GTM-focused SaaS Advisor and Board Member

I am a go-to-market-focused technology executive and board member with over 20 years experience leading SaaS companies.  

I have led product, marketing, sales, and customer success, and twice I have run companies as CEO.  Along the way I have served formally on 4 boards of directors (including one public company), 7 advisory boards and 3 non-profit boards.

As part of these roles, I have helped to:

* Sell 5 companies (to Oracle, Amazon, Aurea, Maritz, and NonProfitEZ)
* Secure over $100M in equity financing (series Seed, A, B, C)
* Acquire and integrate 5 companies
* Manage small and large quotas (up to $300M)
* Launch dozens of products
* Get two products to profitability on a pure PLG / self-serve basis
* Grow multiple companies at 50%+ growth rates
* Restructure / downsize multiple companies
* Hire hundreds of people
* Create over $1B of shareholder value

I am now 100% focused on teaching, writing, investing and advising.  

As the Executive Chairman of Winning by Design, I work with leadership teams to optimize go-to-market strategies, product development, and customer success.  As an active board member and advisor, I focus on product development and corporate strategy.  As a professor at BYU's Marriott School of Business I teach Product-led Growth, B2B Sales & Marketing, and Career Strategy.

I recently published my first book with Stanford University Press:  FREEMIUM, available from all book retailers.

I am proud to serve as a formal advisor to Mercato Partners, Pledge, Terrett, and ProAI, and an informal advisor to other entrepreneurs and business leaders changing the world.

My mission is to empower the next generation of software leaders and entrepreneurs to create value for their customers and for society.

Dave Boyce

No one has it figured out. 

Since AI changed everything about how customers discover, buy, and use your product, you have to go back to being the "chief figure it out" officer.

"Working harder" on yesterday's playbooks won't cut it.

But to figure it out, you need an experimental framework.  This is what I laid out in my book FREEMIUM, and I recently discussed it at length with Craig Taylor on his podcast, Truth, Lies & B2B Growth.

You can find the full episode on my SubStack:  ProductLedGTM.

XOXO,

-db

Brendan Short

Playing long-term games w/ long-term people ✨ Building Groundswell

Currently writing about the future of gtm/tech, at The Signal. Subscribe now (it’s free): www.TheSignal.club 

I’ve worked at a couple of startups ($0-$10M), a couple of big companies (Zoom Video, Apollo.io), and I’ve started a couple of venture-backed SaaS companies (Hexa.ai, Groundswell).

I’ve been an SDR, AE, Head of Sales, SDR/Ops Leader, and CEO. Jack of all trades, master of none, perhaps. 

I like learning and building. 🤘

Writer

• Separating the signal from the noise—a weekly newsletter on all things GTM tech

Brendan Short 🌊

We ArE sO eArLy WiTh Ai

but for real, this is bonkers:

brendan short

Writing The Signal → Exploring AI & the future GTM playbook 🐇 🕳 | Playing long-term games with long-term people 🫡

Salesforce bought Momentum last week. That's 10 acquisitions in 6 months, and nearly all of them are about filling holes in Agentforce.

Momentum is the interesting one. The idea is to take what people say on calls (eg: Zoom and Google Meet) and turn it into data that AI agents can use. Because right now, Agentforce only knows what a rep typed into Salesforce after the call (which, if you've ever managed a sales team, like me, you know less than half of the important information makes it into the CRM).

For the short-term investor narrative, this is great: "We're buying our way to a complete AI-native revenue stack" is exactly the kind of thing that gets an analyst to raise a price target. And it might work! Ten acquisitions that all fit together on a PowerPoint slide is a pretty compelling narrative.

The problem is that customers don't care about investor narratives/slides. They care about how a product will help them win. And the reality is, when a product makes ten acquisitions in six months, that means ten different engineering teams figuring out who reports to who. Ten code bases. Ten sets of gtm leaders jockeying for headcount. Ten product roadmaps that need to become one product roadmap, except nobody agrees on what that one roadmap should look like. The people who are best at navigating that kind of internal complexity are rarely the same people who built the original product.

Salesforce has run this exact experiment before. In 2022 they bought Troops.ai, a Slack-based tool that helped reps update their CRM without leaving Slack. Good product, real users, compelling pitch. A couple of years later, Salesforce killed it, migrated everyone to something called Slack Elevate, and Troops basically ceased to exist. The thesis was right. The execution wasn't.

I don't think this means Salesforce is making a mistake. That said, I do think that the nature of being a platform this large makes it almost impossible to ship fast and stay close to users after absorbing a smaller company. There are simply organizational physics at play. The gravity of a 70,000-person company bends everything toward internal consensus and away from the best interests of the end users.

Which is why I'm even more bullish on my friends over at Attention (Anis Bennaceur). Attention plays in the exact same space as Momentum. Same problem, same category of customer, same bet that conversation data is the context layer that makes AI agents useful. The difference is that Attention doesn't have to spend the next 18 months figuring out how to fit inside Salesforce. They get to keep doing the thing that made them good in the first place: talking to customers, shipping product, and not spending their Mondays in integration planning meetings. Momentum getting acquired actually validates the entire market Attention has been building in.

The question for revenue teams is pretty simple. Do you want a LEGO castle? Or an agile innovator still operating independently?

Writing The Signal (AI x GTM weekly newsletter) | Playing long-term games with long-term people 🫡

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