Navigating growth challenges, from Seed to Series A

I’m Brittany Walker, General Partner at CRV, which leads seed and Series A rounds. Our firm has backed prominent companies like Cribl, DoorDash, and (yes) Mercury during their most critical stages. During our 54 years in business we’ve partnered with over 600 exciting startups. I joined Mercury at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco to talk about founder-led sales, hiring great people and other strategies for early-stage growth.

Going from seed stage to Series A is a feat that comes with a unique set of challenges. Among those there are three specific categories where getting it right can really make the difference:

• Scaling the team
• Scaling go to market
• Preparing for a successful fundraise

These are the pillars we use to evaluate founders at CRV, and for good reason: time and time again, we see that founders that nail these tend to get a whole lot farther than founders who don’t. Let’s talk about this.

Scaling the team

Who you hire is critical — and your network is a great place to start.

The team you build in your startup’s early days will determine its future. As founders, you likely start with a few close collaborators — people who have the skills you need and are as committed to the vision as you are. As you grow, you’ll need to make deliberate choices about expanding that team, and chief among them is identifying the most important gaps in your team’s capabilities.

Before you start screening candidates, you need to be crystal clear on the skillsets you’re adding to your team and why they’re critical. We find that most teams stick to hiring engineers early on, but the types of engineers needed can vary from infrastructure experts to front end developers to machine learning folks depending on the startup’s focus area. Beyond engineering, whether you hire for developer relations, marketing, or enterprise sales will also depend on both your focus area and your team’s existing strength in go-to-market.

When it comes time to sourcing the right people for these critical first hires, most founders can, and should, look to their existing personal and professional network. People you’ve worked with before, or people those folks can recommend, are typically the best place to start. In fact, at CRV, we value a founder’s network so highly that we often underwrite our investment decisions based on his or her ability to bring on top talent.

In the early days, hiring from your personal network (or your n+1 network — meaning, referrals of referrals) can not only shorten the recruiting process, but  give you a clearer sense of who you’re bringing on. You’re less likely to make a poor hiring choice when you’re pulling from a pool of people whose work you already know, or whose work is known by people whose judgment you trust. Personal connections can also help you close the gap that is convincing someone to join your not-yet-established startup: the best talent out there probably has offers available to them that you can’t compete with, at least from a compensation perspective. If those talented people believe in you and what you’re doing, they might be more likely to board your ship with enthusiasm — and a willingness to accept less cash than they might otherwise expect.

Hire slowly and intentionally to maintain a high bar

When building a team, I can’t stress enough the importance of keeping a high bar for talent. There’s a saying in startups: “A-players hire A-players; B-players hire C-players.” We’ve seen time and again that a strong team can lead to exponential growth, while even a single weak link can set back progress. The phrase “hire slow, fire fast” captures the essence here. Take your time finding the right person, even if it means a slower initial pace. If you bring on someone who isn’t working out, it’s better to make that tough call sooner rather than later.

As you grow, you may be hiring for roles where you lack personal expertise, such as sales or marketing. In these cases, turn to your network and industry benchmarks to help you set a high standard. Ask others with expertise in that area to interview candidates on your behalf or guide you in evaluating talent to ensure you’re building a high-quality team …even in areas outside your personal skill set.

Scaling go to market

Once you’ve built the right team (for now!) and have begun developing your product, it’s time to narrow down the universe of potential customers you’re considering, and define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). It may seem obvious, but knowing who your product is for and why it resonates with them is crucial for growth. Many early-stage companies make the mistake of trying to be everything to everyone. This often leads to unfocused efforts and missed opportunities. Instead, focus on narrowing your customer base. Conduct interviews, gather feedback, and identify the profile of your highest-potential customer.

In the early days, founders should be quite involved with customer conversations, even leading sales calls, especially with key customers or design partners who will play an active role in product development. Some founders feel uncomfortable on the go-to-market side of the business — it’s not always the most natural thing for someone who’s used to spending their time with code. The more you can build relationships at the founder level with customers invested in your product and its development, the more those relationships will serve the company in the medium to longer term.

If you’ve found that you’re striking a chord with your ICP, it’s time to bring in more folks to scale the sales organization and prove out the go-to-market motion. By the time you’re preparing for a Series A, you should have at least a couple of sales reps who can replicate the results you’ve achieved. Investors want to know that the growth you’re experiencing isn’t just a founder-led fluke, but a sign of a repeatable sales process. The more you can document and translate to your sales team the objections you’ve had to handle, how you’ve addressed them, as well as what you’ve seen work and not work when it comes to sales conversations, the better.

You’re always going to have a leg up when it comes to sales: there’s a level of personalization and passion that just comes through to potential customers. That’s a beautiful thing when you’re the entire sales team — but it also means that certain tactics, approaches, and conversations that were effective when you were running the playbook yourself might not translate as you broaden your team.

It’s never going to be a completely perfect handoff — and directional iterations might still be necessary. Perhaps you’ve narrowed down to one ICP, but after running in that direction for a while, you realize it’s not quite right. That doesn’t necessarily mean your sales team is doing a bad job, but it might mean some changes are in order. If your sales team is continuously running up against dead ends, it’s on you to know when to pivot to a different direction.

Making the transition to Series A

Fundraising: No silver bullet

Having built the team and scaled the go-to-market organization, you’ll probably start thinking about raising your next round of funding: the elusive Series A. The reality is that raising a Series A is more about substance than style — if you have a business that’s resonating with end customers, and a product that people love, your fundraise will be successful. That being said, there are optimizations that can get you there more quickly and ensure that you have the right partners for the journey ahead.

Rather than waiting until it’s time to kick off the fundraise, I recommend founders start building relationships with potential investors about a year in advance. Getting to know investors over time gives you a clearer sense of who aligns with your vision and who will support you in both good times and challenging ones.

Building these relationships well before the fundraising period also gives you a chance to assess the value each investor brings beyond capital. Are they willing to make introductions for hiring or customer development? Are they genuinely interested in your product and able to provide helpful feedback? These interactions can reveal a lot about how an investor might contribute to your business.

By the time you’re ready to raise, ideally you’ll have a shortlist of investors who you feel confident about. This can not only potentially shorten the fundraising process, but also help ensure the partners you work with are genuinely invested in your success — not only financially, but also personally.

In summary: Focus on the fundamentals, let the rest fall into place

At the end of the day, the best way to prepare for a Series A is to build a strong business. That may sound overly simplistic, but the reality is that a company with a solid team, a clear customer focus, and strong execution will attract investors naturally.

While there are countless strategies to optimize your pitch, the core of a successful fundraise is a company that’s already showing early signs of product-market fit and a path to growth. No matter where you are on the journey from seed to Series A, staying focused on the fundamentals — building the right team, understanding your customer, and creating a scalable foundation — will position you not just for a successful raise, but for long-term growth and impact.