Unicorn Builders

HighLevel is the second largest CRM by users on the planet — behind only Salesforce — with 2,000 employees and millions of customers worldwide. They got there without venture capital, without an enterprise sales motion, and without ever running an unprofitable growth model. When HighLevel eventually took outside capital, it was two rounds of PE at minority positions — because they didn't need the money. In a recent episode of Unicorn Builders, we sat down with Shaun Clark, Co-Founder of HighLevel, to learn how a bootstrapped SaaS built by two engineers in their basements became one of the most capital-efficient growth stories in B2B software — and why Shaun believes the VC-fueled playbook routinely turns founders into employees.Topics Discussed:Why Shaun chose to bootstrap HighLevel after repeated VC conversations that went nowhere in his previous companyHow a cold call from a marketing agency operator became HighLevel's third co-founder and rewired the entire product and distribution strategyThe agency-first GTM motion that competitors see, dismiss, and still haven't copiedGTM Lessons For B2B Founders:Profitability at inception changes your relationship with capital permanently. Shaun didn't bootstrap out of ideology — he couldn't get VC attention on his first company and decided to build a profitable business instead. The downstream effect was structural: when HighLevel eventually took PE, both rounds were minority positions with no primary capital component. "We didn't need them to keep the lights on. They were minority positions, so they can't tell me what to do." Founders who reach profitability before taking outside capital negotiate from a fundamentally different position — they're choosing partners, not accepting terms.Your best distribution insight may already be in your customer base. HighLevel's original thesis was direct-to-SMB. The pivot didn't come from a strategy retreat — it came from a cold call with a marketing agency operator who was already a mutual customer. That conversation became a co-founder relationship and surfaced a structural problem: agencies were generating leads for SMBs, handing them over in a spreadsheet, and getting fired when the leads didn't convert. Nobody was closing the loop. HighLevel automated that follow-up process, became indispensable to the agency, and never looked back. The person closest to your end customer's failure point is often already in your pipeline.Solve your channel partner's retention problem and you become impossible to replace. White-labeling wasn't a feature request — it was a survival mechanism for HighLevel's agency customers. The recurring pattern was: agency deploys software, SMB client recognizes the software brand, concludes the software is doing the work, fires the agency. HighLevel's response was to let agencies brand the platform as their own, so value attribution stayed with the agency relationship. "If we could disassociate this third-party brand with your efforts and your outcomes, you will retain clients longer." Founders building through channel partners should look for the moment where the partner's customer relationship is most at risk — and own that moment in the product.//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

Backstory AI — formerly People AI — is building what CEO & Board Member Jason Ambrose calls the "revenue reasoning layer." Even with full CRM visibility, leaders still go ask a person, that person comes back with an answer, and there are ten more questions about how they got it. That trust gap hasn't been solved by RevTech. In this episode, Ambrose walks through the full reset — from an MCP demo that changed his read on the market, to rebranding out of People AI, to rearchitecting the pricing model.Topics Discussed:The MCP demo that triggered the strategic pivotWhy the "revenue reasoning layer" sits above automation — and what that means for GTMHow rebranding out of "People AI" clarified Backstory's market identityThe mechanics of consumption pricing that avoids in-year budget varianceThe strategy diamond framework for sequencing a company transformationThe board conversation: beat-and-raise vs. "become the right business"GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: The market signal is in the demo, not the deck: Ambrose's pivot started when he watched Claude autonomously ask twenty follow-up questions of Backstory's software during an early MCP demo — a moment he compared to loading a web page in Mosaic. When he brought it to customers, the reaction repeated. The signal worth chasing isn't market-size data. It's the demo that resets how a buyer thinks about what your product is.Position where reasoning replaces interpretation: Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks told Ambrose that across their AI-paired org, automation was most impactful at the individual contributor level — but as seniority increased, reasoning took over. Senior leaders don't need faster dashboards; they need explainable answers that don't trigger ten follow-ups. The automation layer is crowded. The reasoning layer above it is a different conversation.Build consumption pricing that survives the budget cycle: "I don't want consumption pricing" almost always means "I can't have in-year variance." Ambrose's approach: year one, contain costs; year two, look at actual consumption patterns and set a committed spend level — or use prepaid blocks. Engineer the model so in-year variance isn't possible.The strategy diamond forces you to confront economics first: Ambrose used a five-element framework — arenas, vehicles, differentiation, sequencing, economic model — because it surfaces how each element constrains the others. Example: routing through a hyperscaler means giving margin to that partner, which reshapes field economics and seller comp. Set GTM without working the economic model and you'll ship conflicting commitments.Sequence the transformation before anything else ships: Backstory's reset followed a deliberate order: state the strategy clearly enough that every person applies it daily; rebrand (People AI kept getting confused for HR tech); then realign the roadmap. Skip step one and steps two and three become incoherent.// 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

Peregrine Technologies unifies fragmented government data systems into a single, current, complete data asset — then gives agencies the tools to build operational workflows on top of it. In a recent episode of Unicorn Builders, we sat down with Ben Rudolph, Co-Founder of Peregrine, to learn how the company spent its first six months embedded inside a police department before writing a line of product code, how they constructed a repeatable sales motion in one of the most procurement-hostile markets in the country, and why nine years of forward-deployed engineering is now their structural advantage in the AI era. Peregrine is now deployed in over 400 cities with a team of approximately 400 people.Topics Discussed: How Peregrine landed its first customer by cold-calling a specific commander and researching his prior drug bust before ever mentioning the product Why the founding team spent the first six months doing detective work — not building software How Peregrine's demo strategy is built around local government priorities, not a fixed product pitch The two moments that told Ben they had product-market fit — and why neither was a revenue number The three chapters of Peregrine's company-building journey: wilderness, repeatable motion, and scale Why proprietary government data, customer proximity, and security controls are the three ingredients that make Peregrine defensible in the AI era The two operating principles behind Peregrine's forward-deployed engineering modelGTM Lessons For B2B Founders:Target the second-in-command: Peregrine's early targeting was precise — they looked for commanders and captains who were ambitious, career-motivated, and had a technology-forward lens. Not the chief, who is rarely day-to-day. That archetype — second or third in command, younger, wants to move up — was their entry point at San Pablo PD and remains a defining characteristic of their ICP today. In institutional sales, the person with both the motivation and the operational authority to champion something new is almost never at the top of the org chart.Research the prospect before you pitch the product: Peregrine didn't cold-call Commander Bubar at San Pablo PD with a product demo. They had researched a specific drug bust he had run years earlier, called him, and asked him to teach them how he did it. The frame was partnership and curiosity, not sales. That approach got a pickup, a polygraph, and eventually an embedded office inside the department. When your prospect has never bought software like yours before, leading with genuine interest in their work is a more reliable opener than leading with your product.Spend the first six months doing the job before building the product: For the first six months at San Pablo PD, the Peregrine team had no product. They were background-checked, polygraphed, and worked out of the department every day — doing the job detectives were doing. That depth of understanding is what produced a product that officers at their third or fourth customer (Albuquerque PD) were using daily without any hand-holding. The speed at which you reach unsolicited product adoption is largely determined by how close you got before you built.// 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

Oyster is a global employment platform built on one core premise: make hiring across borders as easy as hiring locally. Rather than racing competitors toward all-in-one HR stacks, Oyster stayed deliberately narrow — owning the cross-border employment use case in a $30 billion market. In this episode of Unicorn Builders, founder Tony Jamous and newly appointed CEO Hadi Moussa walk through one of the most intentional leadership transitions we've seen in B2B tech — why Tony initiated it, how they executed it, and what Oyster's next chapter looks like from a strategy and GTM standpoint.Topics Discussed:Why Tony proactively surfaced himself as the bottleneck — and how he structured the board conversationWhat an 8-month, 50-candidate global CEO search actually looks like from the insideHow Hadi structured his first 30-60-90 days: what he prioritized, what he deferred, and whyOyster's three strategic bets: EOR depth, mid-market expansion, and AI talent demandThe operational systems behind Oyster's mission authenticity — beyond the website copyWhy remote work was just the catalyst, and what's actually sustaining global employment demandGTM Lessons For B2B Founders:Founder-as-bottleneck is a GTM problem, not just a leadership one. Tony didn't wait for board pressure. He solicited 360 feedback, concluded he was limiting the company's trajectory, and brought the transition idea to the board himself. The framing matters: he positioned it not as stepping down, but as identifying what the company needed to grow beyond what he could deliver. For founders, this is a GTM unlock — the wrong leader at the helm caps your sales motion, your hiring, and your market credibility at exactly the wrong time.Your first 30 days as an incoming CEO is a customer discovery sprint. Hadi's first month was structured entirely around listening — with the team, with customers, and with the existing plan. He specifically prioritized customer conversations to map pain points and identify where Oyster was creating friction. The output wasn't a vision deck. It was the foundation for a three-year strategy grounded in real customer problems Oyster could solve in a differentiated way. Incoming operators: resist the pressure to announce strategy early. The diagnosis has to come first.Over-invest in the transition communication plan. Tony and Hadi spent roughly two months planning the transition before it was announced. The core insight: your company is as attached to you as you are to it. People joined because of your story. A rushed or ambiguous handoff creates fear, not confidence. The communication plan needs to answer one question clearly — why now, and why is this good for them. That requires intentional design, not a last-minute all-hands.Execute the handoff fast once it starts. Tony left his team Slack channels within one week of Hadi joining. His words: it was painful, but necessary. Slow transitions create ambiguity around decision authority, which stalls execution at every level of the org. Once the decision is public, speed matters more than comfort. Dragging out the overlap is almost always worse than a clean break.// 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

Illumio is the cybersecurity company that bet on a thesis the market wasn't ready for: stopping bad actors from getting in is necessary, but no longer sufficient. The real problem is what happens after they're already inside. Founded on that conviction, Illumio spent nearly a decade building, selling, and evangelizing without a Gartner Magic Quadrant or a Forrester Wave to validate the category — relying almost entirely on early adopters and obsessive customer feedback to move the ball forward. Now, with Gartner's first-ever Magic Quadrant for the category on the horizon and the Forrester Wave already establishing Illumio as a clear leader, the market has finally caught up. In a recent episode of Unicorn Builders, we sat down with CEO and Founder Andrew Rubin to unpack what it actually takes to build a company when the category doesn't exist yet — and what founders operating in emerging spaces can take from that decade-long journey.Topics Discussed:Why Illumio was founded around the post-breach problem before ransomware was a mainstream enterprise concernThe mechanics of building a GTM motion without analyst validation or category definitionWhy evangelism and selling are fundamentally different motions — and what confusing them costs youHow Illumio used voice of the customer as their sole strategic compass for nearly a decadeThe deliberate, multi-month process behind crystallizing "the Breach Containment Company" positioningHow to think about Gartner and Forrester as an early-stage founder without getting burnedHow Illumio approaches RSA across three distinct layers most companies collapse into oneGTM Lessons For B2B Founders:Selling and evangelizing are different motions — staff and spend accordingly: When Illumio went to market, they weren't walking into rooms where buyers had already identified the problem. They were spending as much time establishing why the problem mattered as they were positioning the solution — and they had to do all of that before the word "Illumio" even came up. Andrew's distinction is operationally important: evangelism means convincing someone to care about something they've never thought about; selling means competing for a decision already in motion. If you're pre-category, you are evangelizing. The implications for hiring, quota design, and sales cycle expectations are entirely different. Staffing a 200-person enterprise sales org before the category exists is how you burn your runway.Without analyst validation, your only GTM compass is early adopters — go find them deliberately: Illumio made a conscious strategic decision: without Gartner or Forrester organizing the market, they were, by definition, only accessible to early adopters. So they stopped trying to sell to everyone and got specific about who early adopters actually are. Andrew's profile: large global organizations, heavily concentrated in financial services, with the institutional DNA to evaluate and adopt something before the mass market has a framework for it. The lesson isn't to wait for the market — it's to map where the early adopters are concentrated and build your entire GTM motion around getting in front of them.// 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