90% of Startups Fail: What $100m Sales Teams Do Differently with Ethan Schechter
December 11, 2025
Leadership in high-growth environments comes with moments of pressure, complexity, and rapid change. For go-to-market executives, your approach in those moments sets the tone for the entire team. In this episode of Built Not Born, Ethan Schechter shares how he keeps teams laughing through the lows, turns competition and collaboration into motivation, and helps build startups that endure when many don’t.
Sage Nye sits down with Ethan Schechter, a go-to-market leader and SVP of Global Sales & Customer Success at Qodo, to discuss what it really takes to build high-performing sales teams from the ground up. Ethan shares how to balance structure with creativity, foster accountability, and turn failure into growth. From his “Passion, Mastery, Accountability” hiring framework to practical insights on cross-functional selling and customer success alignment, this conversation offers a blueprint for scaling revenue engines that endure the chaos of startup growth.
Leadership in high-growth environments comes with moments of pressure, complexity, and rapid change. For go-to-market executives, your approach in those moments sets the tone for the entire team. In this episode of Built Not Born, Ethan Schechter shares how he keeps teams laughing through the lows, turns competition and collaboration into motivation, and helps build startups that endure when many don’t.
Sage Nye interviews Ethan Schechter, a go-to-market leader and SVP of Global Sales & Customer Success at Qodo, to discuss what it really takes to build high-performing sales teams from the ground up. Ethan shares how to balance structure with creativity, foster accountability, and turn failure into growth. From his “Passion, Mastery, Accountability” hiring framework to practical insights on cross-functional selling and customer success alignment, this conversation offers a blueprint for scaling revenue engines that endure the chaos of startup growth.
Here’s what you will learn:
- How to identify and respond to early failures quickly while maintaining team morale
- The "Passion, Mastery, Accountability" framework for hiring early-stage sales talent
- Why collaboration and competition aren't mutually exclusive, and how to leverage both
- Structuring cross-functional alignment with sales, marketing, and customer success
- The importance of breaking down processes into measurable, celebratable milestones
- How to balance data-driven decision making with relationship-focused selling
- Why team selling is crucial for enterprise deals and how to orchestrate multiple stakeholders
- The critical balance between maintaining rapid growth and sustaining operational excellence
- How to create effective handoffs between sales and customer success teams
Ethan Schechter is a seasoned go-to-market and sales leader, currently serving as SVP of Global Sales & Customer Success at Qodo. With over two decades of experience in scaling high-growth SaaS and developer tool businesses, he has helped multiple organizations grow from early stage to $100M+ in revenue. Known for his expertise in developer tooling and his hands-on approach to early-stage market development, Ethan has been at the forefront of selling to developers "before it was cool." His experience includes being the first sales leader at four consecutive companies, where he successfully built and scaled commercial engines from the ground up.
Episode Resources: