Whispered Hiring

Whispered Hiring with Sriharsha Guduguntla CEO @ Hyperbound

Sai [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sguduguntla/]built Hyperbound [https://www.linkedin.com/company/hyperbound-ai/] from a two-person YC startup to 35 people and a Series A in under two and a half years, after pivoting through 17 different ideas. He's a first-time founder and engineer by background who has had to figure out GTM hiring entirely from scratch. In this episode, Andy and Sai get into the specific frameworks he's developed for vetting startup fit, using his own product inside the hiring process, and what he sees coming for the sales manager role. It's a rare look at how a fast-moving founder actually thinks about building a team, not how they wish they had. Topics discussed: * The opt-out move Sai runs in the first interview to self-select for startup fit before wasting anyone's time * Why he weights hunger over experience 70% of the time, and how he actually tests for it beyond just asking * The rule that either Sai or his co-founder must have done a role themselves before hiring for it * Parking a truck with a live coding problem on an LED screen around San Francisco to source engineers * Requiring every AE and BDR candidate to complete a Hyperbound AI roleplay as a screener, then watching whether they act on the coaching feedback * Handing AE candidates a real recorded discovery call and asking them to build a month-by-month account plan, specifically to catch whether they can reality-check the timeline * Telling candidates upfront to use AI on take-home assessments, then pressure-testing their reasoning to separate people who prompted well from people who just copy-pasted * Why Sai thinks the sales manager conversation is focused on the wrong thing, and what a 1:20 or 1:30 manager-to-rep ratio actually requires of the people in those seats ABOUT YOUR HOST:  Andy Mowat [https://www.linkedin.com/in/amowat/] has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating.  Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.com [https://www.whispered.com/] Interact with AI Andy: https://www.whispered.com/whisper-searchwww.whispered.com/whisper-search [http://www.whispered.com/whisper-search]

Whispered Hiring with Dini Mehta Operator @ PeakXV

Dini Mehta ran sales at Lattice with under 3% voluntary attrition over four years, promoted nearly 50% of the management team from within, and built the kind of org where the best people kept choosing to stay. In this episode, she breaks down exactly how she did it: how she designs roles before writing job descriptions, why she keeps doing reference calls until she hears something negative, and the 90-day onboarding approach she uses with every senior hire that feels uncomfortable on purpose. She also has a sharp take on AI fluency that goes well beyond the usual interview question, and makes a case that most senior onboarding is a quiet failure hiding in plain sight. Topics discussed: * Four questions to answer before you write a job description or pick a title * Why Dini creates roles for exceptional generalists even without a defined seat * Spending 30% of operating time meeting talent with no open roles * Sourcing through "who are the three best people you know in this domain" * Running reference calls until you surface at least one blind spot * Embedding internal recruiters inside the revenue org, not alongside it * Doing a bi-annual feedback loop with recruiting to evolve hiring profiles as the business changes * The 45-minute interview where the candidate asks all the questions, and why the first 15 minutes don't count * Asking candidates to run a live mock team meeting to reveal management style * The AI fluency interview question that separates candidates who have actually built something from those who haven't * Why experience can become a liability, and what to look for instead * The 90-day over-communication approach to senior onboarding, and the specific milestone that tells you it worked ABOUT YOUR HOST:  Andy Mowat [https://www.linkedin.com/in/amowat/] has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating.  Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.com [https://www.whispered.com/] Interact with AI Andy: https://www.whispered.com/whisper-searchwww.whispered.com/whisper-search [http://www.whispered.com/whisper-search]

Whispered Hiring with Anurag Goel Global Head of ROI, Industries & Top Accounts @ Red Hat

Most AI pilots fail not because the technology is wrong, but because nobody agreed on what success meant before it started. Anurag Goel [https://www.linkedin.com/in/anuraggoel2/] has built his entire function around fixing that gap. As the leader of a 125-person specialist team at Red Ha [https://www.redhat.com]t touching $4B in ARR, he's moved pilot-to-deployment conversion rates to three times their previous pace by doing one thing differently: defining success in executive business terms before anyone writes a line of code. Anurag built this function from scratch at Red Hat after doing similar work at Adobe and Salesforce, and this conversation gets into the specifics of how he hires for it, structures it, justifies it internally, and tests candidates in ways most hiring managers haven't considered. Topics discussed: * Why AI pilots stall at the executive layer and how scoping business KPIs upfront changes conversion rates * The three-profile hiring model for value consulting roles: management consultant, financial storyteller, B2B software fluency * How sequencing early hires across external experts, internal sales reps, and former customers built the foundation * The case study round structure that tests how candidates prepare and present, not whether their answers are right * Using one interview question to separate surface-level AI users from people who build with it * Why "builder mindset" in this function means co-creating a shared vision with the customer, not internal execution * How to justify an overlay function's existence with a single two-part metric * Testing for "fire in the belly" through specificity of past examples, not behavioral question frameworks ABOUT YOUR HOST:  Andy Mowat [https://www.linkedin.com/in/amowat/] has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating.  Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.com [https://www.whispered.com/] Interact with AI Andy: https://www.whispered.com/whisper-searchwww.whispered.com/whisper-search [http://www.whispered.com/whisper-search]

Whispered Hiring with Srikrishnan Ganesan, CEO @ Rocketlane

A year ago, Srikrishnan Ganesan says, asking candidates to prove their AI fluency was too soon. Now, he says, it's table stakes and the answers candidates give are creating a sharp divide between those who will thrive and those who won't. In this episode, Andy and Sri get into how Sri screens for genuine AI adoption, why he thinks the pre-sale to post-sale handoff is collapsing faster than most GTM leaders realize, and the specific signals he uses to decide whether a leader is actually built to operate in a fast-moving company. Topics discussed: * Why "I use it for emails and meeting summaries" is now a red flag in interviews * Pushing customers to feel 40% implemented before the sales cycle ends * How candidates use AI to prep for interviews  and what it reveals * The specific question Sri asks before ever calling a reference * Why being out of a role matters less than what the leader learned from it * Using exec partners from VC firms as a selective lens on certain hires * Curated customer call playlists as the foundation of exec onboarding ABOUT YOUR HOST:  Andy Mowat [https://www.linkedin.com/in/amowat/] has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating.  Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.com [https://www.whispered.com/] Interact with AI Andy: https://www.whispered.com/whisper-searchwww.whispered.com/whisper-search [http://www.whispered.com/whisper-search]

Whispered Hiring with Peter Grant, CRO @ You.com

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Peter Grant, CRO at You.com, about what it actually takes to hire technical enterprise AI sellers who can build, demo, and sell at the same time. Peter has spent 20+ years scaling GTM at Siebel, Salesforce UK, C3.AI, and OakNorth, and drove 40x revenue growth at You.com in 2024. He shares the exact frameworks, tests, and reference approaches he uses to find sellers who combine genuine technical fluency with commercial instinct. Topics discussed: * Why AI sellers need technical fluency, not product familiarity alone * The Lovable/Replit live demo test: filtering real builders from claimants * Why early-stage CROs should carry a bag before building the team * Write a specific JD before launching any senior search * How AI is changing sales enablement cadence and certification * The biggest hiring mistake: choosing people you want to drink with * Force-ranking 5 sales stages to surface a candidate's real edge * The best candidates treat the interview as a sales campaign * Customer references over manager references: what to actually ask * Good hires are visible on day one: booking meetings, everywhere * Steve Garnett's 10-point hiring framework for technical GTM talent ABOUT YOUR HOST:  Andy Mowat [https://www.linkedin.com/in/amowat/] has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating.  Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.com [https://www.whispered.com/] Interact with AI Andy: https://www.whispered.com/whisper-searchwww.whispered.com/whisper-search [http://www.whispered.com/whisper-search]