I joined a company that was pivoting. I didn't know it when I joined.

Pre-revenue. First seller in the building. 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.

It didn't just fail as a sales motion. It failed as leadership.

I took that role partly to grow into leading people. And on paper, I did. I got the title. I got the experience. But I never actually learned how to lead. I just hoped everyone would watch me and copy what I did. That's not leadership. That's a founding AE with a bigger job and the same bad habit.

After five years, they brought in someone to run sales. And they moved me back to being an IC.

It was one of the most humbling experiences I've ever had.

It was also the moment the lesson actually landed. I hadn't built a team. I'd built a bottleneck with my name on it. When the company needed sales to outgrow any one person, the one person was the problem. And that person was me.

That's the lesson I write from. Not the win. The thing I learned by being the kind of Founding AE who makes the business harder to scale, not easier, and who mistook doing the work for leading the people doing it.

After that, I spent six years at Salesforce, led sales at Outreach and Meta, and then started doing the thing that changed how I think about this role entirely.

I started talking to founders. A lot of them.

300+ conversations now. 41 countries.

And I kept hearing the same thing.

Different products. Different markets. Different stages. Same ask, over and over and over. Find me a Founding AE.

Not an AE. A Founding AE. The person who can sell before there's anything to sell with. Who can build the motion while running it. Who can operate in the mess before the mess has a name.

Every single one of them wanted that profile. And almost none of them knew how to find it, evaluate it, or set it up to win.

And I wasn't just talking to founders. I was talking to the Founding AEs too. Hundreds of them, on both sides of the same problem.

That's the part that makes this different. My read on this role isn't a memory of one job I had years ago. It's built on hundreds of conversations with the people hiring for this seat and the people sitting in it, right now, in real time.

I record the work. So the patterns compound. Every call sharpens the last one. What I saw at conversation fifty looks naive next to what I see at conversation five hundred. The insight isn't frozen. It keeps getting sharper.

That's not a credential. It's a feedback loop. And it's why what I write holds up.

Here's what struck me. The demand for this role is enormous and growing. But the role itself has no home. No precedent. No place where the people doing it can figure out what "good" looks like, in a job where good changes every six months.

Founders have communities. Sales leaders have communities. VCs have more communities than they know what to do with.

The Founding AE has a LinkedIn feed full of people who've never done the job telling them how to do the job.

So I'm building the thing this role has been missing.

A place to learn the job from someone who sat in the seat and got it wrong before getting it right. Mentorship. Job coaching. And when the fit is real, access to early-stage roles with founders I already know are looking.

It's already happening. Once a month I get a group of Founding AEs in a room to talk about what we're actually wrestling with. Not to network. Not to trade LinkedIn tips. To put the real problems on the table and make each other better at a job almost no one else understands.

That's the whole idea. Operators who get the seat, sharpening each other. No one performing. Everyone building.

Not a job board. Not a career-advice listicle. Not someone who's never done the job telling you how to do it.

A place built by an operator, for operators, around the one job that's hard to name and harder to do well.

That's what Before It Scales is.

If you're a Founding AE, or you're about to be one, you're in the right place.

I'll see you next week.