Hi everyone welcome to the A6 and Z podcast I am Sonel and in this episode part of our ongoing founder

operator series which you can find more of at a six and z.com slash founder stories is about founders wrestling with how to evolve

their roles from product to sales and the question of bringing in an external

CEO or not.

The conversation took place as a hallway style chat and features A6 and C general partner

Martine Cassado, who co-founded and was C.T.O. of Nysera, and shared his own journey, lessons learned and advice for founders at

A6cency.com. External CEO.

And then the voice you'll hear after both of ours is Armand-Dadgar, the co-founder and

CTO of Cloud Infrastructure Automation Company,

Hashicorp, which enables enterprises to provision, secure, connect,

and run any infrastructure for any application.

And while the two share their own journeys, our conversation is really more broadly about

the phases that all leaders and startups go through, though they may end up in different

places.

In this discussion, we touch on everything from managing one zone psychology to managing specific

tactics, discuss swim lanes, and what enterprise sales means for CEOs and more,

but we begin by outlining different mental models for describing different phases of leading

a company.

So I feel like leaders and startups go through three phases.

And startups require three different types of leadership phases.

The first one is a product phase. So if you're going to be a leader of a startup early on,

you have to be a product leader. And your goal is to find product market fit, which is

...