Founder-Led Sales: He Learned to Sell and Closed 50 Customers

GroundCover, an AI-era observability platform, leverages eBPF technology to provide high-fidelity telemetry without traditional SDK instrumentation. Co-founder and CEO Shahar Azulay explains how the company differentiates itself by utilizing a "bring-your-own-cloud" architecture, which shifts the cost model from usage-based to host-based pricing. Azulay emphasizes the necessity of founder-led sales in the early stages, noting that he personally managed demos and sales for years to deeply understand customer pain points and refine the product. The transition from selling to early adopters to displacing established incumbents like Datadog required significant shifts in confidence, pricing strategy, and post-sale migration support. These experiences highlight the importance of iterating on sales processes and maintaining technical depth to successfully scale a mission-critical enterprise software business.