The 0 to $20M GTM Traps + How To Diligence A Founder w/ Dini Mehta, Operating Partner @ Peak XV

Dini Mehta is an Operating Partner at Peak XV, where she parachutes into portfolio companies on go-to-market, sits in exec meetings, runs forecast calls, and hosts open office hours for founders and GTM teams across the portfolio. She was CRO at Lattice, where she took the company from $3M to over $100M ARR and from a single product to a platform. Before that she led go-to-market at Drawbridge from pre-revenue to $140M ARR, and got her start in the early programmatic days at Comcast. An immigrant who fell into sales and then into tech, she spent roughly a decade selling top-down enterprise before deliberately taking a job in a category she knew nothing about.

Timestamps:

• (00:00) The AI theater

• (01:41) Welcome to the Crew podcast

• (02:39) Leaving the operator seat for Peak XV

• (07:44) What Peak XV is, and her three engagement models

• (10:25) The question she gets most in office hours

• (11:23) Comcast, Drawbridge, and Lattice from $3M to $100M

• (14:17) Two types of go-to-market leaders

• (14:38) Top down versus bottom up, and where each one breaks

• (18:06) Trap one: hiring AEs before you have demand

• (20:27) Trap two: not hiring fast enough at 500% attainment

• (22:14) Why she ignores resumes and logos

• (24:31) Trap three: the founder who passes the hot potato

• (26:27) Centralized or decentralized AI ownership

• (29:05) Behind closed doors, none of it is solved

• (31:20) How she diligences a company

• (34:19) The hypotheticals that expose a founder

• (38:08) Why traction alone has eroded as a signal

• (38:47) The full body yes

• (39:47) Run your own race

• (42:22) What she would tell her younger self

About The Crew Podcast

The Crew podcast interviews GTM leaders and investors at top AI startups and early-stage companies.Every week, host Chris Balestras, partner @ Crew, talks to the people actually building go-to-market motions in real time, not in retrospect.

About Crew

Crew is a recruiting, investing, & media firm for seed through series D AI-natives & fast-growing SaaS startups.

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