When there's no onboarding, no documented motion, and no one looking out for the new hire, founders search for someone who can figure everything out alone. That person is rare, expensive, and takes months to find. This engagement changes what you're searching for — and that's why it moves fast.
Talk about the search →When you've thought about onboarding before the offer goes out, you stop searching for someone who needs no help. That pool is larger. The hire sticks longer.
Most recruiters would have just taken the search. Dave asked me a few questions and I realized I couldn't describe what a repeatable deal looked like yet. He told me to wait — and said he'd rather be my first call when the timing is right than place someone who isn't set up to win. That's a different kind of recruiter.
The founder can sell. The pipeline looks real. The deals feel active. Then the AE shows up and nothing converts at the same rate.
I've watched sellers I know are great fail in roles. Not because they couldn't sell. Because they weren't set up to. The knowledge that closed deals, the triggers, the objections, the patterns, never left the founder's head. So the AE guessed. The founder stepped back in. Six months passed.
Most reps won't say "I don't understand" or "that's not compelling." They'll say "got it" and figure it out alone. Founders don't know the rep is struggling because the rep hides it. By the time it shows up in the numbers, you've lost a quarter.
Most searches get longer because founders respond to this by raising the bar. They look for someone who can figure it out alone, close without help, and build the playbook from scratch. That person exists. Finding them takes months.
Faster hire. Faster ramp.
The founders who hire well are not better at finding talent. They are better at building the conditions that let talent succeed.
This engagement is built for two people. Founders at the seed and Series A stage who are running sales themselves and need to transition out without breaking what's working. And sales leaders stepping into roles and revenue levels they have not managed before — often while still carrying a full plate — who need to make sure the hire does not fall through the cracks.
Not sure if the timing is right? Read the complete guide to hiring a Founding AE.
The deals are coming in, but they depend on you being in the room. That's not a repeatable motion — it's a dependency. The longer it stays that way, the harder it is to hand off.
Selling, coaching, forecasting, board prep — the list doesn't stop. A new hire needs time and attention you don't have. Without a structured process, they're figuring things out on their own while you're stretched thin. Something falls through the cracks.
A Founding AE at a velocity SaaS company has almost nothing in common with a Founding AE running enterprise infrastructure deals. Same title. Different motion. Different buyer. Different daily work.
The mistake isn’t hiring a bad seller. It’s hiring a good seller for the wrong motion. The skills that win in one don’t transfer to the other, and the candidate often can’t tell the difference until they’re six months in.
A recruiter looks at a Founding AE who closed deals and pattern-matches on closing. An operator reads the motion underneath. These are the questions that determine whether a hire works. Most searches skip them, because most people running searches can’t answer them.
Six dimensions that determine fit.
The Founding AEs I know stay in touch for different reasons. Some are happy in their roles and want a thinking partner. Some are evaluating their next move. Some are working through something in the role they're in. Is this quota realistic? Is the product the problem or am I? How do I manage up? Is what I'm experiencing normal? I've led sales teams at Outreach and Salesforce and have spent the last two years in deep conversations with hundreds of B2B founders about what's actually working in GTM right now. That gives me the pattern recognition to answer those questions honestly. Whether they want the answer or not.
That changes what happens when a founder hires me to run a search. The candidates I reach out to are operators I'm in real relationships with, not entries in a CRM. They tell me what they actually think. They tell me fast when a role doesn't fit. And when the right role lands in front of them, they take it with conviction because someone they trust is on the other end of the call.
That's the difference between a recruiter's network and a relationship that exists beyond a transaction. It's also why my onboarding doesn't end at the offer letter. The relationship continues. That's what these relationships are.
Most founders I work with hire in San Francisco or New York. Some want in-office presence, some want proximity for occasional in-person work, and some are open to remote when the fit is right. I run searches across all three configurations. The network skews to SF and NYC because that's what most of my founders are asking for.
Talk about the search →"I've sold with Dave. If he calls, I pick up — and I send people his way."
"I've had Dave mentor me through job decisions where he had zero financial stake in the outcome. He just gave me his honest read and coached me through it. If you're a Founding AE and you're not in this network, you're navigating blind."
"Dave delivered strong candidates quickly — and the quality was there. He maintains a real community of founding AEs so he's not starting from scratch on every search. As a European company hiring in the US, that kind of operator relationship is hard to find."
Most Founding AE hires fail at predictable points: wrong profile, unprepared candidate, no ramp structure. This process addresses each one before it becomes a problem.
I get deep on the product, the commercial traction, and the materials before approaching anyone. I need to understand why it wins and be able to present it compellingly — and I flag what's missing before the first candidate conversation.
Candidates come from a vetted community of Founding AEs evaluated over time — not a cold LinkedIn filter. The candidates who see this opportunity are already known quantities.
Good candidates fall out of bad processes. Before the search begins we agree on the steps, what we're evaluating at each stage, and who owns each conversation. How you run the process signals exactly what it's like to work with you.
My work doesn't end at the offer letter. I stay in the conversation with both you and the hire through the early ramp. Checking in on what's working, flagging what's not, and being a sounding board for the decisions that come up in the first 90 days.
The search finds the right person. RepReady makes sure they succeed.
A structured 30-day onboarding program built from your specific deals, buyers, wins, and losses — extracted through stakeholder interviews before the rep starts. The rep enters a process, not a blank page. And you have someone in your corner who can tell you whether the ramp is going well or whether something needs to change before three months pass. Ask about RepReady →
You're ready when the motion is repeatable — meaning you can explain to someone else why a deal closed, and you're confident a different person could run the same process and get a similar result. If you're still figuring it out yourself, hiring someone to figure it out for you usually doesn't work. The full checklist is in this article.
Traditional recruiters optimize for placement speed and fees. This is an operator search. I get deep on the product before approaching a single candidate, run a structured process designed to surface the right person rather than the fastest yes, and stay involved through the early ramp. The candidates come from a vetted network — not a cold LinkedIn filter. RepReady is available as an optional structured onboarding add-on for founders who want a formal program.
RepReady is an optional add-on to the search engagement. Once you have found the candidate you want, RepReady builds a structured 30-day onboarding program from your specific business — your deals, your buyers, your wins and losses. I conduct stakeholder interviews to pull the institutional knowledge out of the founder's head, then organize it into two hours per week covering the five areas that determine whether a new rep ramps in 30 days or 90. The AE enters a process, not a blank page — and the founder's calendar stops being the onboarding plan.
Almost always the same reasons: the role was unclear before the search started, the motion wasn't repeatable enough to hand off, and there was no onboarding structure once they joined. The rep spent their first quarter asking questions nobody had time to answer. Sometimes it is the wrong person. But often the right person fails because nobody set them up to succeed. That's what this engagement is designed to address.
Because candidates come from a vetted network rather than a cold search, the process moves faster than a traditional recruiting engagement. Most searches reach an offer within six to ten weeks. The preparation work — product review, assets review, process design — happens in parallel with sourcing, so we're not adding time before the search begins.
Seed and Series A B2B SaaS companies where the founder is currently running sales and needs to hand off without losing what's working. Also sales leaders who just stepped into a role and need to hire without the bandwidth to do it carefully. If you're pre-revenue or the motion is still being figured out, the timing may not be right yet — and I'll tell you that on the first call.
The search takes two to four months. Most of that time is spent on candidates who looked right on paper, took the first call, and went quiet when they saw the opportunity wasn't fully packaged. Strong operators have options and evaluate them quickly.
You make a hire. They start on day one to a Notion doc and a product demo. The knowledge that closes every deal — the triggers, the objections, the patterns — is still in your head. They spend their first quarter figuring out what you already know.
You are still in every deal at month four. The hire is doing activity but not closing independently. You start questioning whether you hired the wrong person. In most cases you did not — you just never gave them what they needed to succeed.
Six months and one failed hire later, you start the search again. With higher burn, lower board confidence, and the same unclear motion the last person inherited.
The cost of a failed first hire is not just the salary. It is the six months of runway, the board conversation, and the window you had to build momentum before your next raise.
30 minutes to talk through where you are in the motion, what the role needs to look like, and whether the timing is right. If it's not, I'll tell you that too.
See if there's a fit →