For the past months I've been working on Wave - an open source, AI-native terminal that knows your context (we know, the hook still needs work). In this time, we've gone from zero daily active users (DAU) and zero GitHub stars at launch in November 2023 to approximately 3000 DAU and 12k GitHub stars today. My biggest lesson: The tried and trusted SaaS go-to-market (GTM) playbook doesn't apply for AI-native products. We're consciously breaking all my cardinal rules, such as:
Hosted by Startup Battlefield Editor Isabelle Johannessen, Build Mode is a survival guide for early-stage founders navigating the messy, high-stakes chaos of building a company from scratch. No sugarcoating. No hype. Just candid conversations and tactical advice from the people who've done it before and have the scars (and term sheets) to prove it. Starting November 13, Isabelle will sit down with founders, VCs, and operators to unpack the real stories behind the build.
In any enterprise application, user-provided data is often messy and incomplete. A user might sign up with a "company name," but turning that raw string into a verified domain, enriched with key technical or business contacts, is a common and challenging data engineering problem. For many development teams, this challenge often begins as a seemingly simple request from sales or marketing. It quickly evolves from a one-off task into a recurring source of technical debt.
David Castignola arrives with more than two decades' experience in accelerating growth and driving customer success. He joins Nasuni from Delinea, where, as CRO, he successfully integrated and scaled the worldwide sales organization following its merger. Previously, he also spent 20 years at RSA, where he created and led the customer response program during the RSA SecurID breach, and later served as CRO at Optiv, COO at BlackBerry Cylance, and CRO at Bugcrowd.