Investing in RevOps: Finding the Right Balance
PLUS: Mastercard-acquired founder building something new
Behind The Scenes
Most founders recognize the importance of RevOps as their company scales, but many struggle with how to implement it effectively. This uncertainty often leads product-driven founders to underinvest in RevOps, fearing it might create unnecessary overhead and divert focus from building and selling.
It’s an understandable concern—no one wants organizational bloat. However, overlooking RevOps can significantly stunt growth.
Great Founders Build Two Products: Their Core Offering and a High-Performing GTM Machine
The most successful founders understand that they’re building two products from day one:
The actual product being sold to customers.
A well-structured, high-performing go-to-market (GTM) engine.
Right-sized RevOps investments distinguish top-tier GTM organizations from the rest. While some companies manage to scale with a “good enough” GTM function, truly exceptional companies dedicate the same level of strategy, focus, and precision to optimizing their GTM system as they do to their core product. At scale, sales success heavily relies on RevOps.
Understanding the Role and Impact of RevOps at Every Stage
That said, knowing exactly what RevOps solves and how much to invest at each stage of growth isn’t always straightforward. To provide clarity, the key aspects of a strong RevOps function at different levels of scale include:
Core objectives RevOps should focus on.
Common pitfalls RevOps helps avoid.
Key business processes to prioritize.
New hires to bring on board.
Benchmark ratios to guide investment.
Every company’s needs will vary, but using this RevOps "cheat sheet" as a reference can help assess the current function, spark internal discussions, and guide strategic decisions on when and how to invest in RevOps to fuel GTM success.
(This article was written by Mark Regan and Joe Morrissey from a16z Growth team. For full version of this article, you can read them here)
Geeks of the Week
Startup Name: NationGraph
Geography: US
One-liner: NationGraph empower sales teams with real-time insights—covering purchase orders, meeting minutes, procurement rules, and more—so they can bypass endless spreadsheets and focus on building genuine relationships.
Founder(s) Background: Head of Savings at Ramp (via Buyer acquisition).
Startup Name: Tempo
Geography: Brazil
One-liner: Personalized personal assistance and payments platform that combines humans and AI to solve your daily needs.
Founder(s) Background: General Partner at Base Partners (Portfolios such as Zoom, Stripe, Netskope, Nubank, Getir, UiPath and Bytedance).
Founder(s) building in stealth
This edition is brought to you in partnership with Stella Capital.