The Day Paddle's Entire Sales Team Quit, And What It Taught Harrison Rose About Building GTM Teams That Last

Harrison Rose (0:00)

It's not good enough for me to be like, good, or necessarily even really good. It's like, I want to be the best, and then when I become the best at something, I want to be better at every single time I do it, and like really redefine what great looks like. Like nothing motivates me more than being told something is not possible, and then not only proving them that it's possible, but completely overwhelming them as to how good the answer or the outcome I'm gonna deliver is. Like I live for it.

Danielle Parker (0:34)

Welcome to Human-First, the GTM Hiring Show. I'm your host Danielle Parker, and we also have Chris Gannon, founder of Captivate Talent as our co-host today, live in London. Most founders who have built something extraordinary have a moment that they don't talk about much. The moment where something went badly wrong with the GTM team, and they have to figure out what exactly they missed. Our guest today talks about that moment openly, the day his entire sales team at Paddle quit, and what he learned from that is now shaping how he builds a new go-to-market team at Good Fit, especially in the age where AI is making a lot of go-to-market hiring decisions obsolete. Harrison Rose co-founded Paddle at 18, and helped scale it to unicorn status.

Now he's building Good Fit, a platform designed to answer the question every founder needs to answer before they hire. Who should you actually be selling to?

Harrison, thank you so much for joining us today. It's so exciting to see you here in London. So we're going to get right into it. So you co-founded Paddle the day you got your A-level results at 18, which I'm not even fully sure I know what an A-level result is, but we'll leave that till later.

Harrison Rose (1:39)

They did not, to be fair. They're nasty at all, man.

Danielle Parker (1:43)

Most people are not hiring anyone, managing anyone, founding a company at that time in their life. So how did you figure that out? How did you figure out what hiring was supposed to look like, and leading, and managing? What was that like?

Harrison Rose (1:56)

Yeah. I probably didn't figure it out for quite a long time, which is maybe the problem. It's interesting. At that age, I didn't know about the world. I was walking into it too early. My co-founder Christian had been reading S1 since he was about seven, whereas I knew nothing about the world, knew nothing about VC. I didn't know what go-to-market was, but we got started. And then there's the ignorance and arrogance, I guess, of being 18, of just like, yeah, I can do this.

I can work this out. I didn't know you were meant to hire an expertise or anything like this. So I think those two things helped me in the early days. But really, I think because I didn't know I could go and hire people, or this expertise existed, or even considered whether it existed, I think we didn't hire anyone really or grow a team for quite a long time.

I think this played itself out throughout the early years of Padouin that I did every role before we hired for it, whether that was BDRing, Solutions Engineering, Account Manager. I did everything because I guess I must have been thinking from first principles because it's all I had, but before I hired anyone to do anything, I needed to work out what is I needed them to do. But I think that ended up serving us relatively well.

Christopher Gannon (3:08)

Harrison, hitting that critical point, I mean, you've mentioned before 2-3 million was roughly where you were at before you were in the founder-led sales trap. How did you figure out that was a trap internally? What were the signals you saw?

Harrison Rose (3:21)

Yeah. I think that increasingly in Europe, I'm hearing people talk about the founder-led sales trap, but we worked with Notion Capital at Good Fit and they name it something even more disastrous sounding. I wish I could remember off the top of my head, but it's like where startups in Europe go to die, like this 2-5 million ARR point, they've often raised the Series A and they're struggling to get to the B, and I think it's because a lot of them are falling into this founder-led trap, where for those that don't know listening in, you've been selling via your own network or maybe some VC intros or some credibility, and you're struggling to grow beyond that. I think we did a hell of a lot wrong, which I know we're going to talk about today.