The people power of events, community, and partnerships in GTM.
Science to Silicon Valley to Disney and now AI.
Biotech. Automated drug discovery & robotics.
Yahoo. Modernized a $156M media P&L.
Disney. Interactive, Imagineering, then the first partnerships hire on Disney+. 150M+ subscribers, 100+ countries.
The AI Collective. In service of founders and AI-curious as NYC chapter lead. 15+ events hosted, 25K to 250K members worldwide.
Now: Eve. Founding team, Partnerships & Ecosystem.
“GTM” means everything that is not code.
Today’s focus
Human-led and high touch. Built on real relationships, not sequences.
They drive revenue now and compound into an ecosystem later.
And they get you out of the co-working space. Conversation is a lost art.
Every lead sits somewhere on a temperature scale.
I skip the cold end entirely.
Cold. Strangers. You are an interruption with a calendar link.
Warm. They know you, or know someone who does. They take the call, hear you out, and tell you the truth.
Hot. They came to you. Enjoy it. It is rare.
Cold still works. It is just the most expensive trust you will ever buy.
Three operators, three cities, three networks.
We are running warm as a real experiment: expand discovery, validate assumptions, re-ignite relationships we already earned.
Sweep our own worlds first. People who already trust us take the meeting, hear us out, and tell us the truth.
Every conversation is signal. New segments, new objections, new partners we did not know we had.
And the best relationships do not stay leads. They become advocates.
Direct sales is inference.
I am training a model that sells.
Ambassadors
Customers who love Eve sell it, and earn the product by selling. Reinforcement learning with a very honest reward function.
Referrals
The network gets paid to open doors we would never find on our own.
Bundles
Fractionals and agencies price Eve inside their own offers. Their pipeline becomes ours.
Friends of Eve
No incentive at all. They intro, amplify, and vouch anyway. 3 already on the books. Value from unlabeled data.
Instrument the human motion.
Warm does not mean vibes. Every conversation enters a pipeline the moment it happens.
scores upcoming events against our ICPs before I commit a night
name tag in bubble letters, obviously
recorded on the walk to the subway, while the details are fresh
meeting notes, automatic
every contact, tagged to the event or community that produced it
scores every source on what it actually converts
Built in Claude Code. Runs every week. The dashboard decides where I spend my nights.
My own network outscores every event I attended. That is the whole thesis in one bar. And communities now out-convert events two to one.
The two-minute conversation is an eval.
Do they ask real questions, or just wait for their turn to pitch?
Are they generous by default? Intros, ideas, attention.
Do they light up about anything at all?
Would I stand in this pizza line with them again?
A ranking system with evals to tune after events. Includes cool factor.
01 · Start warm.
Your next ten customers already know someone you know.
02 · Show up as a person, not a pitch.
I connect as Paula first. Eve comes up when it should.
03 · Instrument the motion.
Score events and communities the way you score ad channels.
04 · Build channels that compound.
Ambassadors, referrals, bundles, friends. Trust accrues like interest.
05 · Give before you ask.
Harvest tastefully. No grifting. Be transparent.
06 · Get out and about.
See and be seen is not just important. For an early-stage founder it is existential.
Be Cool.