Selling Without a Sales Team: How Railway Scaled GTM to $100M+ with Under 10 Reps | Rahul Parmar

Matt Cohen (0:02)

I would say, the number one thing that Google did for me, was it gave me confidence in the road. It's like a shield, right? You're like, I'm at Google. And do I get paid if we don't sell? Absolutely not. But is Google gonna be fine? Absolutely, right? And so I used to like tell myself, I'm like, whether I show up to work today or not, Google will make $400 million. Like, and that was the math of the time. I was like, we're making 400 million bucks a day. Like, great. Now I would also like to get rich. So how do I do that? And so I would show up to these customers and we'd be very transparent. My view on selling and it handles through through software startups early stage is like, tell them what you do, tell them what you don't do, and then shut up. Like, that is the game. Welcome back to Tank Talks. I'm your host, Matt Cohen, founder and managing partner of Ripple Ventures. And today's guest is Rahul Parmar, head of go-to-market at Railway and venture partner with us at Ripple. Rahul has an impressive track record, building and scaling sales functions at high growth companies, from being one of the very first sales hires on Google's cloud business in London, to building Drata's sales engine from Series A through Explosive Growth, and now leading GTM for one of the most compelling developer infrastructure platforms in the market at Railway. In this conversation, we explore the real truths of building a GTM team in the AI era of selling, and why humans can never replace the art of selling to enterprises. We also discuss why Rahul believes Canadian talent and founders don't need to apologize for building here and how we maintain such a high demanding leadership roles for Bay Area based companies while staying in Toronto. And finally, we discuss the durable advantages that actually exist in Canada and what it takes to build a high impact career without relocating. Now let's jump into the tank for this week's episode with Rahul from Railway. Rahul, what's up? Why are you doing this? I can't believe we've roped you into this. It's going to be really good or really bad. But thanks so much for joining us in the tank today. Yeah, I'm going to try to be not crazy spicy and not torch my entire online and professional career. But yeah, with the three followers you have, it won't be that bad. There's at least 30 At least 30 Okay. Well, for our listeners, who don't know about you, Rahul Parmar, tell us a bit about your background. You've had a journey through sales, starting at Google, working early at Drata, Railway Now. Tell us about your role. So I've had a fun ride, I would say. Probably a ride that may not be that replicable now. I did a bunch of stuff coming out of business school that isn't super relevant, but then I built a company in Vancouver with a few buddies called Lighthouse Labs, then became Canada's largest coding bootcamp, or one of, I should say. I went from that to Google Cloud, so I was one of the first hires for Google Cloud in London. I think I was the fifth or sixth seller for that market. This is back when the first all hands I joined, we got a spreadsheet pricing calculator for all of GCP. So very, very, very early. Revenue of GCP at the time was? Under 100 million. Wow. Under 100 million, which sounds actually crazy large, but for a startup. Yeah, but for the scale of Google, it was an inconsequential bet. The entire org fit in one hangout.

So pretty crazy to do that. I did that for six years across Dublin, London and Toronto. Came back in 2019 I went from that to Drata. As you said, I was the first sales leader there, kind of subbed in for the founders and took over a small existing sales team and then scaled that out series A to series C. I'm sure we have some questions on that, so that'll be fun. Then now I'm at Railway, which was a series A company when I joined, is now series B. We'll see where it goes from here. Seeing really explosive growth, I would argue much faster than we saw at Drata. So kind of crazy for us to be on.

Lots of interesting learnings there from what's happening with AI coming on, which again we can talk about, but that's it. And then there are the angel checks on the way, and that's kind of it. A couple of angel checks. Yeah, we'll get into that as well. But talk to us about why Google is such a great training ground for salespeople, especially at the time that you joined with basically just a laptop. Yeah. So it's such an interesting idea. If you talk to seasoned salespeople, like your sales force, whatever, they're like, Google doesn't understand sales. And actually, I don't disagree with that very much, but Google is one of the few places you could join a business like GCP, as small as it is, and you have access to every CEO in the world pretty much instantly. You were focusing on a specific market. I had a couple of different markets, but I started in the UK and I was on agency and ad tech. So if you don't know, I mean, everybody knows today that Google's biggest business is ads. And so I looked after three of Google's top six customers Google-wide. So that would be your things like Dentsu, WBP, Omnicom, multi-billion-dollar ad spenders who had no cloud footprint whatsoever and did not know Google Cloud existed. And so my job was to get in there. And I did that in every way you would do it as an early AE, right? I called the ads people, I was like, do you have a meeting? Can I come with you? Give me 10 minutes at the end, like all of these different ways to try to get in. And the thing about Google that's amazing there is like, you are immediately in the VP or C-suite with these agencies talking about what Google can offer. Now, they are very funnily enough, like anti-Google in many ways, because they feel themselves to be in bed already quite aggressively with Google. And so putting more stuff on Google is quite scary for them. You are fighting yourselves. Yeah, you are friends, but not really, right? You are frenemies. And so that was a super cool experience. I was like, imagine that was my first real sales job where I wasn't the founder selling something. And it's immediately you are in boardrooms at like Fortune 500, Fortune 50, right? That's a lot of pressure. It's a lot of pressure. And I think it just forces you to, like I'm the kind of person where pressure makes you show up and do the job, right? Without pressure, I don't really. Where did that come from? Honestly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would say the answer there is it always kind of worked for me, so I didn't change it. You know what I mean? Like I'm very much like rise to the occasion kind of guy. Some people are, I prep every day. I'm always ready. I am like deadline is next week. Now we have to like really turn the jets on. That's just who I am. I think fundamentally it's never failed me. And to like I'm extremely driven in bursts. So my energy levels are very much like sprint, break, sprint, break, sprint, break. And that's how I've always. Do you remember your first big enterprise deal that you landed at UCP and like what was it that finally clicked to win that first one?