From BDR to YC Founder: Simon Ooley’s GTM Playbook for 0 to 1
Key Takeaways
- Sell Use Cases, Not Features: Simon's core thesis: enterprise buyers don't buy features—they buy the specific outcome the feature unlocks. Anchor every conversation in a concrete use case with measurable ROI.
- BDR Foundations Compound Into Founder Skills: The discipline Simon built as a BDR—daily activity, fast iteration on messaging, callous-thick rejection tolerance—is the same skill set early-stage founders need to do their first 50 sales calls.
- Procore and Builder Taught Pattern Recognition: Enterprise sales at scale builds a pattern library: deal shapes, objection types, buying committee dynamics. Those patterns transfer directly into a founder's first GTM motion.
- Sales Roles Are Merging Under GTM: The SDR/AE/CSM split is collapsing. Modern startups need fewer, broader operators who own the full revenue motion—Simon designs Veles' GTM around that reality.
- Urgency Is Manufactured, Not Found: Buyers rarely arrive with urgency. Great discovery surfaces the cost of inaction in dollars and weeks, which is what turns a polite "interesting" into a signed contract.
- YC Forced Speed-to-Customer-Feedback: YC's pressure cooker meant Simon couldn't hide behind a 6-month build cycle—he had to be in front of buyers in week one, which set Veles' GTM speed permanently.
- Founder-Led Sales Is the Only Way at 0-to-1: Hiring a sales rep before product-market fit is the classic 0-to-1 mistake. Founders carry the urgency, conviction, and product depth that a rep can't fake in those first conversations.
Key Topics
Use cases, not just features. That’s howSimon Ooley, co-founder of Veles, a YC-backed startup reshaping how enterprise sales teams engage buyers, and former sales leader at Procore and Builder, reframes the future of enterprise sales.
Instead of selling products, he helps teams sell outcomes anchored in urgency, ROI, and the real problems customers are trying to solve. In this episode of the B2B Go-To-Market Leaders podcast, Simon joins Vijay to unpack his journey from BDR to founder and YC-backed entrepreneur.
Choose Your Path
Make the call from where you are.
GTM TEAMS
You already have a motion. It’s not fully working at your current stage.
Fix the motion before you scale it.
FOUNDERS
You are the GTM motion. It doesn’t scale.
Make it repeatable before you hire into it.
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