Vidya Raman, Partner @ Sorensen Ventures, shares her best practices for developing a strong enterprise GTM strategy & why this is such a challenging thing to do as a new founder. We also dive into blindspots that highly technical founders may possess, balancing the technical aspects of founding with the anthropological side, product considerations when building for enterprise, timing new product releases, developing & articulating your product roadmap. Plus how to identify and build your “wedge,” & avoid becoming simply a point solution. We also cover how to tackle a common founder concern – honing your sales skills – and when to know it’s time to bring in a non-technical co-founder.
Vidya Raman, Partner @ Sorensen Ventures, shares her best practices for developing a strong enterprise GTM strategy & why this is such a challenging thing to do as a new founder. We also dive into blindspots that highly technical founders may possess, balancing the technical aspects of founding with the anthropological side, product considerations when building for enterprise, timing new product releases, developing & articulating your product roadmap. Plus how to identify and build your “wedge,” & avoid becoming simply a point solution. We also cover how to tackle a common founder concern – honing your sales skills – and when to know it’s time to bring in a non-technical co-founder.
Vidya Raman joined Sorenson Ventures in 2019 from Cloudera, where she led the ML platform, the fastest-growing product line in the company’s history at the time. There, she was responsible for making ML at scale a reality for customers spanning industries such as autonomous driving, biotech, banking, and government. Before that, she led engineering and product teams at venture-backed enterprise startups, including eMeter (Sequoia-funded, acquired by Siemens) and Silver Spring Networks (Kleiner funded, IPO exit).
Throughout her career, Vidya has worked with teams that have taken more than a dozen products from mere ideas to many millions in revenue and eventually to product-market fit. She draws on her rich set of successes and failures, helping founders navigate the journey to product-market fit while at the same time being an eternal student in the constantly evolving world of go-to-market techniques.
Vidya is passionate about partnering with technical founders who think in first principles, dream big, and are keen to build businesses that stand the test of time. Vidya’s primary focus is on startups that build for the builders, i.e., tools used by engineers.
Working with companies in their earliest stages is her passion. She believes that the opportunity to have the most meaningful and direct impact is at that stage.
Outside of work, she loves spending time in nature and reading. Her favorite genre includes biographies (all-time favorite: Nelson Mandela), behavioral economics, and psychology (favorite: Thinking fast, slow). She is a die-hard Harry Potter fan, and her favorite spell is Wingardium Leviosa.
"There is something about selling to enterprises that goes beyond what's on the surface of what you offer as a product. To me, that became about how do you enable the people first and foremost and then the business. It's not actually the other way around. Oftentimes, I've seen that products which get embraced within enterprises have enabled someone to become a hero, oftentimes a superhero. That is how human doing business is actually. Even for very, very technical enterprise products.”
- Vidya Raman
Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host
Jerry Li - Co-Host
Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/
Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/
Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/