from a revenue standpoint. How is all the activity you’re creating moving that needle? It’s random, honestly. You do all these activities and it’s very hard for you to eventually connect all of those activities to the actual outcome outcomes. And it’s more like a, hey, my opinion versus yours rather than some sort of a system. So that in a nutshell is why we started it. And I’m one of the co founders of Optima gtm. As you know, my focus has been product marketing, marketing outreach, community engagement, these kinds of things over the years. So my other two co partners bring different disciplines. Michael Lin is a product executive, has worked at VMware, a bunch of startups, AWS, and Brian comes from a sales background. So the three of us bring sales, product and marketing together as a team. And our belief is that when we kind of bring all these three disciplines together, fix the disconnects, then go to market becomes easier from a systemic perspective.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Thank you for explaining that in our tech heavy industry, engineers can see right through all this marketing fluff and bluff. And that’s why here at tfire we focus more on solving technical problems and not that marketing fluff and bluff. What happens in most cases is that when it comes to new companies, usually technical founders start a company to scratch their own itch or the problem that they saw in their own day to day life and they create a company, they create a product, they get good traction, they have brilliant vision. But in some cases they may not be great at marketing. And as they try to scale, going from first customer to the hundred customers, they have to hire new teams who might not even understand the original vision or open source ethos. In those cases, the founder becomes a bottleneck because the vision is trapped in their head. They burn out or the company loses its identity. Having been in this space for so long, how do you help founders bridge this disconnect? How can they maintain their original vision? Or the vision can evolve without making a lot of compromises while onboarding the right team to scale?

Kamesh Pemmaraju: Absolutely, because I’ve seen that personally. Again, like I said, I’ve worked with founders over the years and they tend to be all the founders I’ve worked with so far at all. The startups are extremely passionate about what they do. They’re engineers for the most part because we’re dealing with technologies like AI, Cloud, Open Source, Kubernetes, OpenStack. These are extremely complex engineering challenges. And these people come from those backgrounds and they have a vision, they know what problem they’re solving at the technical level. But here’s what happens. Swapnil, right when they start hiring people, they forget that they’re hiring those people not to necessarily replicate themselves. They’re bringing them because those folks bring specific expertise in specific areas. If I bring a marketing guy in, for example, I’m a founder, I’m highly technical, maybe I’m doing something in AI. In fact, I was talking to a CEO founder yesterday and he made a comment somewhere during the conversation. He said, maybe I made a mistake in hiring the right person for my marketing and sales. And I asked, what do you mean by that? He said something interesting. He said, they don’t understand, go to market. I actually hired somebody who’s more like me, which is a very interesting comment. He says, at the end of the day, you don’t want to replicate the same person across the board. Right. So you want somebody that understands the different aspects of the business. But back to your question though. Yes, this is a very common thing and the vision gets lost. He even said that sometimes I can’t communicate my vision. Nobody understands what I’m talking about.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Right.

Kamesh Pemmaraju: And that’s because the vision is highly technical. And how do you translate that into terms that marketing can understand, into terms that sales can understand and then not only understand, but also convey to the market and to the customers in a way that they build trust, credibility and ultimately buy your solution. Right. So it’s a communication challenge in some ways, but I feel, and again, I’ll put on my go to market hat on. It’s more of a system problem. I’ll give you an example, very specific example. So this founder has a very good idea in their head about the vision and the kind of customer they want to go after. Their ideal customer profile. And he said like five things. Here’s the kind of profile I’m looking for. None of that had to do with the size of the company or the number of employees. It had to do with very specific characteristics he was looking for. Then I asked, great, that sounds fantastic. Have you communicated that with your team? Oh, I just communicated that yesterday. Okay, great. How do you translate that into execution and how do you know it’s working? That’s where he paused. He said, oh, I don’t know, I got to figure that out. That’s an example of a very specific area where the thought process, the vision, the idea the founder has in his head is not getting translated into day to day activity in a way that his team can execute or her team can execute. That’s where you need somebody that can take that information and translate it into execution, into daily operational system level, operational execution mode and keep making sure that it does not really deviate from the vision. This is not something you do once a year. This has to be a day to day, weekly cadence, monthly cadence, quarterly cadence on really checking on how execution is aligning with strategy and vision, that’s part of what the GTM leader should be doing or the founder should be doing.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Let’s talk about target audience. Whether you are in a brand new market requiring heavy education or a crowded space, fighting incumbents standing out is tough and challenging in this current highly crowded genai wave. Where do tech founders most often stumble when they try to differentiate themselves from and how do you help them fix this problem?

Kamesh Pemmaraju: You can’t just say we have AI capability. Right? That’s Just yeah, sure, everybody has AI now. Everybody wants to say they have AI capability. What does that mean? Right? How does that actually translate to my workflows? I’ll give you like three or four different examples. So think about what’s happening in the market today, right? Software development is getting commoditized, right? You have cloud code, you have any number of agents that are out there. I don’t know if a modern AI native company is having engineers actually coding anymore. It’s not happening. It’s a lot of agents, it’s a lot of cloud code. It’s all of that stuff that’s happening. Software development is commoditizing very, very quickly. Now the flip side of that is AI workflows or AI systems are inherently non deterministic, right? It’s not like hey, if then else you do this, but if you give a chat, you give a command to your AI agent now it’ll give you one answer. If you give the same question, a few minutes later it might give a different answer. That’s just because inherently that’s how large language models work and generative AI works and most buyers don’t yet have a framework for evaluating that risk, right? And this is where AI companies need to really. I can’t just say, hey, I’m going to give you an AI tool for running your, I don’t know, pick something security, right? Or pick marketing or any number of domains where AI can be helpful. But it needs to really answer that question, right? Can it really create deterministic? Well, it’s not inherently non deterministic. So how do I get some results that I can rely on? So that’s the number one question that needs to be answered. The second thing is again, AI research and iteration is a real differentiator, right? AI by definition, I don’t know what I’m looking for yet. I need to try a lot of different things. If you think about different agents, different workflows or different LLMs that are out there, the gap between a team that can retrain and redeploy in days versus weeks is enormous, right? And again, AI companies, AI founders need to really focus on that aspect of it. How do I make sure that that speed of that iteration in AI research become. Again, who are we talking about? We are talking about AI researchers. And AI researchers don’t necessarily want to deal with infrastructure or tooling or understanding all the nuances of GPUs and how that all should work. And Soknil, you and I have been in the infrastructure space for a Long time Kubernetes and OpenStack, you know how complicated they are, how complicated it is to set those things up and run them. Researchers could care less. They don’t want to deal with any of that stuff. And we know that over the last few years this new discipline emerged called platform engineering. We talk a lot about that in the community space and other places, right, where you need to have a platform, a DevOps platform or an AI platform of some sort that somebody is handling and taking care of. And researchers can now focus on what they need to do, which is iterate research. And that’s a real differentiator for their customers. And if you as an AI founder can make that gap smaller, then you have a win, right? So that’s the second thing people should think about and then the third one and the big elephant in the room. So Apnil, you probably know this already. GPU access is a huge problem right now. Even though there’s so much of GPU supply that’s coming out of Nvidia and you know, predominantly Nvidia. But who do you think is sucking up all that, all those GPUs? It’s the anthropics of the world, it’s the open AIs of the world. Meta Google, 80%, 90% is going to them and they’re building like crazy $600 billion of investment. And who is getting left out? Well, the small guys, the medium sized guys, even the enterprises, larger enterprises, they have to sit around waiting for a GPU for nine months. So think about it. If you’re an AI founder and you’re delivering some sort of a capability to, I don’t know, pick some company, right? Johnson and Johnson or somebody, and now you say, hey, my thing can make your AI researchers do things like 10 times faster. And the very first objection is I don’t have GPUs to run this on, or I don’t want to go to a public cloud to do this or whatever may be the situation. So what are the constraints that are real constraints for everyone else and that shapes what you’re actually building and. Or figure out who your ideal customer is that may have some spend, may not need that much or things like that. So differentiation, to answer your question, has to be grounded in the buyer’s, what I call unavoidable problem, right? They have something that they have to get done, hopefully they have GPU access. If they don’t have it, you don’t have a, you don’t have a buyer, they won’t buy your stuff. Until they have GPUs. Right. It’s not about the founder’s favorite feature or the latest innovation in open source, it’s about what the buyer needs now. And they have a project that’s unavoidable and how do you cater to that and supply to that demand? And that’s a hard thing to do. You really have to sit down and think through who those customers are, which market segment gets it, is it a vertical, is it a horizontal play? And these things are not done well. It may be in the founder’s head, but again, like you, like you mentioned earlier, it doesn’t translate to execution. And when you look at the day to day operations at the marketing level, product level, what feature you’re building in the product, what campaign you’re running in marketing, what the sales guys are saying to customers, they all diverge and as a result you don’t get a go to market notion that’s efficient.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Very true. Let’s pivot slightly to a major challenge in our space. Open source getting community traction and GitHub starts is one thing. Converting that into commercial success is a totally different ball game. But without commercialization, open source companies simply cannot survive. Where do these companies typically hit go to market friction? And what’s your primary advice to them for driving revenue without compromising on their open source values?

Kamesh Pemmaraju: Yeah, I mean thinking about it specifically from a commercial go to market perspective, Swapnil, here’s the challenge I see because I’ve been in the open source space for a long time. I’ve been in companies that were pure kind of pure open source, like Think Red Hat, Think Mirantis in the early days or many companies that had open source and then what they provided was support, right? Support, training, that kind of stuff. But eventually they all moved to a different model, a product model. Right. Because that’s where they make the money. So the challenge to directly answer your question Sapnil, is if open source, I mean many of these large companies are using open source, right? The biggest enterprises are using open source developers typically. Right. That are downloading and using it. Now here’s a question I would ask a founder. He says if open source, whatever open source these developers are downloading, is that good enough for them? Does it kind of address 80% of their day to day needs and use cases? Then what is the compelling reason for them to buy a commercial version? Right. So that’s where the, that’s where the barrier happens. So 80% of open source takes care of what I need. Okay, there are some issues here and there I’ll go to the open source community, they’ll tell me how to fix it. There’s all kinds of channels, Slack channels and Google groups and what have you. And I get answers to what I need to. And I, you know, I’m a big company, I have a bunch of developers, they know how to fix these things. So why would I buy anything? So there’s no reason that anybody would convert to a paid without a very specific trigger. Now let’s talk about what those triggers are. The compelling reason to buy is not just convenience for the developers. So users are not equal to buyers in an enterprise context. So of course support is important. But there are many other things if you think about from an enterprise standpoint. It’s compliance, it’s security, it’s governance, it’s risk management, it’s scaling its innovation. It’s things that may not be there because it’s just open source tool may not give you all those other things. So the commercial tier of the product and here’s another challenge too, and maybe that problem is solved. Now which is the fork, right? You probably know this quite well, Sopnit, you have the open source code and you have a fork that takes that and then creates a commercial version, right? In order for us for you to kind of, and usually there is a gap. Open source is way ahead and the fork of the commercial version is way behind. And we have seen this across Red Hat and all these companies that have built these things. I would argue that maybe that problem is reducing because of AI, right? You could kind of maintain multiple code bases in a way that reduces the amount of work you need to do. And I don’t know this for a fact, but my suspicion is with AI and flood code and all of these things you could make that a lot less of a challenge. But the problem remains nevertheless. You have two different versions or variations of your offering. One is the open source and the other is a commercial. The commercial one has all these things that the enterprise cares about. Now the next challenge is, okay, I’ve got 80% of the use cases are covered. Is the 20% enough for the buyer to pull the trigger or pull the plug and say, yes, I need to buy this thing. So buyers are not users. The community champion and the procurement decision maker have completely different profiles and need different narratives. So from an AI or even a founder or a startup company perspective, you need to have two different sections or parts of your company that are speaking two different languages. And most open source founders, or even founders in general have never had to articulate the current status quo and why it’s failing. That diagnosis is what is required to convert from community trust to commercial pipeline.

Swapnil Bhartiya: It’s not an easy topic, so thank you for tackling that. But let’s revisit the internal disconnect you touched on earlier. What are the real risk for B2B SaaS companies when product marketing, sales and the founders are all operating on a completely different playbooks where in most cases there is conflict internally with the vision that every member is bringing to the team?

Kamesh Pemmaraju: What is the threat that’s connecting them? Who is the person that’s connecting product, marketing and sales? That would be my question, right? Yes. Product is doing their roadmap. They’re probably listening to their, you know, maybe a specific segment of the users, they’re building features. Marketing is running some campaigns, but who is, who is the connecting tissue between all of those groups? To your point earlier, Swapnil, that vision that you mentioned, that overall system, who is maintaining that? The answer is nobody. Typically it’s either this founder or somebody else. There’s no specific owner for the system, the go to market system and its life cycle. And I see that as a gap not just in founders or AI companies. I see that as a gap in general, which is why Optima GTM exists. And by the way, I’ll give you a very interesting statistic. I wrote a blog post about this yesterday which is the emergence of a new role in the industry and it’s called the GTM Architect. There are companies who are hiring for GTM engineers. Probably people know about GTM engineers. They’re the execution people that pull together different things and execute things. But the GTM Architect and the Director and VP of GTM Architecture is emerging now. And I look at the I went to a couple of scale. AI is a good example. I went to their website, looked up the definition of the role description and a lot of it had to do with alignment between sales, marketing, creating dashboards that are common to all of them and kind of looks at the GTM as a system, creating operating cadences, things we do as a company. At Optima, GTM people have realized they need it and it’s no longer the founder who needs to pull the thread together. You need somebody that owns this and reports to the CEO or founder, not to any specific function. And this is what I wrote in my blog post. This is becoming and people are seeing that this is something that they need, one role that owns and is accountable for that end to end go to market life cycle Just like you have a product person who is responsible for product end to end life cycle, you need a role, a person, and who is it? Typically in any company, in a startup, it’s a founder. He’s putting all these things together in his head. But to your point earlier, once they reach a certain stage, it’s not sustainable, it’s not scalable. So they need a system and a way to do this so that it’s not dependent on heroics, it’s not dependent on one person, it’s not dependent on the founder. So the GTM operating system means that these decisions that are being made individually reinforces each other. So ICP clarity, for example, feeds into marketing targeting, which feeds into sales qualification, which feeds into product roadmap, all in one loop, one life cycle with feedback loops happening across. And they don’t happen in a natural way. I mean, typically sales and marketing are kind of fighting with each other. Product and sales have different ideas. That doesn’t happen naturally and in any environment because that’s how these systems are set up. They’re set up as silos. You have a VP of marketing or VP of sales, and everybody’s trying to show that they’re doing a great job. They show their own individual metrics and they say, yeah, marketing’s done a great job and product just shipped their latest release. Fantastic. And the founder is sitting there and figuring out why the hell is my pipeline not moving right? I don’t see more qualified deals in the pipeline. Why is my win rate going down? Who is answering those questions? So that’s, that’s kind of what needs to happen. And I’m encouraged to see that more and more companies are starting to recognize the need for this and they’re hiring people for it. GTM architects. VP of gtm, not VP of Sales. By the way, that’s a different role. This is VP of Go to Market end to end. And I’m really happy to see that happen now. I think this problem is eventually hitting people and they have to fix it.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Very well said. Thank you. Can you share a practical example? Without necessarily naming anyone, we are aligning these internal functions truly transform the company’s pipeline. How did bringing everyone together help them earn the trust of both developers and executives?

Kamesh Pemmaraju: No, I can give you. I can obviously name names. We’re working with a client right now who is in the AI infrastructure space. Right? They’re building AI infrastructure for a specific segment. When we were bought in, it’s everything I just described. There was a disconnect between what the leadership thought they were going after. There was a disconnect at the execution level. Marketing, sales, everybody was having their own vision of what needs to happen. So there was a positioning challenge, there was a messaging challenge. It was all translating down to we can’t, we don’t know what to say on our website or we don’t know what the salespeople should be saying to our customers. Classic example of where the go to market broke down across multiple layers. Right. Leadership has one vision. Sales and marketing are doing something different. So when we came in, our first goal was to kind of level set across the teams. We sat down with the leadership, went through a couple of iterations of what is it exactly which market are you trying to achieve? Target. Right. And they gave us a bunch of different things. We pressure tested that against number of factors. Is it differentiated enough? Are you positioned in a way that doesn’t sound like everybody else? Right. Is it a unique offering that you have that nobody else is actually offering in the market? Is the moat, the differentiation big enough that people can just copy this stuff? Right. And what is your overall solution, not just your product? Product is a piece of what they do. They have a number of other features that they do which all had to be brought together so that the overall message and the narrative and the positioning and including the ideal customer profile all came together. And we were, now we’re still working with them and we’re coming up with this narrative, this icp. And at the end of the day, I stopped them. What matters is for the team to execute. What do they need? They need something. The marketing needs something on their website. Marketing needs to be able to run campaigns. Sales need to have a sales deck and a talking point so they can speak to when they’re in front of a customer. These are practical, down to earth, day to day stuff that they need. So when you do this high level exercise, it’s not enough to just do the exercise and walk away, which is what most consultants do. Right. Advisors do that. And that’s not what we do. We are operators, we are embedded in with the team, they’re working with them day to day. And we are creating these assets that these actual teams can use on a day to day basis. And so we’re at that stage helping them get through those specific assets. A good example is a website update. Although that sounds mundane, it’s actually a lot of these things have to connect and everybody has to be on the same page in order for that to come together. Same thing with the sales deck. Right. Are you saying different things to different customers. Is that really aligning and causing your customer to nod their head and say, yeah, this is our problem. You. Yeah, you guys can help us. Show me how. At that point it’s trust and evidence. Right. So that’s kind of how we operate. That’s our engagement model, is to kind of work with the leadership to ensure everybody’s aligned. We typically like to work with CEOs and founders of companies because that’s where our most value is, for them to see the system at the top level and then translate that into execution. So every team knows exactly what the overall GTM vision is and strategy is and they are executing their pieces of it. And then you, every quarter or every month or whatever, you kind of review and see if there’s a drift. Right. Which happens naturally. Oh, it’s happening because I’m running this campaign. Then the question is, why are you running that campaign? Doesn’t really align with the strategy. Maybe there are reasons for that. So you have to kind of adjust as you go. It’s a dynamic thing. It’s not a one time, one time fix all one time. You do it for a year and forget about it. It’s a continuous process.

Swapnil Bhartiya: I think we have covered the core issue, but before I ask my final question, is there anything else that you’d like to touch upon? Any recurring problem that you hear from founders or engineers that we missed or you feel like we should touch on that as well?

Kamesh Pemmaraju: Yeah, I would say when we started Optuma gtm, we were talking this system level language. We were talking about GTM operating system. We were talking about how you need to fix the overall system in the life cycle. What we realized, and having spoken to a number of these founders and company startups is what we found out is these founders and CEOs don’t wake up in the morning and think, my GTM is broken as a system, I need to fix my system. That’s not how they think. It’s very rare that you find somebody that says I have an overall go to market strategy problem. They think they have that nailed. They think they know what that is, although it’s not true that that is happening in reality, but that’s not how they think. What they think is about very specific problems. You know, like they’re. I’ll tell you a good example, right? Lead quality and conversion. Because I’ve been in marketing and sales. The first issue that you see is sales is complaining about lead quality. Say, oh, marketing is generating all these leads. They are junk. I can’t really do any action on them. These are not real leads. There’s no intent here. That’s an example or product is building some features that sales is not able to articulate in front of customers. These are very specific down to earth areas that happen within specific functional areas. And that’s what’s top of mind for these folks. Whichever is the top right, they might whoever is complaining the loudest and let me put it that way, maybe sales is. Sales is usually the one that gets the priority because they’re shouting the loudest saying hey, I can’t sell because that’s a downstream consequence or symptom if you will. And that’s what they want to fix. And so my point here is yes, they need to fix the gtm, but they usually are looking at the symptoms functionally. So our approach has changed a little bit. We say, hey, you have a product management issue or a product marketing issue or a marketing issue or a sales issue, we can help you with that specific area. But that’s just a symptom. There might be more systemic problems and upstream issues like your ICP is not clear or your market segment is not clearly differentiated or you don’t have a clear path from open source adoption to commercial pipeline. Is that clearly documented somewhere? So everybody understands what that process looks like. So these are the things we surface as we work with the specific area. But that’s what we found as we were starting to engage with customers and trying to help them with this go to market stuff.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Thank you. For startups transitioning from founder led sales to scalable GTM engine, what’s your advice on balancing authenticity with repeatability? How do you get the founder sales marketing moving as one cohesive unit rather than pulling in different directions?

Kamesh Pemmaraju: Yeah, well my, our advice typically is, you know, make sure that you have, we call it a one page go to market motion. One page. Have you created just one page of what your go to market looks like? And typically the answer is no, it’s in my head or it’s in different functional heads. It’s not. Nobody has actually done the exercise to create a one pager. Where do we win the most? Why do customers buy? What is our differentiated point of view? What is our sales motion? Are we doing product led? Are we doing community led? Are we doing ecosystem partnerships? Are we doing all of the above? You ask 10 people, you’ll get 10 different answers, right? And what’s the customer ROI? Why do they renew with us? And what is the overall metrics that we align on from a dashboard Standpoint and that’s the advice. We would just start there. Start with one single go to market template or what I call it a one page go to market. If you can put everything on one single page and everybody in the company looks at that, sticks it on their computer and looks at it every day. So that’s what the company is trying to achieve this year, right? This is the market we’re going after. This is the icp, these are the accounts, this is how we attack it, this is our message. It can be done and we can do it on a single page. So I have on my website, Optima GTM.com a specific section called GTM Template. And that template kind of walks them through seven pillars of what they should be doing, right? I mean they don’t need to include it, they can do it themselves. They go to a leadership off site, get all the teams together, spend a day or two and hash it out. Use the template as a guide. It has inputs, outputs and diagnostic questions to ask for each area. And you surface the gaps and say this is where the gaps are and you create this one pager at the end of it and make sure everybody’s aligned on that. And of course that’s not a one time activity subnet. You know that, right? It’s, it’s, it doesn’t, Your, your whole go to market doesn’t get solved in two days in an off site. You, once you start executing, things will surface. So you have to keep iterating on that, right? Where did we go wrong with this pillar? We came up with this strategy or plan and this is what’s happening in reality. Let’s kind of adjust that drift as we go. So that needs to happen on a regular cadence, maybe monthly, maybe every other week, quarterly for sure. And that’s what I would advise founders and CEOs to do. Do that exercise. Don’t let the thing run on its own. It’s entropy. Things will just drift on their own if you don’t do anything.

Swapnil Bhartiya: We have talked a lot about how you help others. Let’s talk about Optima, GTM itself. What’s your long term vision for the company?

Kamesh Pemmaraju: We are here really to help other startups and growth stage companies. We have been through this, we know the pain and we just don’t want these folks to go through the same pain again. The more people we can help and let’s face it, there are some of these companies and leaders and founders who may not listen to, to us. Maybe they think they know the answers. Well, all the power to them. But for those who really want to do this right from the ground up and can use some experienced operators like us, we are not looking to, you know, grow to $100 million company. We want to help each individual company and we’re not bringing in junior people. It’s us, right? We are the senior operators here. One other thing I would mention is that we can’t solve every problem that a startup might have. They might have specific execution challenges. They might say, you know what, we want help with SEO. We want to go design our website or we want to have you run Google Ad campaigns or whatever outreach, sdr. What we’re doing from our business model point of view is we’re building a network of trusted experts in various disciplines that we can bring in or refer to our customers and say, hey, you need help with outbound channel outreach to your customers? How do you do that? Well, we can help you with your icp, we can help you with your target segment, but the actual execution, we know somebody that can help you with that. They have AI tools, they’ve done this before, they are experts, they can help you set it up for you. And so we’re building that network as we speak. So our goal is to have that trusted network and we help as many AI native, as many B2B SaaS, companies in their early stage when they’re getting to that point where things are breaking and they can’t scale and they can’t grow. We want to help as many of them as we can. So that’s really our goal. Nothing way too ambitious, but really there to help these companies succeed.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Amish, thank you so much for sharing your playbook on breaking through B2B tech noise and building an effective go to market engine. This is incredibly important and valuable advice for early stage founders or teams struggling with internal alignment. Thank you for sharing all those insights and I look forward to chat with you again. Thank you.