Building GTM Engineering @ Rox I Ex-Founder, Ramp, Vanta I Angel Investing · 6w ago
Super excited to join Rox to build GTM Engineering.
After spending the last few years building in GTM AI, I’ve developed some pretty strong opinions about what defining the future of GTM + AI looks like:
1) It needs both the pipes and the action. You need to be able to get data across your context, systems, and graph — and then actually do something with it.
2) The winner needs to have pull across SMB, MM, and Enterprise. AI has the opportunity to change how the job gets done, not just build a better solution for one segment.
3) You need the full package: people, product, founder-market fit, funding, and distribution to build a category-defining company.
That’s what drew me to Rox.
The talent density here is incredible, the product maps closely to what I’ve come to believe about GTM + AI, and the ambition is appropriately insane.
I’m beyond grateful to get to be a small part of this team. Thank you to Steve, Adam, Ishan, and Erin for pulling me in close, sharing your vision for where this space is going, and giving me the opportunity to help build it.
After spending a lot of time thinking about what I believed should exist in this market, I’m excited to keep building toward it.
Jake Heenehan
Building GTM Engineering @ Rox I Ex-Founder, Ramp, Vanta I Angel Investing · 4w ago
AI is killing a lot of the function models we built companies around.
And GTM Engineering is the case study where it is happening.
I spent the last few years building a company in GTM AI. Now I’m on the other side, building GTM Engineering.
And one thing has become obvious:
We built entire functions around the fact that software was hard to build.
- Sales finds the problem.
- Product figures out the solution.
- Engineering builds it.
- Ops makes it work.
But building is commoditized with AI.
So the bottleneck shifts from:
Can you build it? --> Can you find the right problem and solve it?
That’s the opportunity collapsing into GTM Engineering.
- It’s not RevOps with Claude Code.
- It’s not SWE embedded in Sales.
- It’s a full-cycle builder who can find a hair-on-fire revenue problem and own it all the way through the solution.
Kudos to Clay for seeing that gap early and pioneering it.
But I think GTM Engineering is just the beginning.
As building gets cheaper, functions collapse.
And full-cycle builders emerges.
What function gets the "GTM Engineering" next?
Jake Heenehan
Building GTM Engineering @ Rox I Ex-Founder, Ramp, Vanta I Angel Investing · 4w ago
6 months into building a GTM AI company, I realized our product was great for demos.
But not nearly as good in the real world.
The model wasn’t the problem.
Context was.
- CRM knew the opportunity.
- Call transcripts knew the conversation.
- Slack knew the internal chatter.
- Email knew what happened next.
Connecting that data into an agent wasn’t enough.
The agent needed to understand how it all fit together.
Who knows who. What happened. What changed. What matters. What should happen next.
That’s context.
Turning fragmented enterprise data into a model of the world an agent can understand and act on.
Context → Intelligence → Action.
I underestimated the first part as a founder.
Now building GTM Engineering, I’m convinced:
💎 The best model won’t win GTM AI. The best context will.💎
Jake Heenehan
Building GTM Engineering @ Rox I Ex-Founder, Ramp, Vanta I Angel Investing · 3w ago
I watched a company spend ~$10M/year building GTM AI internally.
When you asked reps what they thought of what shipped.
They said ~50% of it wasn't useful.
That changed how I think about “build vs. buy.”
The problem wasn’t whether they could build it.
It was whether it was still the most important thing to build by the time they finished.
GTM moves fast.
- The bottleneck changes.
- The workflow changes.
- The goalposts move.
I saw this clearly even as a founder building GTM AI.
The goalposts moved by the time we built.
But being able to build something doesn’t mean you should.
The advantage isn’t being able to build anything.
It’s being able to build fast enough that the problem still matters when you ship.
That’s a big reason I joined Rox when I thought about building GTM engineering.
I get to start at floor 10 and spend my time solving real, present GTM problems instead of spending ~12 months building the foundation.
Which is how GTM Eng/Growth Eng gets to actually do what they came to do.
