Shift & Thrive Podcast:
CEO Insights on Driving Change

What does it take for a lifelong engineer to build a high-growth services firm on a foundation of radical transparency and relentless speed? In this episode of Shift & Thrive, host Natalie Nathanson sits down with Tameem Hourani, Founder and CEO of RapDev, a firm that helps enterprises modernize their technology environments with speed, automation, and best-in-class implementations. Named Datadog's Partner of the Year four times, RapDev has grown to over 130 people since its founding in 2019. Tameem shares the hard lessons of scaling sales as a technical founder, why he wired transparency into RapDev from day one, and how bold hiring decisions made with less money in the bank than a new employee's salary turned out to be the best bets he ever made. He also breaks down how RapDev thinks about AI, not as a standalone offering but as a way of working woven into every part of the business.

Is your go-to-market strategy built for today's buyers, or are you still relying on playbooks that no longer work? In this special Best of Season 2 compilation, Natalie Nathanson brings together some of the most impactful conversations from founders, CMOs, operators, and investors who are redefining growth in the age of AI. It pulls together some of the season's most brilliant GTM strategists, fractional CMOs, and venture capitalists to discuss why the old playbooks are dead, how to uncover the true story behind your data, and what it takes to compete in an increasingly crowded and rapidly evolving market. Throughout the episode, guests share practical lessons on defining the right ICP, understanding the business impact behind pipeline metrics, and uncovering customer insights that data alone can't reveal. They also explore how organizations are scaling marketing teams with AI, leveraging untraditional tactics like influencer pods and community-led growth, and using category creation to establish market leadership. Whether you're a founder, CEO, marketer, or revenue leader, this episode offers actionable strategies for building a smarter, more modern go-to-market engine.

Scaling out of founder-led sales is one of the most critical, yet deeply misunderstood transitions any B2B company will ever face. In the early days, no one sells the vision better than the founder. The passion, the relationships, and the storytelling instinct all lives with the person who built the thing. But as companies mature, the scrappy hustle that fueled early growth eventually stops working, and that inflection point demands a different approach entirely. In this special compilation episode of Shift & Thrive, host Natalie Nathanson brings together some of the sharpest voices ever featured on the show to unpack the necessity of early founder sales, the often-overlooked difference between founder market fit and product market fit, and the principle that separates companies that scale well from those that stall: the goal is to bottle the founder's magic, not replace it with a professional sales hire and hope for the best.

What does it actually take to lead a commercial transformation before anyone else believes in it, and what happens when the biggest threat to closing a deal is not your competitor, but your buyer's fear of being wrong? In this Investor Spotlight episode of Shift & Thrive, host Natalie Nathanson sits down with Paul Terry, global go-to-market leader, advisor, and investor at Tech Operators, who brings over 25 years of experience building and scaling international sales teams. Paul shares the hard-earned lessons from leading one of the earliest social selling rollouts at Forrester Research in 2012, before LinkedIn Sales Navigator was even a household name. He and Natalie dig into the evolution of B2B buyer behavior, the FOMU (fear of messing up) phenomenon that is quietly killing deals, and the practical frameworks Paul uses today when advising early and mid-stage tech founders on ICP, international expansion, and go-to-market clarity. Candid, grounded, and full of real examples, this conversation is one every GTM leader and founder needs to hear.

What if the reason your go-to-market isn't working has nothing to do with your tactics and everything to do with how your leadership team defines, owns, and executes it in the first place? In this Re-air episode of Shift & Thrive, host Natalie Nathanson is joined by Sangram Vajre, Co-Founder and CEO of GTM Partners, bestselling author of Move, and pioneer of account-based marketing, for a candid conversation on what it really means to build go-to-market as a company-wide operating system. Together, they explore why GTM must live at the CEO level, how the eight-question GTM operating system drives clarity across every stage of business growth, and what it looks like when AI is layered on top of strategic foundations versus used as a shortcut around them.