Reverse-Engineering the AI Buyer — Aliisa Rosenthal, Acrew Capital
Former OpenAI sales leader advises founders to automate go-to-market before hiring sales teams
“build the machine first before you build the team”
Aliisa Rosenthal, who scaled OpenAI's enterprise revenue from near-zero to several billion, argues that AI tools have fundamentally inverted the traditional GTM playbook — founders should automate first, identify bottlenecks, then add humans, rather than building a large sales org upfront. She grounds the advice in OpenAI's own stumble: ChatGPT launched with zero enterprise features and took 9 months to get internal approval to build them, leaving inbound enterprise demand unserved. The talk is a practitioner-level signal that AI-native GTM motion is now the expected standard, not a differentiator.