GTM & Scale: Lessons from Silicon Valley
A conversation about how SME Tech startups can build a scalable go-to-market engine and find true product-market fit.
Charlene Wang is a seasoned go-to-market (GTM) executive in the U.S. tech industry with experience spanning early-stage startups to Fortune 100 firms. Based in San Francisco, she is currently co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Zyphe (a portfolio company of āltitude).
In this interview, Charlene shares insights on her professional background, how she approaches GTM, what she has learned from both successes and failures, and why she is excited about her new venture that is tackling the problems SMEs face when it comes to identity verification and PII (Personally Identifiable Information) storage.
Tell us a little bit about yourself. What is your backstory and how did you end up in tech?
I grew up in Michigan, but I’ve lived on both the East and West Coasts over the years. I’ve always loved building things – for example, in college, I ran my own social enterprise that sold donated designer clothing online and gave the proceeds to women’s charities. After I finished my bachelor’s degree, I joined McKinsey before getting my MBA at Harvard. I’ve always been drawn to the operator side and actually growing and scaling businesses – so I moved from management consulting into the corporate strategy group for EMC, VMWare, and RSA, which is today part of Dell. There I focused on go-to-market strategy and had the chance to learn from top leaders in enterprise GTM.
After that, I joined Coupa Software, starting in strategy and operations, where I built out a lot of the foundational infrastructure and governance for the go-to-market teams leading into the company’s IPO and afterwards. From there, I moved into marketing leadership, growing some of the company’s fastest-growing products as the company scaled more than 20x.
From there, I joined a Series A startup called Fin, where I built out marketing and growth, while driving a 19x increase in the sales pipeline. The market changed significantly during our Series B fundraising, and despite our growth, we faced challenges with SaaS spending cuts on the customer side and an unfavorable valuation climate. That experience really taught me the importance of timing and aligning product-market fit with market conditions.
After Fin, I went to Worldpay, one of the world’s leading merchant acquirers, where I lead product and partner marketing for embedded payments and software platforms, which gave me a lot of insight into the pain points that fintechs face around Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB). Finally, before becoming a founder at Zyphe, I was VP of Marketing at Qualia – a Series D company and the leading digital real estate closing platform, where I came in to uplevel their marketing team and growth engine.
I met my current co-founders through our networks in Silicon Valley and decided to join them to lead GTM for our identity verification startup called Zyphe.
Can you share a quick elevator pitch for your new venture? What attracted you to joining a startup as a co-founder?
Zyphe (formerly known as Togggle.io) is the privacy-first identity, decentralized verification platform. We’re one of the earliest platforms built on Web3, decentralization principles to make user onboarding significantly more secure and seamless. By removing single points of failure for unauthorized access to personal data, we help companies reduce their compliance overhead and the risk of data breaches during KYC, KYB, and more, while delivering a smoother user experience by enabling reusable one-click onboarding that reduces user friction.
I love building, growing, and shaping a company’s culture and direction. For me, it was important to find a large market with a real, urgent need and technology that significantly improves the current state. KYC (Know Your Customer), KYB (Know Your Business), and identity verification are massive challenges for businesses of all sizes and only growing more complex as fraud and data breaches become more common and regulation tries to keep up. I believe the decentralized, privacy-first approach my co-founders and I are taking is the next wave in this space and will become the de facto way of identity verification and PII (Personally Identifiable Information) storage.
I also really enjoy working with my co-founders – we’re all very passionate about bringing innovative, privacy-centric approaches to this important space. We have very complimentary skillsets – my co-founders bring strong product and technical chops, and I can apply my experience scaling GTM from zero through the growth phase and beyond. Plus we have fun working together and bond over finding great pasta places!
You’ve emphasized the importance of go-to-market (GTM) strategy throughout your career. How do you approach GTM, especially in the early stages of a startup?
GTM strategy and, more broadly, GTM execution and tactics vary by stage. Early on, it’s about founder-led sales and moving quickly – hustling, leveraging networks, and getting those first customers in non-scalable ways. For example, I’ve been rolling up my sleeves to reach out and schedule meetings with potential clients and partners through my network to close deals. At the same time, we’re already building foundational sales and marketing assets like positioning documents, messaging frameworks and data sheets. We recently rebranded and launched our new website.
Now, we’re also testing low-hanging fruit like SEO and paid ads, while starting to add outbound email outreach. All of this helps us to start building a longer term growth engine. As the company scales, the GTM approach will evolve into more sophisticated campaigns and team structures with different responsibilities.
You’ve worked across different stages of companies, including running your own startup and NGO and leading GTM at ventures ranging from Series A to IPO. What lessons have you learned about scaling? What pitfalls should founders be aware of?
One key lesson is avoiding ‘fake product-market fit’. At my previous startup, Fin, we landed big enterprise customers early, but their needs diverged from what the broader market required. This made scaling difficult. At a startup, it’s crucial to build for the next cohort of customers, not just the first few. Along the same lines, it’s also important to ensure repeatability in use cases. If every customer is using your product differently, it pulls your product roadmap in different directions, while also making it hard to create scalable messaging and campaigns.
You’ve mentioned ‘fake product-market fit’. Could you elaborate on what you learned about that?
At Fin, we landed a few big-name customers like Airbnb and Coinbase through founder-led sales early on. This looked like great traction, but it turned out to be a bit misleading. We essentially forced our way into those deals through strong executive connections rather than building a scalable process that a sales rep could replicate. The real litmus test is whether you can eventually close similar deals without a founder’s personal involvement and without customizing the product too much.
The latter is important as enterprises often have unique needs – if your product can solve different problems for different clients, it is actually a challenge to build repeatability into the sales process. Enterprise sales also usually take longer to close, which provides less real-time feedback for an earlier stage company. This makes it harder to truly validate your roadmap or know if you have built repeatable sales plays. So staying focused on your ICP while already thinking about your next cohort is important.
Many founders are looking for frameworks to scale GTM at their companies. Can you share some of the frameworks you use for GTM and scaling?
Early on in a company’s growth, I tend to rely more on ‘first principles’ thinking to determine what needs to be done. This is because there’s so many unknowns and learning is critical at this stage. Founders need to be constantly iterating their approach based on what they encounter. Early stage companies often rely on founder-led sales, while building a foundational understanding of the customers and competitors and testing messaging to see what resonates with the target audience.
As you scale, you layer in more repeatable messaging and campaigns, additional people on the GTM team, partnerships, demand generation, brand awareness, and more. At the scaling stage, this is where I sometimes apply frameworks that I’ve developed based on pattern matching against prior experiences and best practices at comparable companies.
In my view, GTM at early stage companies starts with a few basics:
Understand your positioning and target market – Start by identifying what makes your product unique and superior to competitors or substitutes. Then identify who the best customers are for your product. These should be customers who really value what you have to offer and are willing to tolerate some imperfections because your product is solving their unique pain points significantly better than the alternatives.
Develop messaging for your next set of customers – Once you’ve identified your positioning and ideal customers, now you need to figure out messaging that highlights the pain points that your solution solves and an efficient way to communicate why your product is better than the status quo. It’s especially important to find repeatable messaging that can be used for the next set of customers. If you’re solving 10 different problems in 10 different ways, that’s not scalable. Additionally, for enterprise customers in particular, it’s important to turn your early customers into advocates and success stories that you can share with future prospects.
Test different channels and campaigns to start building your GTM playbook – Early on, you don’t know which channels or campaigns will work. Therefore it is especially important to test all of these on a small scale and look at the metrics to see what’s working or not. For instance, you can experiment with small scale, targeted outbound campaigns or a limited number of paid search ads to gauge outcomes. If you find that these efforts are working and that the costs make sense for your particular product and revenue profile, then you can double down. If that’s not the case, then you should quickly iterate your messaging or approach before committing more resources.
Then build a consistent, repeatable sales and marketing motion – Once you’ve started to understand which messages and campaigns actually work, now you have the beginnings of a GTM playbook. Then you should start to scale up your teams and processes to double down on efforts that work for your specific company and GTM motion. Depending on your market and competitor set, sometimes you’ll need to start scaling sooner rather than later. In either case, it’s important to really empower your growing sales and marketing teams with the knowledge and toolkit to drive successful revenue outcomes.
Over time, those basic steps evolve into more sophisticated campaigns, bigger teams, and more structured processes – but in the very early stage, scrappy wins the day.
In a fast-paced startup, how do you maintain productivity and prioritize effectively?
I try to keep it simple: every week, I identify my top priority that must be done this week for us to make progress. This is the single most critical thing that I can contribute to the company this week. Every morning, I check in with myself: “Am I making progress on my top priority?” Additionally, I also keep a tally of top three priorities and everything else on my to-do list. Then at the end of the week, I check back to make sure that I’ve managed to consistently move the needle on top priorities.
Of course, fires pop up and you have to handle them, and then there’s the rest of your to-do list after your priorities. These are important tasks, but often not mission critical. For these, I try to tackle smaller tasks in off-hours or during times when I’m low on creative energy. That way, my best mental hours go towards the highest-impact work.
After all, everyone’s different. I’m a naturally structured person, so I tend to keep a mental (and occasionally written) to-do list. Others may prefer a more flexible approach. Whatever your style, developing a clear sense of your top priorities each week and keeping yourself honest against those priorities on a daily and weekly basis is crucial.
On that note, what is one book you would recommend for founders or aspiring entrepreneurs?
I recommend “Why Startups Fail” by Tom Eisenmann. He is a professor at Harvard Business School whom I did research with while doing my MBA. The book is based on his in-depth research on the pitfalls that trip up startups at various stages. I’ve seen a lot of founders focus on success stories and trying to learn from those – but knowing what not to do is often just as important as knowing what to do.
This book does an excellent job highlighting common failure patterns at each stage of a company’s journey, from the very early days all the way up to IPO. For instance, in the early stages, founder disagreements and product-market fit issues often emerge. These challenges evolve over time as your company tries to scale sustainably and profitably, while focusing on the most productive product investments.
Thank you for the interview, Charlene!