Kyle Norton

📈 CRO 📈 @ Owner.com (Hiring), SaaS GTM Advisor & Investor

As CRO for Owner.com, Kyle leads a team of world class go to market professionals who help independent restaurants grow their direct, online takeout and delivery channels. He currently owns the sales, partnerships, onboarding, demand gen, revenue operations and enablement portfolios.

Kyle is also a Limited Partner (GTM Fund, Stage 2 Capital), Advisor, and Angel Investor for several SaaS-focused funds and startups, where he shares his insights and expertise on scaling, selling and servicing SaaS products.

Additionally, Kyle is a founding member and Co-Chapter Head of the Toronto chapter of Pavilion, a global community of revenue leaders and operators and host of the Revenue Leadership Podcast.

I spend a lot of time on stages talking about GTM AI, sales infrastructure, enablement systems.

All real. All important. None of it is what actually makes Owner truly special.

What makes Owner.com different is people.

A 22-year-old who was making $14/hour in restaurants, riding the subway in the dark both ways. Someone gave him a shot. Two years later he's leading a team, and the thing that fires him up most is returning that fortune to the next early-career kid who doesn't know what they're capable of yet.

A recent grad who joined us five months ago and told her manager, unprompted, "I can't imagine working somewhere where you watch the clock." She opens her laptop and suddenly it's 3pm.

An entire team logging in on a Saturday because the month wasn't finished. Nobody asked them to. Everyone's Slack bubble just turned green. People who had already hit their number were in the channel hyping up those who hadn't. That's not something you train into people. That's identity.

You can replicate the systems. You can replicate the infrastructure. You can replicate the AI tools that make us more efficient than our competitors.

But you can't replicate what happens when you put hungry, humble, growth-obsessed people shoulder to shoulder and enable them to do their life's work. That's something totally different and I'm so grateful to experience that environment everyday. 

We just dropped a video from our new Toronto office, which tells this story better than I can. Go watch it.

You watch is and think "hell yeah," we're hiring.

Young-Ghee "YG" Hong is an absolute GTM AI 🐐 and if you're in NYC, you should go learn from him.

Co-Founder @ Deepline - Universal API Gateway for GTM Data | Data + Growth infrastructure | Ex-Uber & Capchase

The teams actually getting results with AI + GTM typically aren't posting on LinkedIn. So we got a few to take a break from building to share their work.

Join us on 4/1, 6pm at betaworks in NYC for Claude Code + GTM Lightning Talks 

Concrete, real-world use-cases for GTM leader, GTM engineers, and founders trying to sift through the noise of how to use coding agents to drive pipeline today.

Speakers include:
- Young-Ghee "YG" Hong, Applied AI Lead, Owner.com - by hyper-focusing on fundamentals and data, YG's been making exponential improvements for Owner. 

And if you've seen Jonathan Shenkman & Kyle Norton's work building one of the most data-driven GTM orgs out there, that's even more impressive!

- Shashank Khanna - Founder in Residence, GTM Engineering @ Vanta

- 🏍benyamin ‎, GTM Engineer @ AirOps - early to the GTM engineering space, big pickup for the team that coined the term "Content Engineering" to bridge the worlds of content marketing -> SEO/AEO/GEO. 
 
- Garrett Wolfe - already a big month for him after releasing the State of GTME report. Both a practitioner and expert on how the space is developing sharing his expertise.

+ more!

RSVP now! If you've been to any event in NYC in the last 2 months, you know it this will be at capacity.
https://luma.com/ycfvnrlq

Vice President at Spiralyze | Optimization | CRO for B2B SaaS

Through GTMnow (the media brand of VC firm, GTMfund), I help share content to help companies grow revenue and individuals scale their careers. Subscribe to build, scale, and invest with the best minds in tech.

I host The GTMnow Podcast (top 1% global podcast) and write The GTMnow Newsletter (read by 50k+ operators, founders and investors). 

Tech moats are declining; distribution is the final remaining moat. Your go-to-market strategy and execution determine your outcome. 

--

Passionate people person. Passionate about global education. 
Life is short, and there are 1440 minutes in every day. Make the most of them, make a difference, and enjoy the ride.

Sophie Buonassisi

This is so incredibly well deserved. Paul Irving has been promoted to General Partner at GTMfund! 

To know Paul is to love Paul.

Another equally true saying is: to know Paul is to be constantly blown away at both the sheer volume of work he gets done and by the quality of that work. IYKYK. 

He is the definition of executional excellence. 

One of the things I’m constantly amazed by is that no matter what he’s got going on, if someone asks him a question, he responds with the thoughtfulness and thoroughness of someone who has had an entire weekend to reflect on it. I’ve come to realize that he simply has no other mode than the highest level of execution. And at the same time, he cares deeply about everyone. 

He’s helped build GTMfund alongside Max Altschuler and our team, and continues to lead through what feels like one of the most exciting chapters yet… though somehow, every chapter keeps feeling like that.

Congratulations Paul 🐐

SVP Marketing at GTMfund | Host of The GTMnow Podcast

These are 30+ Claude Code use cases, organized by function, difficulty level, and time savings. 

It covers sales, marketing, customer success, product, personal admin, and some random wild use cases for inspiration of how creative you can get. 

For the full breakdown of each, the link to the newsletter is in the comments (free, ungated). 

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In conversations with hundreds of founders and GTM leaders, one theme keeps surfacing: One of the biggest blocker to AI adoption is often the imagination of what's possible (vs technical barriers). This edition is designed to help unlock that💡

BREAKING: Nooks launches Agent Workspace and AI Sequencing products. 

These are designed to operate across the full action set of a rep’s day — calls, emails, research, prospecting, and strategy. Meaning, they’re taking on legacy incumbent companies… an increasingly common theme across AI-native startups. 

I sat down with Dan Lee (Co-Founder & CEO at Nooks) to go deep on the launch and the impact that AI is having on sales. 

Key takeaways:

1️⃣ The shift is from systems of record to systems of intelligence.
CRMs capture structured data (accounts, contacts, activities). But they don’t capture how reps actually think (which accounts they prioritize, what signals they trust, and why they choose a strategy). The next layer encodes judgment and workflow behavior, not just fields.

2️⃣ AI disrupts the top of funnel first.
Research, list building, drafting emails, and prospecting are high-volume and process-driven… making them the most automatable parts of sales. Meanwhile, closing (trust, multi-threading, negotiation) remains deeply human, so pipeline generation is where AI creates the earliest leverage.

3️⃣ The winning wedge is the workspace.
Point tools optimize single steps (sequencing, enrichment, dialers). Owning the rep’s workspace — where they research, prioritize, call, and execute — creates a continuous feedback loop. Every action (calls, edits, prioritization decisions) trains the system and compounds intelligence over time.

4️⃣ First-party workflow data beats commoditized signals.
Job changes, funding alerts, and intent data are increasingly table stakes. In contrast, first-party data from calls, transcripts, objections, and engagement history provides richer context (budget, timing, org structure) that competitors can’t easily replicate.

5️⃣ Ruthless prioritization is a startup advantage.
“You can do anything, but not everything.” Winning a focused wedge (calling and top-of-funnel execution) before expanding horizontally enables depth, faster learning loops, and stronger differentiation against legacy, broad platforms built for a pre-AI workflow.

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💚 Thank you to our incredible sponsors for supporting the podcast:

- HockeyStack - the AI platform that unifies GTM data to help teams convert, expand, and scale.

- Granola - the AI notepad that helps you get the doing done. Get an exclusive 3 months free through the link/code in the episode show notes. 

🎧 Tune in and subscribe on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you like to listen by searching "The GTMnow Podcast."

💡GTMnow by GTMfund: Build, scale and invest with the best minds in tech.

NEW: The cloud covers 30% of the world. Armada is building the other 70%.

Armada builds modular AI data centers (called Galleons) that can be deployed anywhere on Earth. Saudi Arabia in the middle of summer. The Arctic. A US Navy ship. A C-17 in flight.

They are the hyperscaler for the edge, building infrastructure for the 70% of the world major cloud providers don't reach.

Here's why that matters right now: We are in a global AI race. The US and China are competing for AI dominance, and infrastructure is the battleground. The countries and companies that deploy fastest will compound advantages in ways that are nearly impossible to close.

Most of that data — on oil rigs, Arctic drones, Navy ships, manufacturing sites — is effectively stranded. The cloud can't reach it. Without compute on-site, connectivity alone doesn't solve the problem. That's exactly the world Armada was built for.

I sat down with Dan Wright (Co-founder & CEO of Armada) to go deep on what they're building, why the timing is now, and what it means for the future of AI infrastructure.

Key takeaways:

1️⃣ The cloud was built for a world before AI.

Every major cloud provider built their infrastructure 25 years ago, before large models, before sensors were on everything, before data lived on oil rigs or in the Arctic. The world changed. The infrastructure did not. That mismatch is a massive market opportunity.

2️⃣ Connectivity unlocked the edge, but without infrastructure it's useless.

Starlink changed the game for connectivity. But without compute, you just have faster access to a problem you still can't solve. Every time Starlink goes live in a new country, Armada is the first mover on infrastructure. Connectivity + compute = the edge finally works.

3️⃣ Sovereign AI is here and the US and China are in a global AI race.

For companies like Aramco and the US Navy, data sovereignty means the data cannot leave the site — by law, by security protocol, by necessity. You can't send classified sensor data from a Navy ship to a data center thousands of miles away. You need compute where the data lives. That's what Armada builds.

4️⃣ Category creation is about problems, not technology.

Nobody wakes up wanting to buy infrastructure. Dan's approach from day 1: Get specific about the problems and let the technology follow.

5️⃣ Write your manifesto first.

Before you hire. Before an office. Before raising a dollar. When you can articulate exactly why your company needs to exist, recruiting, fundraising, and partnerships all get easier. You're not selling a product. You're building a movement.

--

💚 Thank you to our sponsors for supporting the podcast:
- HockeyStack - the AI platform that unifies GTM data to help teams convert, expand, and scale.
- Nooks - the AI workspace for outbound teams.

🎧 Tune in and subscribe on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen by searching "The GTMnow Podcast."

💡 GTMnow by GTMfund: Build, scale and invest with the best minds in tech.

If you use LinkedIn correctly, it drives revenue. 

HockeyStack’s first customers were from LinkedIn when Emir Atli (Co-Founder & CRO) had 100 followers.

Sales might be the most human job in the economy.

Dan Lee (Co-Founder & CEO at Nooks) on why that doesn’t change with AI.

No alternative text description for this image

Nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to buy software 🙃

That’s the reality. 

Dan Wright (CEO of Armada) explains how to sell what people want to buy.

🔊 EXCITING MARKETING ROLES. There are some incredible opportunities across the GTMfund portfolio right now, including: 

🚀 Founding Marketing & Growth Lead at Village [LA, CA - Hybrid]

Village is an AI-powered care orchestration platform for children with differences — a modern care coordination partner that helps families navigate complexity with confidence, and the practice infrastructure that lets providers focus on what they do best. 

Village is looking for a Founding Marketing Lead to own and drive their go-to-market across B2B, B2B2C, and B2C. You'll have real ownership, close proximity to leadership, and the ability to shape how Village shows up in the market.

For more details and how to apply: https://lnkd.in/gJzTfU5x 

🚀 Head of Marketing at Obvio [San Carlos, CA - Onsite]

Obvio is building a new category in traffic safety. They work at the intersection of technology, public trust, community partnership, and policy and believe safer streets come from better feedback loops, not just enforcement.

As a foundational marketer, it’s a GTM + narrative role for someone who wants to build the marketing foundation of a category-defining company.

For more details and how to apply: 
https://lnkd.in/gAchQJ-A 

🚀 Head of Marketing at Tavus [San Francisco, CA - Onsite] 

Tavus is a research lab pioneering human computing. They’re building AI Humans: a new interface that closes the gap between people and machines, free from the friction of today’s systems. Their real-time human simulation models let machines see, hear, respond, and even look real - enabling meaningful, face-to-face conversations.

As Head of Marketing, you’ll lead their go-to-market strategy during a pivotal inflection point. You'll own brand positioning, product marketing, and category creation as they introduce PALs and expand their Conversational Video Interface (CVI) API to developers and enterprises worldwide.

For more details and how to apply: 
https://lnkd.in/gT_h_vrv


Maybe I'm a tad bias, but there has never been a more exciting time to be in early-stage marketing!

When most companies say they’re going to the moon, they don’t mean literally. 

Dan Wright does. 🚀

NEW: 95% of the Fortune 500 uses Figma. This is Sheila Joglekar Vashee, the CMO behind one of the most beloved brands in software.

Before Figma, she was the second marketing hire at Dropbox, scaling through $1B+ in ARR. She's also held roles across consumer companies like Opendoor, and spent time on the venture side advising early-stage startups. She's seen brand building from every angle.

I sat down with Sheila to dissect the defining lessons from her career and how to build a world-class brand.

Key takeaways:

1️⃣ Brand is the sum total of every experience (not a logo or a campaign).
It's what people say about you when you're not in the room. It's how your support team talks to customers, how your salespeople engage buyers, and the experience your product delivers. Every person at the company is a node of brand. 

2️⃣ The PLG-to-enterprise leap requires an intentional, early investment.
Figma built an enterprise team far earlier than most PLG companies do and it paid off. It’s the reason 95% of the Fortune 500 now uses Figma. But optics matter more than you’d think: enterprise customers need to see you're invested in their success before they'll bet on you. 

3️⃣ Customer obsession is the new operating model.
Figma's founders flew to Nigeria to meet early users. Their product support team feeds insights directly back to product. They have 200+ Friends of Figma chapters running worldwide. And their user research sessions are open for anyone at the company to watch live. That closeness to the customer is embedded in the Figma DNA, and it shows up in the product. 

4️⃣ Measuring brand impact requires creativity.
Sheila ran match market tests at a previous company by fully treating one city with TV, billboards, and brand spend while keeping comparable cities at steady state. The ROI was clear. For brand skeptics who say you can't quantify it: design the experiment, isolate the variable, and let the data speak.

5️⃣ AI enables human creativity. Human taste will always win. 
Figma sees AI as a massive enabler. Tools like Figma Make let you generate 20 prototypes in 20 different directions. But the judgment on which path to take, the craft that brings it to life, that's still human. Sheila's push to the marketing community: don't fall into the AI slop trap. MAKE GOOD $h!t!

--

💚 Thank you to our incredible sponsors for supporting the podcast:
- HockeyStack - the AI platform that unifies GTM data to help teams convert, expand, and scale.
- Granola - the AI notepad that helps you get the doing done. Get an exclusive 3 months free through the link/code in the episode show notes. 

🎧 Tune in and subscribe on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you like to listen by searching "The GTMnow Podcast."

💡GTMnow by GTMfund: Build, scale and invest with the best minds in tech.

This is a full decision tree for how to price your SaaS product. 

We recently published an edition outlining some pricing considerations, and the demand for more pricing information was overwhelmingly positive. 

We wrote this edition to answer that call and build out a true pricing model decision tree, along with a full guide to help you determine which pricing structure actually fits your product, buyer, and market.

One of the most common mistakes is starting with: “what should we charge?”
The right question is: "how should customers pay us, and why?"

At a very high level (full details in the comments), here's the decision tree:

Step 1: Does value scale with users?
→ Seat-based. Simple, forecastable. Use this when each user gets clear, individual value and the product becomes more valuable as more people join (e.g. collaboration or workflow tools like Slack, Notion, Salesforce). It’s simple, familiar, and creates a clean expansion path as teams add users. . Watch out as AI reduces seats needed.

Step 2: Does value scale with usage?
→ Usage-based. Use this when value scales directly with consumption, customers naturally use more over time, and the metric is simple and intuitive (e.g. API calls, messages, compute). It’s common in infrastructure, data, and AI products where cost and value rise in lockstep (e.g. Twilio, Snowflake).

Step 3: Is value tied to a business outcome?
→ Outcome-based. Use this when you can directly tie your product to measurable outcomes (revenue, cost savings, risk reduction) and prove the impact with clear data. Intercom priced Fin at $0.99/resolved ticket and went $1M to $100M ARR. 

Step 4: Is the product a system of record?
→ Platform/tiered. Use this when your product becomes core infrastructure used across multiple teams, with growing workflows, data, and integrations that increase switching costs over time. It typically combines a base platform fee, tiered plans, and add-ons that unlock as customer needs mature (e.g. HubSpot’s free CRM → Starter → Pro → Enterprise). Their NRR improved from 101.8% to 105% after they overhauled structure.

Most companies end up with a hybrid of the above. Hybrid pricing jumped from 27% → 41% adoption in just 12 months.

Important:
There is no “best” pricing model, only the one that best reflects how customers experience value. The right model depends on how value expands within an account (users, usage, outcomes, or platform adoption) and whether it matches your actual GTM motion and how deals close.

From all the pricing workshops we've run, content we've curated, and conversations we've facilitated, the biggest piece of pricing advice is this:

Treat pricing like a product: test, iterate, and refine it continuously. It’s a core part of your go-to-market, and what once had wiggle room is now a critical lever to get right.

The full pricing model decision tree guide can be found in the comments. Hope it's helpful! 

How are you evolving your pricing model in 2026?

The mistake most product teams make?

Skipping the one question Dan Lee (Co-Founder & CEO at Nooks) asks before building.

NEW: Inside ServiceNow's $10B go-to-market engine with Paul Fipps (President, Global Customer Operations).

ServiceNow powers over 80 billion workflows annually and has seen 20%+ growth for five consecutive years.

From CIO at Under Armour overseeing a 300 million-member connected fitness ecosystem, to now leading global sales, customer success, field marketing, and partners at a growing enterprise org, Paul has seen what it takes to scale on both the B2C and D2C sides.

I sat down with Paul to take you behind the scenes on ServiceNow's disciplined GTM engine.

Key takeaways:

1️⃣ At scale, complacency is a bigger threat than competition.
When you're growing 20%+ year over year, the danger isn't who's coming to eat your lunch. The internal drift that happens when you're adding thousands of people and hundreds of new processes is a much greater existential threat. Paul's job is to make sure every person stays oriented around one thing: making the customer the hero of their own story.

2️⃣ Customers should never feel your org chart.
ServiceNow unified global sales, customer success, field marketing, and partners under one motion, deliberately. When you do all the hard work of a complex enterprise sale and then an entirely new team shows up Monday morning asking "so what are we doing?" — you've already lost. The pre-sale and post-sale have to have one continuous through line.

3️⃣ Churn shows up in relationships long before it shows up in reports.
They monitor adoption daily. But the signal Paul watches most closely is behavioral: when a customer stops showing up to QBRs, when they disengage from meetings — you know something is already wrong. The best time to act on churn is before any data shows it's an issue.

4️⃣ The AI governance crisis is real and it's happening right now.
Paul spoke with the CIO of one of the largest healthcare companies in the world — who had 900 AI pilots running inside his org, then cancelled every single one. The security and governance risk outweighed the innovation benefit. For every company racing to deploy AI: can you govern pilots as fast as you can deploy them?

5️⃣ Consumer product thinking is still an unlock in enterprise B2B.
Most enterprise software companies hire from within enterprise software. Paul brought a different lens from Under Armour, where data from 300 million users surfaced unarticulated needs that led to product breakthroughs. In B2B, treating every buyer as an individual — not just a segment or persona — is still a competitive advantage most companies haven't fully captured.

💚 Thank you to our incredible sponsor for supporting the podcast:

- HockeyStack - the AI platform that unifies GTM data to help teams convert, expand, and scale.

🎧 Tune in and subscribe on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you like to listen by searching "The GTMnow Podcast."

💡GTMnow by GTMfund: Build, scale and invest with the best minds in tech.

MARCH 20TH! We’re excited to be hosting the second GTMfund Founder-Led GTM Series this month, alongside our friends at Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) and Peter Kazanjy!

It’s a highly interactive workshop-style breakfast, where you’ll learn how to successfully generate early revenue before scaling a GTM team.

This event is for founders with technical backgrounds, who want to excel in selling. 

When: Friday, March 20th 8:30 - 10:00 AM PDT 
Where: Downtown San Francisco

Spots are highly limited - I’ll drop the event link in the comments. 

Please share with any technical founders you know :)

We often talk about AI, this is an ethereal thing, but in reality it's governed by the laws of physics. 

When an AI model is too far from a data source, it doesn’t work. 

The cloud was built 25 years ago: before large models, before sensors on everything, before data lived on oil rigs and in the Arctic.

So you can’t actually use AI where it matters most. 

Dan Wright and Armada are changing this.

Important startup advice from the co-founder of Twitch: 

If you’re not willing to do it for 10 years, you should quit right now.

The key is to think in decades, not funding rounds.

This was given to Emir Atli (Co-Founder & CRO of HockeyStack) early. 
After that, him and his co-founders made a promise to each other to do just that - 10+ years and see it all the way through.

Traditional channels are collapsing under AI noise. You can no longer rent attention with the same impact that could before.

So, how do you win?

More embedded “growth loops” that compound over time 📈 

We teamed up with Stefan Bader, co-founder of Cello, to create a guide that maps the 8 specific growth loops (Viral, Content, Community, and more) and the 5-layer architecture needed to replace fragile funnels with a resilient GTM engine.

Taking a Growth Operating System approach with loops (or “Growth OS,” as we call it), each function becomes a node in a connected network. A happy customer (customer success+ output) becomes a referral source (marketing input), sales objections feed directly into product improvements, etc. 

Think of it as five integrated layers, pictured here. 

Link in the comments to the full GTMnow edition that outlines every component of this image!

Being able to scale 1:1 customer service is now possible. 

Intercom’s AI is doing the work of ~6,500 humans every week.

From my conversation with Archana Agrawal on the GTMnow  podcast.

Garbage in, garbage out. The quality of your prompt dictates the quality of your output.

Here's the structure behind a great Claude Code prompt:

1. Context / Source - tell Claude where to find the data. 
A folder path, a file name, a URL. Specificity here eliminates the most common failure mode: Claude working on the wrong thing entirely.

2. Task / Extraction - be explicit about what you want pulled out. 
Don't just say "analyze this" - name the fields, patterns, or signals you care about. Precision here determines how structured and usable the output will be.

3. Analysis / Synthesis - this is where you ask for higher-order thinking: aggregation, ranking, pattern recognition. 
Skip this step and you get raw data. Include it and you get a story.

4. Format / Structure - Claude can output markdown, tables, JSON, HTML, plain prose, but it needs to know which. 
Define the shape of the output upfront and your deliverable arrives ready to use.

5. Output Location - tell Claude where to save it. 
Claude Code writes directly to disk, so a specific file path means the result lands exactly where you need it.

-- 

✍ More details on Claude Code, including 30+ prompt examples, in The GTMnow Newsletter (link in comments). 

💡 GTMnow by GTMfund: Build, scale and invest with the best minds in tech.

Brand is accumulated experience.

“It’s what people say about you when you’re not there… the sum total of all of the experiences people have with your product and your company.” - Sheila Joglekar Vashee (CMO at Figma)

So much of a brand is shaped by how customers feel, how they talk about you, and whether they champion you when you’re not in the room.

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The Battle

Kyle Norton

Sophie Buonassisi

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Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Kyle Norton's LinkedIn Performance

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