Before "founding AE" was a title anyone put in a job post, I was one. Except I didn't take the job to be one. I took it for a $200K base and a VP of Sales title, at a nine-person, pre-revenue company with no other sellers and no plan to hire any. I was excited about exactly the wrong things. The title, the comp. Not the actual job, which was to build a sales motion from nothing, alone, with no proof it could be done.

And the company was pivoting. I didn't know that when I joined either.

No playbook, no case studies, no one ahead of me who'd done it. I figured it out. Scaled it from zero to $10M ARR. And I built something that couldn't survive without me.

That's the part nobody puts on LinkedIn.

My whole philosophy back then was "do what I do." Watch me. Copy the motion. It worked, right up until we needed more sellers. Then it didn't. Because "do what I do" isn't a motion. It's a person. And a person doesn't scale.

After five years, they brought in someone to run sales and moved me back to being an IC. One of the most humbling experiences I've ever had. It was also the moment the lesson landed. I hadn't built a team. I'd built a bottleneck with my name on it.

That's where I started. Not the win, the thing I learned by getting it wrong first. But most of what I write here isn't my story. It's the pattern underneath hundreds of them.

After that role I spent six years at Salesforce, leading sales teams at Outreach and Kustomer, and then started doing the thing that changed how I think about this role entirely. I started talking to founders. A lot of them. More than 300 conversations now, across 41 countries. And I talk to the founding AEs too, hundreds of them, sitting on the other side of the same table.

That's the whole reason my read on this role is different. I'm not writing from one job I had years ago. I sit in the middle of hundreds of founders and hundreds of sellers, and I see both sides of the same hire at the same time. The founder who can't find the right person, and the right person the founder just passed over. I get to watch all of it at once.

Here's the pattern I see most.

The person the founder wants is usually not the person who wants their startup.

You've felt this. You walk into a process for an unproven company, and they interview you like you're joining a proven one. They want you closing business right away, with little or no pipeline, in a motion nobody there has proven can even be run yet. They dangle a big OTE, then attach a quota that makes the number impossible to hit. They want a name-brand résumé, for a company that isn't name-brand yet.

It's not you. It's a structural mismatch. The founder is chasing the low-risk hire to cover a high-risk bet, and the low-risk hire has better options. They're chasing equity at the Anthropics of the world, not betting on an unproven startup. Meanwhile the person who'd actually thrive in the mess, who's built for the blank page and the thing with no name yet, that person gets passed over for looking too risky.

And this doesn't end at the interview.

If you're already in the seat, it's the same pattern in a new form. It's why your founder keeps reaching for the polished hire instead of the scrappy one. Why the comp plan tightened the second you had a good quarter. Why they hired you to build the motion from scratch but start asking where the closed deals are in month two. The mismatch doesn't stop when you take the job. It just changes shape.

So this isn't job-search advice. It's a lens on the whole job.

Once you can see the pattern, two things happen. You stop taking it personally. The rejection, the restructure, the good quarter that somehow made things harder. And you start reading founders faster. You can tell, early, whether a founder has made peace with what their company actually is. The ones who have are worth your time. The ones who haven't will keep hunting for a unicorn and blaming the market, or blaming you, when they can't find one.

The best founders eventually learn to want the person who wants them. Most learn it the hard way.

That's the whole idea behind this newsletter. Not a job board. Not career advice from someone who's never done the job. A place built by an operator, for operators, around the one job that's hard to name and harder to do well, whether you're interviewing for your next seat or three years deep in your current one.

Every week I take one pattern from the hundreds of founders and founding AEs I talk to and break down what it actually means for you. No perfect answers, because this job doesn't have many. Just the real thing, from someone who sits in the middle of it and sees both sides.

If you're a founding AE, you already know the feeling of being the only one at the company who does what you do. This is a place for the people who get it. Glad you're here.