Founders in Conversation: Building GTM Motions Across Startup Stages
AI Innovation Exchange Day: Fireside Chat
Founders in Conversation: Building GTM Motions Across Startup Stages
About the Event
Building a great product is only the beginning. The real challenge is taking that product to market, finding the right customers, building a repeatable growth engine, and evolving the organization as the company scales.
This fireside chat brings together founders and technology leaders at different stages of the startup journey for an honest, practical conversation about what it takes to build and scale a go-to-market motion. Hosted in partnership with AWS, Wisdom Tree, and the MIT Sloan Alumni Club of Northern California, the session skips prepared presentations and rehearsed talking points. It focuses on real experiences: what worked, what didn't, and how GTM strategies evolve from early traction to growth and, eventually, scale.
Whether you're a founder building your first GTM motion, a startup leader navigating the next stage of growth, an enterprise executive curious how high-growth companies scale, or an investor following AI-native businesses, you'll hear practical perspectives from leaders who have lived these stages.
What to Expect
A 60-minute, informal, highly conversational discussion between three leaders at different stages of the startup and growth journey. The conversation covers three stages:
Early Stage: Finding Initial GTM Traction: How to find your first customers once you have an MVP, what signals show you're solving a real problem, and how to balance product development with getting into the market and learning quickly.
Growth Stage: Building Repeatable Systems: How companies build scalable sales, marketing, customer success, and product processes without losing the agility that got them started.
Scale Stage: Building the Engine for Scale: How teams, product strategy, demand generation, leadership structures, and operating systems need to evolve as GTM becomes an organizational challenge as much as a commercial one.
Why You Should Attend
Founder and leader perspectives: Hear directly from founders and senior technology leaders at different stages of company growth.
GTM evolution: Understand how strategies change from initial traction to repeatable growth and scale.
Lessons from the field: Learn from real challenges, pivots, and decisions.
Practical takeaways: See how product, sales, marketing, and organizational growth connect.
Community: Meet a curated group of founders, enterprise leaders, investors, and MIT Sloan alumni.
Featured Speakers
Harish Doddala (SVP & General Manager, Harness) is a senior technology leader with experience taking products and businesses through increasingly complex stages of growth. He will speak to how GTM motions evolve beyond initial traction, including building repeatable systems, aligning teams around growth, and creating the organizational structure that supports scale.
Jerry Shu (Co-Founder & CTO, Daylit) brings a founder's perspective on building a company from the ground up and finding the right path to market. He will share the early-stage realities of building a product, finding initial customer traction, and deciding what has to change as early signals turn into a sustainable growth motion.
Debjani Deb (Co-Founder & Member of the Board of Directors, Session AI | MIT Alum) is a founder building and scaling a technology company. She will speak to evolving GTM strategy as a company grows, from understanding customer needs and sharpening product-market fit to building the teams, demand generation, and operating systems needed for the next stage.
Moderators
Chetan Bhargava (Co-Founder, Wisdom Tree | MIT Sloan Fellow) brings experience at the intersection of technology, business, and innovation, and will guide the conversation on the practical realities of building companies, taking products to market, and scaling growth.
Anar Shah (Board Member, MIT Sloan Club of Northern California) brings a strategic perspective and will help facilitate an open exchange of experiences across the startup stages. Together they will keep the discussion informal, candid, and focused on lessons from the real world.