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. That’s interest, not urgency.

My deals are stalling

Find the constraint

A five-minute diagnostic names what’s holding your revenue back. If it’s the motion, the 5-Day Sprint fixes it.

Take the diagnostic

I’m hiring an early-stage AE

Hire a Founding AE

I write the case for the role before I approach a single candidate. You meet a short list, not a funnel.

How a search works

I’m a Founding AE

See the open roles

Founding AE seats written up with the real comp, the upside, and the risk. No portal, no résumé black hole.

See the open roles

Featured inHarvard Business Review

Founder AMA forMadrona

Built sales teams at

What does Dave Rubinstein do?

Dave Rubinstein is a GTM advisor and Founding Account Executive recruiter for venture-backed B2B SaaS founders between $500K and $10M+ ARR. The 5-Day SPRINT GTM Reset is four working sessions across five days — four dedicated hours of your time — that name the single constraint stalling your revenue motion and leave you with one page you can run Monday. For founders whose motion already works, he also places Founding Account Executives: the first dedicated sales hire.

When the motion is the problem

“After four hours 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, nexwise

300+

founder conversations behind the SPRINT framework

4 hrs

of your time, and you leave with one page you can run Monday

When it’s time to hire

“I didn’t have room for a long interview process, so every candidate had to be worth the hour. Dave put three in front of us. All three made our final round, and if we’d had a second seat open, we’d have hired two of them.”

Ted MacLean

President, SmartKargo

3 candidates sent · all 3 reached the final round

“Dave sent us one candidate. We hired him.”

Philipp Wolf

VP Global Sales, Voize

1 candidate sent · 1 hired

175

Founding AEs in the community I recruit from

The 5-Day SPRINT GTM Reset

Five days. One page. The real constraint.

You leave with one page: the constraint, why it’s that one, and what to do about it first.

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.

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

How it works →

What you leave with: the one pageAnonymized example

01 · The bottleneck

Twenty-three demos last quarter. Two closed.

She runs capability demos, not sales calls. The last one ran 68 minutes with the founder talking roughly 79% of it. Every valuable moment came where her share dropped below 45%.

The fix

Structural: lead with the mirror, not the demo.

Four more sections follow: the trigger, the decision, buyer patterns and the call flow. See the full page

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

Not ready for a conversation yet?

Most founders are wrong about their own constraint.

The thing you're trying to fix is usually a symptom of something upstream. Twelve questions, under five minutes, and you get your primary GTM constraint named — plus where you stand on all six dimensions. Add your name, company and email at the end, and the result appears on screen.

Take the diagnostic

Free. Built from 300+ founder conversations since May 2025.

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 48 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.

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

Common questions

What is the 5-Day SPRINT GTM Reset?

It’s four working sessions across five days that name the single constraint stalling your revenue motion. It takes four dedicated hours of your time — the five days are the calendar, not the workload — and you leave with one page you can run the following Monday.

Who is the SPRINT GTM Reset for?

Venture-backed B2B SaaS founders between $500K and $10M+ ARR whose founder-led selling has started to stall: demos that go well, deals that don’t close, and no reliable way to tell which conversations are real.

Do I need a GTM reset or a Founding Account Executive?

If the motion still lives in your head, fix the motion first — a Founding AE hired into an unrepeatable motion usually fails within a year. If the motion already works and you just can’t run it alone, the hire is the next move.

What happens in the first conversation?

Thirty minutes, no pitch. The goal is to work out whether your constraint is the motion, the message, the market, or the hire — and to tell you honestly if a Sprint isn’t what you need.

What happens next

Three steps. You decide at each one.

Book 30 minutes

No pitch and no prep. Tell me where deals stall, or what the hire needs to do.

Get a straight read

Whether your constraint is the motion, the message, the market or the hire, and whether a Sprint is what you need.

Then choose the path

Five days and one page to fix the motion, or a Founding AE search once it works. Or neither, if neither fits.

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.

Book a 30-Min Conversation See the deliverable

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

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

Five days. One page. The real constraint.

Why the diagnosis is current

Three steps. You decide at each one.

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

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

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

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