The Go-To-Market For Scaling Startups With Ajit Deshpande
Key Takeaways
- GTM Evolves By Stage: Ajit's central insight: the GTM playbook that worked at seed dies at Series B. Operators who can't update their mental model with each stage produce diminishing returns.
- Marqeta's Modern Payments GTM: Ajit's role at Marqeta gave him a front-row seat to FinTech scaling. The GTM motion at issued-payments is unlike consumer FinTech and unlike pure B2B SaaS.
- Demand Gen at Scale Demands Operations: Volume without rigor produces vanity metrics. Ajit's investment in demand-gen operations is what turns campaign output into reliable pipeline.
- Startups Need Different Marketing at Each Stage: Ajit maps marketing investments across stages: brand at seed, demand at Series A/B, motion-specific at Series C+. Skipping a stage produces gaps that show up two years later.
- Mature Operators Build Repeatable Systems: The shift from doer to operator is when you stop doing campaigns and start building the system that produces campaigns. Ajit treats this transition as a leadership inflection.
- Payments Is a Specialty GTM: Issued-payment GTM has compliance, partnerships, and technical sales challenges that don't exist in horizontal SaaS. Ajit shows where the playbook diverges.
- VP Demand Gen as a Real Role: VP Demand Gen is sometimes treated as junior to VP Marketing. Ajit argues at scale it's a peer role—the pipeline accountability is too large to hand off.
Key Topics
Businesses go from one level to the next. The further you are along, the more complex your business strategy will become. In terms of the go-to-market, startups and mature businesses also differ in their approach.
Taking us through these stages, Vijay Damojipurapu invitesAjit Deshpande, the Vice President of Demand Generation atMarqeta, Inc. Here, Ajit shares his thoughts and observations between startups and businesses that are further along in the game and reveals some of the best practices of go-to-market leaders. He gives pieces of advice to leaders on building traction and scaling up from marketing to leading a team with experimentation and then reveals how they are working towards their goals in the company as a FinTech startup.
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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