Founder Hustle to GTM Muscle
Building ai-enabled startup systems
Date: Thursday, April 23rd, 2026
Time: 2pm - 6pm (4-hour in-person working session)
Location: IIT2026 Global Conference
Please ensure you bring a personal laptop, as this workshop follows a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) format to ensure everyone can participate in the hands-on exercises.
A hands-on workshop to turn founder traction into a repeatable, fundable GTM engine
Getting your first customers is hard. What comes next is harder and more important. This workshop is designed for founders who have started to see traction and are now facing the next leap. Building a go-to-market engine that scales beyond the founder. And learning how to tell that story to investors in a way that signals durability, not just momentum.
session focused on clarity, structure, and execution.
This workshop helps founders turn four disconnected startup challenges into one connected operating system: getting customers, building a team, producing output, and raising capital.
The session is grounded in patterns observed across real startups, not theory. Participants will map their startup across four systems and identify where AI can act as a force multiplier across each:
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Demand: who you target and how AI improves reach and conversion
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Capacity: how you design roles and leverage AI instead of over-hiring
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Execution: how work flows, and where AI removes bottlenecks
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Validation: how your business stands up to investors, with disciplined pipeline thinking
What You Will Learn
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How to separate repeatable wins from one-off or lucky deals
How to design your first scalable GTM motion without hiring a full team
How to translate customer signals into investor-relevant metrics
How to craft a fundable narrative that connects product-market fit to GTM scalability
How to diagnose founder dependence in your sales and GTM process
Key Modules
This workshop helps founders with early traction build a GTM engine that does not depend on them.
Why founder-led growth eventually stalls and how to remove yourself as the constraint without losing velocity.
Stop selling to personas. Start selling to urgency, outcomes, and buying triggers that repeat.
How to move from ICP clarity to a functioning pipeline without building a large sales or marketing org.
How to pitch a repeatable GTM engine instead of a single growth moment or founder effort.
What Seed and Series A investors actually evaluate including motion, momentum, and repeatability.
You will learn how to design repeatable segmentation, pipeline, messaging, and GTM motion.
Who Should Attend
Founders with early traction including paying customers, active pilots, or strong product usage
Want to build a real go-to-market engine
Want to raise Seed or Series A within the next 12 months
Stop being the bottleneck in their
own growth
Founders from idea stage to early scale who want to build companies that scale predictably, with AI embedded into the operating model.
SESSION OUTCOME
Attendees will leave with a clear model of how their startup scales across demand, capacity, execution, and validation, along with practical AI-enabled tools and prompts they can continue using after the workshop.
Workshop Lead
Parthib Srivathsan
Operating Partner, Companyon Ventures
Metrics geek. Execution and fundraising sherpa.
Parthib is an Operating Partner and founding team member at Companyon Ventures. He works closely with early-stage software and AI startups to turn early signs of product-market fit into repeatable go-to-market execution. Parthib also writes Diligence Diaries and Investor Math, two widely read content series that break down how investors evaluate startups based on motion, momentum, and repeatability rather than surface-level metrics.
