90% of Startups Fail: What $100m Sales Teams Do Differently with Ethan Schechter

90% of Startups Fail: What $100m Sales Teams Do Differently with Ethan Schechter

Author: Venture Guides December 11, 2025 Duration: 26:41
Leadership in high-growth environments comes with moments of pressure, complexity, and rapid change. For go-to-market executives, your approach in those moments sets the tone for the entire team. In this episode of Built Not Born, Ethan Schechter shares how he keeps teams laughing through the lows, turns competition and collaboration into motivation, and helps build startups that endure when many don’t. Sage Nye sits down with Ethan Schechter, a go-to-market leader and SVP of Global Sales & Customer Success at Qodo, to discuss what it really takes to build high-performing sales teams from the ground up. Ethan shares how to balance structure with creativity, foster accountability, and turn failure into growth. From his “Passion, Mastery, Accountability” hiring framework to practical insights on cross-functional selling and customer success alignment, this conversation offers a blueprint for scaling revenue engines that endure the chaos of startup growth.

Sage Nye, Managing Partner at Venture Guides, hosts Built Not Born: The Startup Go-To-Market Podcast, a series built on the premise that lasting companies are engineered, not discovered by chance. This podcast moves beyond theoretical advice to focus on the tangible mechanics of launching and scaling a business, specifically for founders and leaders in the early, precarious stages. Each episode features frank discussions with a range of voices crucial to the journey-technical founders who have navigated product-market fit, investors who scrutinize traction, and go-to-market experts who specialize in building repeatable sales engines. The conversations are candid by design, stripping away the glossy narratives to examine what actually worked, what failed, and why. Listeners will find a resource devoid of fluff, where proven playbooks and operational realities take center stage. It’s for those who understand that strategy is meaningless without execution, and that a bulletproof go-to-market plan is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Tune in for the real talk needed to translate vision into viable, growing revenue.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 16

Built Not Born: The Startup Go-To-Market Podcast
Podcast Episodes
Beyond Capital: How Venture Guides is Redefining the Venture Playbook [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 23:37
Welcome to Built Not Born: The Startup Go-To-Market Podcast, the podcast for early-stage founders and startup leaders who know that great companies aren’t lucky… they’re built through smart execution and a bulletproof go…
Trailer [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:31
Welcome to Built Not Born: The Startup Go-To-Market Podcast—the podcast for early-stage founders and startup leaders who know that great companies aren’t lucky… they’re built through smart execution and a bulletproof go-…