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This week’s sponsor is AI CRM Attio (raised $52M from Google Ventures):

Attio is the AI-native CRM for the next era of companies: Connect your email and calendar, and Attio instantly builds a CRM that matches your business model — with all your companies, contacts, and interactions enriched with actionable insights.

With Attio, AI isn’t just a feature - it’s the foundation. You can do things like:

• Instantly prospect and route leads with research agents

• Get real-time insights from AI during customer conversations

• Build powerful AI automations for your most complex workflows

Fast-growing companies like Granola, Modal, Replicate and more are all experiencing the future of GTM with Attio. See it for yourself.

Try Attio Pro for FREE

This week I sat down with my friend Ignacio “Guli” Moreno, cofounder of Capchase, the fintech that has deployed more than $2B into SaaS startups.

Capchase started with a simple idea: founders shouldn’t be stuck with revenue in the future. By turning ARR into upfront cash, they gave SaaS companies speed without selling equity.

But the real playbook here isn’t just the product. It’s how Guli and team built trust in a new category, scaled globally, and designed culture as their ultimate GTM weapon:

What you’ll learn

• How to design culture as a GTM advantage

• The founder-led sales tactics that got Capchase its first customers

• Why EU startups needs to think global from day one

• How talent snowballs create ecosystems

Key takeaways

• MVP velocity wins trust: Capchase shipped its first working demo in 11 days on a $7 server, speed built confidence with investors and early customers.

• Category creation requires focus: Narrowing only to SaaS looked small, but enabled deep expertise, better underwriting, and founder trust.

• Culture = GTM strategy: Values like intellectual humility, builder attitude, and yes before no weren’t internal HR slogans, they were the operating system that shaped how customers perceived Capchase.

• Founder-led GTM: Guli and team didn’t wait for playbooks. They handled calls, cold outreach, and product tweaks directly, collapsing the feedback loop.

• Trust before growth: While competitors blitz-scaled and died when interest rates rose, Capchase grew cautiously, signaling reliability to customers.

• Flywheel of talent: Guli launched Exponential Fellowship, finding and sending the brightest builders in Spain on a life-changing experience to the US (get in touch with us!).

• EU’s mindset gap: Too many founders still think local. Guli’s lesson: Nordics think global because their market forces them to, Spain must too.

• High-agency behavior compounds: Whether it’s tinkering with an “electric eraser” at age 9 or sending cold DMs, Guli shows that small, consistent acts of initiative snowball over time.

That’s it! I’d love to hear from you, just reply to this email (I reply to all of them).

🤙

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Welcome to a Founder Podcast edition of Startup Riders:

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This week I sat down with Pablo Jimenez de Parga, co-founder of Throxy — the contrarian AI sales startup quietly replacing SDR teams with results-first automation.

But here’s the twist: it’s not a SaaS, and it’s not an AISDR product.

Throxy is a full-stack AI company that builds custom outbound systems, then runs them for you. Invisible UX, real meetings, full accountability. Their model = start manual, validate every step, then automate what works.

They’ve hit $1.5M ARR and are redefining what “venture-backable” looks like in the AI agency era.

📺 Help your boy, subscribe on YouTube!

What you’ll learn

• Why most outbound fails and how Throxy flips it

• Why AISDRs don’t work yet (and what replaces them)

• Why the “AI agency” model works

Key takeaways

1. Sales is still broken: Missed quotas, outdated tools, bad CRMs. Pablo’s insight: it’s not about better messaging, it’s about better targeting.

2. Account > persona > message: Most teams get this backwards. If the pain is real, the message can be weak, it’ll still land.

3. AISDRs failed the outcome test: Pablo’s team proved they could deliver meetings consistently, while most AI tools delivered... demos.

4. The full-stack agency bet: They don’t sell software. They run your outbound for you. Customers don’t care how, it just works.

5. Manual first, then automate: While others chased scale, Throxy stayed manual. They iterated by hand until they earned the right to automate.

6. Invisible UX = magic: Customers see dashboards, replies, and meetings. The AI scraping, enrichment, and filtering? All hidden behind the scenes.

7. GTM was founder-led brute force: Pablo handled 100% of growth. Cold emails, cold calls, statement of work, send, close, repeat.

8. No ops bloat, only functions that move the needle: Legal, finance, HR? Outsourced. Focus stays on growth, product, and engineering.

9. Fundraise fast or miss it: Base10 led their $6M round in record speed. Pablo’s tip: If you want to back top YC founders, move fast or get left out.

📺 Watch and subscribe on YouTube → Startup Riders on YouTube

🗣️ What do you want us to cover next? Hit reply or comment 🤙

Startup Riders

Surfing Tech Waves: AI markets + founder playbooks

By Ivan Landabaso

“Speed is non-negotiable — it’s the ultimate advantage.”

This week I sat down with Guillem Oliva, co-founder of Konvo AI — a vertical agent platform that’s quietly rewriting how e-commerce brands convert.

Konvo isn’t just another support bot. It’s a 24/7 agent that sells: combining brand context, product data, and live buyer signals to trigger real conversations and drive conversion. From live chat to proactive follow-ups, it turns intent into orders.

And it’s working: 200 customers, $500K ARR, and 8% average conversion — built with just a 4-person team. We backed them early, and I’m pumped to share the story.

Help your boy out, Subscribe on Youtube!

What you’ll learn

• Why most ecommerce campaigns convert <1% — and how Konvo unlocks 8%+

• How they went from kitchen MVP to 200 brands

• The real wedge behind “AI agents for commerce” (hint: it’s not just chat)

• How Konvo uses outbound, founder-led sales, and popcorn to win

• Why speed + craftsmanship > frameworks

Key takeaways

1. Co-founder match was founder-future-fit — Guillem and his co-founder aligned early on risk-taking, endurance mindset, and complementary skills — long before the startup idea.

2. MVP = results before product — They onboarded 30–40 customers with zero UI — just backend builds, consulting, and manual execution to deliver real outcomes.

3. 8% conversion > legacy channels — Konvo agents drive 8%+ conversion rates per convo, 10x above email/WhatsApp, by acting as actual sales closers.

4. Agent = proactive sales, not passive chat — Unlike typical bots, Konvo agents detect buyer intent mid-chat and auto-trigger contextual follow-up workflows.

5. Vertical AI > generic LLMs — Plugging in ChatGPT isn’t enough — Konvo builds guardrails, tone, product goals, and context into each brand-trained agent.

6. Own the customer, or lose the edge — As AI platforms become aggregators, every brand needs its own agent to retain conversion and control.

7. GTM began as founder-led brute force — First 100+ customers came from cold email/calling — with just one commercial person on a 4-person team.

8. GTM evolved into community flywheel — Focused on one region (Spain), built trust via offline dinners, creative campaigns (like 60kg popcorn drops), and vertical brand-building.

9. Find what works > scale what works — The playbook: test messy experiments that get results (e.g. popcorn), then figure out how to scale only after.

10. Speed is the real moat — Konvo’s core principle: obsess over detail and move fast — “Anything worth doing must be done fast, or it won’t happen.”

📺 Watch and subscribe on YouTube → Startup Riders on YouTube

🗣️ What do you want us to cover next? Hit reply or comment 🤙

Startup Riders

Surfing Tech Waves: AI markets + founder playbooks

By Ivan Landabaso

This week, I sat down with Clint Burgess, co-founder of CharacterQuilt and former PMM leader at Bloomreach (where we met!).

After running 500+ buyer interviews a year and watching insights die in decks, Clint built a GTM engine powered by AI agents trained on raw voice-of-customer data.

This isn’t a “copy faster” tool. It’s a full-stack marketing engine for founders — research, ICP match, messaging, campaign generation — all in minutes.

Help your boy, subscribe on YouTube!

What you’ll learn

• Why most GTM research never makes it to the final campaign

• The difference between a copy bot and an infused buyer agent

• How a single marketer can now run full campaigns end-to-end

• Where “10x marketers” are already using this to win deals, prep fundraises, and revive warm leads

6 key takeaways

• Campaigns die in committee: Even with great research, insights often get diluted before anything ships.

• Founders should act as PMMs first: Talk to customers. Understand the buyer. Translate that into your narrative and GTM strategy.

• AI ≠ copy monkey: CharacterQuilt trains agents on real interviews, so campaigns are based on actual pain — not GPT guessing.

• From docs to campaign in 30 minutes: Upload positioning materials. CQ scores ICP fit, predicts pain points, and suggests campaign angles + leads.

• One person can run full GTM loops: Research, creative, segmentation, execution — without a 20-person team.

• Used beyond marketing: Clint uses CQ for fundraising, event prep, and reviving 500+ warm leads stuck in Gong/Notion.

📺 Listen and subscribe on YouTube → Startup Riders on YouTube

🗣️ Tell me what you want to hear more of in the comments 🤙

Startup Riders

Learn from the top 1% of founders and investors. Each week, I study how great startups are built and funded—and share ideas you can use to build yours.

By Ivan Landabaso

Each month, I tackle founder-focused questions (send them here!).

Join 17K+ early-stage founders surfing tech waves:

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I write a newsletter about startups and investing. I share market maps, playbooks and tactical resources for founders surfing tech waves.

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Summary

1. 📈 Hubspot’s playbook: on scalable, predictable revenue growth.

2. 💡 Thinking: writing as a recruiting cheat-code.

3. 💵 Iberian Deals: 14 startup deals in Spain (>€50M).

📈 Hubspot’s 0-$100M Sales Playbook

Mark Roberge scaled Hubspot’s customer base from 0 to 12.000, and from 0 to $100M in revenue between 2007 and 2013.

Even though Mark came from a technical background (MiT Engineer), he was given a sales hat upon joining Hubspot as employee #3 (first sales job he ever had).

He wrote a remarkable playbook - The Sales Acceleration Formula. In it he lays out the 4 formulas he followed to achieve his mission.

What I love about this book is how he rejects the conventional wisdom that sales is more art than science. Most sales books focus on the “art of convincing” buyers.

This book does a 180 and presents the “science” of sales growth - basically a standardised and repeatable process built on tracking and experimentation.

The 4 main actionable “formulas” are a collection of repeatable processes, metrics, and calculations used to complete their mission of generating predictable scale:

1. Hiring: “Hire the same successful salesperson every time.”

2. Training: “Train every salesperson in the same way.”

3. Management: “Hold our salespeople accountable to the same sales process.”

4. Demand Generation: “Provide our salespeople with the same quality and quantity of leads every month.”

5. Technology & Experimentation: “developing a culture of experimentation.”

Let’s break it down a little further in case you want to action it.

1. The Sales Hiring Formula

“Hire the same successful salesperson every time.”

Data is king

The first year, Mark wrote down the 10 primary criteria he thought would correlate positively to successful sales hiring.

They defined what a score of a 1 to 3, or a 5 to 7, or an 8 to 10 would look like.

They were disciplined about scoring every single hire against that criteria.

Once 6-12 hires had been closed and they were able to assess their performance - they ran analyses to see what correlated to hiring success.

Here’s a regression analysis they ran in 2009 - which they used to continuously improve and refine their Candidate Assessment criteria:

The conclusion was fascinating: people misunderstood what “good sales skills” were - at least in Hubspot’s case.

When looking at the data, they saw:

1. “Traditional sales skills” (think car sales cliché) such as closing ability, convincing and objection handling, were negatively correlated with success.

2. And things that you would associate with a great consultant or a coach, like preparation, domain experience, and intelligence were highly correlated.

2. The Sales Training Formula

“Train every salesperson in the same way.”

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Welcome to a Growth edition.

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Summary

• ☠️ The Life & Death Of SDRs: A few learnings from a B2B SaaS startup.

• ⚡ Weekly Hack: Lanzarote Valley.

• 💵 Recent Deals in Spain: DudyFit, Atani, Ritmo and more!

• 💭 Thinking or Reading: Grow from discomfort.

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Summary

• 💵 Recent Deals in Spain: Glovo, Inbrain, Kenmei, Balio etc!

• 🏷️ Pricing Strategy: a big lever for startups and how to pull it.

• ⚡ Weekly Hack: T-shaped information diet.

• 💭 Thinking or Reading: No such thing as truly original?

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• ⭐ Minimum Viable Product: Y Combinator’s blueprint.

• 🏃 Crossing The Chasm: If Wealthfront did it, so can you.

• 💵 Recent Deals: Smart Protection, Paack, Ladorian and more!

• 💭Thinking or Reading: Death by powerpoint and Siddhartha.

Check out the Community Group to meet fellow riders and share your experience 🤙

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