When Meka Asonye first started his career, he was laser focused on spotting potential key players and giving them a shot at the big leagues — and we mean that literally. He wasn’t leading startup recruiting, but rather immersed in the world of Moneyball, managing Minor League operations for the Cleveland Indians.

Asonye has since strung together a set of experiences that any company builder would envy. He spent four years cutting his teeth at Stripe as it scaled from 250 to 2000 people and matured its sales org. He then stepped into the VP of Sales and Services role at Mixpanel, owning the customer lifecycle from first website visit to renewal. He’s also been an angel investor, seasoned advisor and first call for dozens of early-stage consumer and SaaS startups.

And as we announced last week, Asonye’s taking on a new role: that of a full-time investor, joining us as a Partner here at First Round. We’re brimming with excitement to add him to the team — you can read more about that in our announcement. But from our perch here at The Review, we spotted the chance to tell a different story.

This GTM-Leader-Turned-Investor Crowdsources Early Lessons From Stripe, Figma & Other Top Startups

If you’re a long-time Review reader, you’ll know that we’ve long believed the best company building advice comes from fellow practitioners, and Asonye’s startup experiences are still incredibly fresh. (As he puts it, he owned a quarterly number just one quarter ago.)

What’s more is that the transition to a new job presents a natural moment for reflection — the peaks, the valleys, and the hard-won takeaways that propelled someone to the present day. So as he hit the ground running in his first few weeks at First Round, we pulled Asonye aside to unearth some of those stories, mining for those go-to-market lessons that others could lean on.

He came back with an intriguing proposal. While he was of course game to share his own takeaways from across his nearly 15-year-career, Asonye wanted to reach out to others across his deep network of sales, growth and customer success leaders to crowdsource the very best advice.

From the early hires to the heads of sales at startups like Stripe, Figma, Loom, Plaid, Front, Coda and more, there are some heavy hitters in this group, including Alloy's Charley Ma, Stripe's Claire Hughes Johnson, tech veteran Richard Alfonsi, Airtable's Liat Bycel, (and many more).

Drawing from his experiences at Stripe, Mixpanel and angel investing, Asonye blends his advice for founders and GTM leaders with the words of wisdom these experts offered up.

Organized into a punch list of four tactical takeaways, their lessons for founders and GTM leaders alike is spot on — and are often only shared through backchannels or 1:1 mentoring From the conventional startup sales wisdom they’ve found not to be true, to the beliefs they’ve changed their minds on over the years, to the things they wished they had paid more attention to sooner in their own careers, we think it's a must-read.

As always, thank you for reading and sharing!

-The Review Editors

To hear more about Meka's story and our partner hiring process, be sure to check out his interview with Forbes' Alex Konrad.

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