Introducing: Patrick Salyer’s Substack - A Startup CEO Field Guide
I’m an early-stage venture capitalist at Mayfield, where we focus on seed, Series A, and Series B startup investments. At Mayfield, we practice the "craft" of early-stage investing. This means we build strong partnerships with exceptional founders at the dawn of their company's journey, often when there is no product or customer base. Our "craft" extends to guiding these founders on their path towards finding product-market fit (PMF), navigating pivots, acquiring their initial customers, developing their sales strategies and methodologies, and hiring and scaling their go-to-market teams. I love this aspect of the job - helping guide, advise, and coach founders.
When it comes to guiding, advising, & coaching, I’m relying on a decade of experience as the CEO of Gigya, a startup where we navigated multiple product pivots, achieved product-market fit, experimented with various sales models, and eventually established a go-to-market team that scaled to a $100M ARR run rate. Our successful (but not easy) journey led to an acquisition by SAP. The valuable insights gained along the way were thanks to a remarkable team that has since moved on to become sales and marketing leaders at prominent unicorns such as Fivetran, Procore, Checkr, Segment, Retool, Big Panda, Everlaw, and Pure Storage.
I’ve found that these learnings and insights (often learned the hard way via scar tissue) prove valuable in my day-to-day interactions with entrepreneurs. Some of these entrepreneurs have suggested that I should document these learnings in a more scalable fashion. A book felt overly time consuming and no one reads long form content anyways, so I went with a substack.
While I intend to cover a wide range of topics on this substack, my primary focus will be on pragmatic strategies and tactics to build and scale startups, with an emphasis on go-to-market strategies, encompassing sales and marketing. Why? Simply because for startups, this is what matters most. Occasionally, I reserve the right to delve into other topics that pique my interest, such as my sprinter van adventures, coaching 8 and 9-year-old basketball teams, or my experiences surfing.
Enjoy!