Balancing shifting priorities, leveraging your founder network, and navigating cost vs. value w/ Sumeet Vaidya @ Crafting

In this episode, we cover some of the most important founder challenges, including engineering management, prioritization / time management principles, analyzing the market, and making the decision to sell to enterprise early on with Sumeet Vaidya, Co-founder & CEO @ Crafting. He unpacks the story behind Crafting & the decision to found it along with how he knew he was the right person to lead this org. Patrick & Sumeet dissect GTM strategies when it comes to enterprise sales, how funnel optimization for sales works, and making business decisions while navigating cost vs. value. We also chat about the importance of forming founder-to-founder connections as you navigate the founder journey – it’s definitely better with others than alone.

ABOUT SUMEET VAIDYA

Prior to co-founding Crafting, Sumeet has scaled engineering teams and built products at Meta, Uber, and Discord. He has worked on developer platforms, consumer products, marketplaces, enterprise integrations, and more. He also angel invests and advises startup founders, motivated by helping sharp people solve real problems to build successful businesses.

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SHOW NOTES:

• The origin story behind Crafting & challenges in eng management (2:56)
• Dissecting Sumeet’s decision to found the company (5:28)
• Questions & processes for analyzing founder conviction from an investor POV (7:00)
• How to know if you’re the right person to lead this org (8:45)
• Analyzing the market / competitors & determining your product’s differentiators (11:34)
• Go-to-market strategy & enterprise sales (14:07)
• Optimizing for enterprise sales early on / understanding PMF (16:15)
• Why you need to leverage your founder network for advice (17:45)
• Frameworks for determining gaps in the sales funnel (20:55)
• Exploring happiness and connection (22:31)
• Sumeet’s perspective on prioritization & time management as a founder (24:45)
• Balancing cost vs. value in business decisions (27:11)
• Remote vs. in-person team dynamics for eng & sales (31:00)
• Hiring the first non-engineer (34:45)
• Rapid fire questions (38:54)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• https://www.themarginalian.org/

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

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/