For venture-backed founders · $500K–$10M+ ARR

The demos go well.
The deals don’t close.

Buyers lean in, ask good questions, tell you it’s impressive — and then go quiet.

You’re generating interest. You’re not generating urgency. Those feel identical on a call and they are not the same thing, and every month you spend fixing the wrong one is a month of runway you don’t get back.

Featured in Harvard Business Review
300+ founder conversations since May 2025

The first 250+ became the basis for the HBR article “Startup Founders Need a New Sales Playbook” →

Sound familiar?

You know something is broken.
You don’t know what.

Every one of these has a different root cause. Fixing the wrong one costs you a quarter.

The 5-Day SPRINT GTM Reset

Five days. One page. The real constraint.

Four dedicated hours of your time — the five days are the calendar, not the workload.

What happens
I ask what nobody else has asked you.

Is the motion actually working, or has winging it just stopped scaling? Four sessions of questions most advisors won’t ask — because they’re working from a playbook that closed deals in 2021, when money was free and buyers said yes to pilots. Mine comes from 300+ founders this year, in the market you’re selling into now.

How it works →
See the actual deliverable
This is what one looks like, filled in.

A real deliverable, anonymized — the bottleneck, the trigger, the buyer, the exact call flow.

See it →
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After five days with Dave, nexwise reframed the problem, sharpened the ICP, and left with a clearer way to tell which deals were real. From "fix for broken shops" to a board-level constraint.

Mathis Stolz, Founder of nexwise
Mathis Stolz
Founder, nexwise

Already know the motion works and the hire is the next move? I place Founding AEs too →

Dave Rubinstein — GTM Advisor and Founding AE Recruiter
Salesforce Outreach
About

Why the diagnosis is current

Most GTM advice is a fossil — a playbook that worked when the advisor was last carrying a number. Mine is 300+ conversations with founders across 40+ countries since May 2025: what is closing, what is stalling, and what stopped working the moment money stopped being free. I've run the motion too — founding AE at gen.video (zero to $10M ARR), six years in sales leadership at Salesforce, $1M to $25M at Outreach. That's why I can read a motion. The 300+ is why the read is current.

300+
founder conversations in the last 12 months
$10M
ARR built as a founding AE at gen.video (formerly ExpoTV)
40+
countries — not one market’s playbook
25×
territory growth at Outreach. $1M to $25M
6 yrs
in sales leadership at Salesforce
HBR
the work became a Harvard Business Review article
More about Dave →

Twenty-three demos. Two closed.
That’s not a volume problem.

That was one founder’s last quarter before we found the constraint — twenty-one conversations that went nowhere, and no idea which of them were real. Five days to name what’s actually breaking — four dedicated hours of your time — before you spend another quarter fixing the wrong thing.