🚀 NEW: What AI fluency actually looks like in a GTM hire right now ➔
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"At that stage, a wrong GTM hire doesn't just slow you down. It distorts your market signal, your culture, and your next five hires." — Boris Valkov, CEO, Lace.ai
Boris Valkov had a problem most founders would envy, and a few would recognize as genuinely dangerous.
By early 2025, Lace.ai had raised $19M, grown ARR 1,000% in 2024, and was adding customers faster than the org was built to support. The market wasn't just receptive to what Lace had built. It was accelerating toward them.
The product addressed something specific and expensive: in home services, HVAC, plumbing, remodeling, most revenue is won or lost on the phone. Owners were managing marketing and field operations with real data while the front office, the moment a customer decides to book or walk away, remained a black box. Lace closed that gap with AI-powered call analytics, turning every conversation into coaching, visibility, and measurable revenue improvement.
Product-market fit doesn't build a GTM org for you. And Boris knew it.
The candidate profile Lace needed didn't map cleanly to any obvious talent pool.
Home services buyers, franchise operators, call center managers, regional owners, run on relationships and proof. They don't care about your funding announcement. They want references, field credibility, and demonstrated results. The standard SaaS sales motion doesn't survive first contact with this market.
Pure SaaS pedigree wasn't enough. Domain adjacency without the right stage experience was equally dangerous. Reps from lead-gen platforms understood the industry but couldn't run complex, multi-stakeholder, value-based deals. Reps from scaled SaaS organizations had the motion but had never operated without a playbook.
Boris had a phrase for what he needed: translators. People who could bridge the urgency and pace of an AI company with the operational reality of contractors, call centers, and local teams.
"At that stage," he said, "a wrong GTM hire doesn't just slow you down. It distorts your market signal, your culture, and your next five hires."
Bek Ventures, Lace's lead investor, made the introduction to Captivate Talent. The fit became clear quickly, not because of a polished pitch, but because of how the first conversation went.
"We value partners who start with the problem, not a template. Someone who's willing to roll up their sleeves alongside us, from first interview to the strategic discussion" – Ezgi Karaman, Bek Ventures
Boris wanted a partner who could benchmark Lace honestly against the market, pressure-test the role design, and surface candidates who weren't actively looking but were already operating at the level the company needed. He described what he needed as "taste and depth" — someone who understood how revenue teams were evolving inside AI companies, not just how to fill a job description.
Captivate ran live calibration sessions with Boris and Lace's revenue leader, reviewing real candidate profiles together and surfacing the filters that never show up on an intake form. What was negotiable, what wasn't, what the team thought they wanted versus what the business actually needed. The first-order filter that emerged wasn't title or company brand. It was stage: when were you there?
Captivate targeted candidates from construction tech, field services, automotive, and adjacent vertical SaaS — backgrounds with domain relevance and zero-to-one experience. Pure lead-gen backgrounds were flagged early as a known failure mode and filtered out, even when the logos looked right on paper.
Dave was the founding AE hire. Not the splashiest resume in the pool, but exactly the profile Captivate had mapped to: someone who understood the weight of a phone call in a home services business, who could earn trust with an operator in the field as easily as he could run a multi-stakeholder deal, and who had been at a company early enough to know what building without a net actually feels like.
Concurrently, Captivate was building out the customer success org. The founding CSM they placed quickly demonstrated she was operating well above the scope of the role — Lace promoted her into Head of Customer Success and handed Captivate the brief to build her team beneath her.
Within a quarter of the AE wave closing, the full sales team was performing significantly above quota. The largest deal in company history came from this group. Where Lace had once been operating month-to-month, multi-year commitments became the norm.
Boris and Paul had seen enough. The AE hires were performing. The CS org was taking shape. When it came time to find the leader who would run and scale everything they'd built, they came back to Captivate.
Handing over an AE search is one thing. Handing over the Head of Sales search, the person who would own the entire revenue motion and manage the team Captivate had already placed, is another. The work had spoken for itself. Captivate placed Max Glenn into the role.
Ten placements in total. Each one building on the last.
The transformation Boris had been building toward is visible in how Lace operates today. Growth that had been driven by founder energy and product strength now runs through a disciplined GTM system. Marketing is accountable for pipeline quality, not just volume. Sales runs structured discovery focused on revenue impact. Customer Success owns post-sale adoption and ties usage directly to booking rates and revenue performance, making Lace feel less like software and more like a performance partner.
The infrastructure is there now. A year and a half ago it wasn't.
Boris doesn't talk about recruiting in terms of speed or convenience. He talks about structural risk and hiring leverage, what a wrong hire costs, and what the right partner actually does.
"We wanted someone who could operate like an extension of our leadership team, not a vendor," he said. "That changed the process. It became much more collaborative and iterative."
The difference between a recruiting firm and a real partner shows up in the details: who pushes back on the profile, who surfaces what's actually in the market, who earns the next search because the last one delivered.
Boris got all of it. His board got results. His team got built.
Roles placed: VP of Sales, 5 Account Executives (incl. founding AE), Customer Success Manager (promoted to Head of CS), Head of Customer Success team build, and Director of Events
Captivate team: Katie Ostrander, Kendra Morales, Tyler Mattos, Casey Erickson
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AI-powered call analytics for home services companies, turning every customer conversation into measurable revenue improvement.
Boris Valkov had a problem most founders would envy, and a few would recognize as genuinely dangerous.
By early 2025, Lace.ai had raised $19M, grown ARR 1,000% in 2024, and was adding customers faster than the org was built to support. The market wasn't just receptive to what Lace had built. It was accelerating toward them.
The product addressed something specific and expensive: in home services, HVAC, plumbing, remodeling, most revenue is won or lost on the phone. Owners were managing marketing and field operations with real data while the front office, the moment a customer decides to book or walk away, remained a black box. Lace closed that gap with AI-powered call analytics, turning every conversation into coaching, visibility, and measurable revenue improvement.
Product-market fit doesn't build a GTM org for you. And Boris knew it.
The candidate profile Lace needed didn't map cleanly to any obvious talent pool.
Home services buyers, franchise operators, call center managers, regional owners, run on relationships and proof. They don't care about your funding announcement. They want references, field credibility, and demonstrated results. The standard SaaS sales motion doesn't survive first contact with this market.
Pure SaaS pedigree wasn't enough. Domain adjacency without the right stage experience was equally dangerous. Reps from lead-gen platforms understood the industry but couldn't run complex, multi-stakeholder, value-based deals. Reps from scaled SaaS organizations had the motion but had never operated without a playbook.
Boris had a phrase for what he needed: translators. People who could bridge the urgency and pace of an AI company with the operational reality of contractors, call centers, and local teams.
"At that stage," he said, "a wrong GTM hire doesn't just slow you down. It distorts your market signal, your culture, and your next five hires."
Bek Ventures, Lace's lead investor, made the introduction to Captivate Talent. The fit became clear quickly, not because of a polished pitch, but because of how the first conversation went.
"We value partners who start with the problem, not a template. Someone who's willing to roll up their sleeves alongside us, from first interview to the strategic discussion" – Ezgi Karaman, Bek Ventures
Boris wanted a partner who could benchmark Lace honestly against the market, pressure-test the role design, and surface candidates who weren't actively looking but were already operating at the level the company needed. He described what he needed as "taste and depth" — someone who understood how revenue teams were evolving inside AI companies, not just how to fill a job description.
Captivate ran live calibration sessions with Boris and Lace's revenue leader, reviewing real candidate profiles together and surfacing the filters that never show up on an intake form. What was negotiable, what wasn't, what the team thought they wanted versus what the business actually needed. The first-order filter that emerged wasn't title or company brand. It was stage: when were you there?
Captivate targeted candidates from construction tech, field services, automotive, and adjacent vertical SaaS — backgrounds with domain relevance and zero-to-one experience. Pure lead-gen backgrounds were flagged early as a known failure mode and filtered out, even when the logos looked right on paper.
Dave was the founding AE hire. Not the splashiest resume in the pool, but exactly the profile Captivate had mapped to: someone who understood the weight of a phone call in a home services business, who could earn trust with an operator in the field as easily as he could run a multi-stakeholder deal, and who had been at a company early enough to know what building without a net actually feels like.
Concurrently, Captivate was building out the customer success org. The founding CSM they placed quickly demonstrated she was operating well above the scope of the role — Lace promoted her into Head of Customer Success and handed Captivate the brief to build her team beneath her.
Within a quarter of the AE wave closing, the full sales team was performing significantly above quota. The largest deal in company history came from this group. Where Lace had once been operating month-to-month, multi-year commitments became the norm.
Boris and Paul had seen enough. The AE hires were performing. The CS org was taking shape. When it came time to find the leader who would run and scale everything they'd built, they came back to Captivate.
Handing over an AE search is one thing. Handing over the Head of Sales search, the person who would own the entire revenue motion and manage the team Captivate had already placed, is another. The work had spoken for itself. Captivate placed Max Glenn into the role.
Ten placements in total. Each one building on the last.
The transformation Boris had been building toward is visible in how Lace operates today. Growth that had been driven by founder energy and product strength now runs through a disciplined GTM system. Marketing is accountable for pipeline quality, not just volume. Sales runs structured discovery focused on revenue impact. Customer Success owns post-sale adoption and ties usage directly to booking rates and revenue performance, making Lace feel less like software and more like a performance partner.
The infrastructure is there now. A year and a half ago it wasn't.
Boris doesn't talk about recruiting in terms of speed or convenience. He talks about structural risk and hiring leverage, what a wrong hire costs, and what the right partner actually does.
"We wanted someone who could operate like an extension of our leadership team, not a vendor," he said. "That changed the process. It became much more collaborative and iterative."
The difference between a recruiting firm and a real partner shows up in the details: who pushes back on the profile, who surfaces what's actually in the market, who earns the next search because the last one delivered.
Boris got all of it. His board got results. His team got built.
Roles placed: VP of Sales, 5 Account Executives (incl. founding AE), Customer Success Manager (promoted to Head of CS), Head of Customer Success team build, and Director of Events
Captivate team: Katie Ostrander, Kendra Morales, Tyler Mattos, Casey Erickson
