GTMfor.dev · Essence × Zetta Partners
GTM for
Technical
Founders.
Go-to-market foundations, strategies and tactics for early-stage technical founders building the next generation of AI and infrastructure tools.
Episodes
- Selling a replacement for a tool developers have used for decades, and how to win on switching costs
- How Warp landed its first thousand true believers and grew to nearly a million developers
- Monetizing a free developer tool without breaking trust
- Repositioning mid-flight: navigating the shift from terminal to agentic development environment
- Open source as a go-to-market strategy, and what the first weeks taught him
- How Iceberg went from internal project to industry standard — and what was intentional about that
- What it actually takes to build a company on top of an open source project you created
- How Tabular found its early customers and what GTM motions worked (and didn't) for an infra-layer product
- Navigating pricing and packaging when your core technology is free
- The Databricks acquisition — how it came together and what founders should understand about timing an exit
- What Ryan would do differently if he were starting from scratch today
- What GTM motion CodeRabbit used to gain serious early traction
- Pricing strategy — what they tried, what broke, and what worked
- Building a developer community that actually converts (not just vibes)
- When to hire sales vs. when founders should stay in the deal
- The mistakes worth making and the ones worth avoiding entirely
About GTMfor.dev
As investors and practitioners, Apoorva, Tim and Naomi hope to share their experiences, failures and successes — and help equip the next generation of technical founders with the right GTM toolkit. You'll hear from serial entrepreneurs and fellow founders and get practical guides and examples that you can bring back and apply to your startup.
Your hosts
Apoorva is a partner at Zetta Venture Partners. He focuses on investing in early stage, deeply technical AI teams. His journey with venture started more than a decade back at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Prior to Zetta, Apoorva was the VP of Enterprise Sales at Quid, a growth-stage NLP and ML platform, and before that co-founder of Funnl Labs, an ML platform focused on aggregating and personalizing communication. Apoorva's deep understanding of go-to-market design and appreciation for technical insight gives him a unique lens when it comes to all aspects of investing and working with technical founders.
Naomi is the Head of Platform at Essence VC, passionate about supporting early-stage technical founders through their startup journey. Prior to Essence, she spent six years at Formative Search Partners helping startups like Retool, Dataminr, and CircleCI scale their GTM and Engineering teams. With over a decade of B2B GTM experience, Naomi has built and led sales, post-sales, marketing, and RevOps functions across both VC-backed and bootstrapped startups.
Tim is the Managing Partner at Essence VC, with a decade of experience leading engineering in enterprise infrastructure and open source communities. Prior to Essence, he was SVP of Engineering at Cosmos, a popular open source blockchain SDK. Before that, Tim co-founded Hyperpilot with Stanford Professor Christos Kozyrakis — leveraging decades of research to disrupt enterprise infrastructure — which later exited to Cloudera. He was also an early employee at Mesosphere and CloudFoundry. Tim is an active Apache member and open source contributor.
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