Why IO River hired a VP of sales one month after founding | Edward Tsinovoi

Akamai once made the decision to freeze its entire network for a full year. No changes. No deployments. No innovation. The cost of another major outage — like the ones that had already knocked critical services offline — was simply too high to justify any forward movement. ⁠Edward Tsinovoi⁠ was inside that decision. And what it revealed to him wasn't just an operational problem at Akamai. It was a structural failure baked into the entire Edge CDN industry: every company, from mid-market to enterprise, was running its traffic through a single edge provider, and that single point of dependency made the whole architecture too fragile to evolve.Edward left Akamai with his co-founder and started ⁠IO River⁠ to solve it. The thesis: give companies an easy button for multi-edge infrastructure — the same strategy that Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and LinkedIn had built for themselves through years of expensive internal engineering — without requiring every company to build it from scratch.In this episode of BUILDERS, Edward shares what it actually looks like to bring a disruptive product into one of the most conservative, risk-averse infrastructure markets in tech — and what he's learned about GTM, messaging, and market sequencing as a first-time founder with 25 years of engineering background and zero sales experience.Topics Discussed:The internal Akamai decision that revealed the CDN industry's structural paralysis — and led directly to IO River's foundingWhy Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and LinkedIn all built multi-edge strategies internally — and why that capability has been inaccessible to everyone elseThe case for hiring a VP of Sales one month in, against conventional wisdom on founder-led salesHow to navigate messaging in a market that wants reliability and predictability above all elseThe specific parenthetical positioning tactic IO River used to bridge a new term to a legacy oneWhy IO River launched in Europe before the US, and what they treated Europe as: a controlled environment to prove the sales motion before crossing to the largest marketThe structural reasons European GTM requires a channel-first approach while US GTM rewards direct selling//Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership.⁠ www.FrontLines.io⁠The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe.⁠ www.GlobalTalent.co⁠//Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here:⁠ https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM⁠