Somewhere between your first customers & a repeatable engine, GTM gets hard in ways that are difficult to talk about openly: the deal that stalls in procurement, the pricing you keep revisiting, the tools that promised more than they delivered.

This closed-door session is built for exactly that stretch. 30 founders with revenue, & a panel of four people who see your deal from every side, including a real enterprise buyer. You come with a question. You leave with answers, honest benchmarks, & people worth staying in touch with.

What you walk out with:

Your stuck deal, worked on. Submit it at registration. We anonymize the best ones & the room takes them apart: founders who've closed that deal, the operator who's run that playbook, & the buyer who's been on the other side of it

30 real numbers. Everyone brings one true metric: win rate, CAC payback, NRR, reply rate. You'll see where you actually stand against 29 companies at your stage. No report sells this

The buyer's answer. Ask the person who runs enterprise AI evaluations the question you can't ask your own prospect: "what would have made you say yes?"

Three intros that matter. Tell us who you need to meet. We make introductions personally, during the evening & after

Who's on the panel:

Four seats, four different views of the same deal

The founder who's ahead of you. Scaled a B2B software company past $10M ARR recently, not in the ZIRP era

The operator. A CRO or VP Sales who built the first sales team at a high-growth startup, from first AE to comp design

The buyer. An enterprise executive who evaluates & purchases AI software. The person on the other side of your stuck deal, explaining why 48 of the 50 pitches in their inbox go nowhere

The practitioner. A GTM lead running today's stack in production: signals, agents, & what actually converts after outbound died

Agenda:

6:30 PM: Doors open, drinks & light bites

7:00 PM: Panel: four views of the 2026 deal (35 min)

7:35 PM: Working session: the room's stuck deals & real numbers, moderated

8:30 PM: Networking, introductions made on request

9:30 PM: Close

Who's in the room:

20 founders, curated for stage & fit:

Stage: in market with paying customers, typically $100K to $5M ARR, and/or institutionally backed, pre-seed to Series A. Your bottleneck is distribution, not product

Building: B2B software, broadly. AI-native applications, SaaS, dev tools, vertical software

Selling to: SMB, mid-market, or enterprise

Every registration is carefully reviewed. The room only works if every seat holds someone worth learning from.

A note on RSVPs:

Seats are limited & the room is built around who's in it. Register only if you're committed to attending. If plans change, tell us early so your seat goes to another founder.

Hosted by OpenStages LinkedIn

building invitation-only conversations for researchers, founders, & technical leaders across the Bay Area.