New episode on the Crew Podcast - Dini Mehta, former CRO @ Lattice (3M —> 100M+ ARR run) + former Operator-in-Residence @ PeakXV.
Also, shoutout to our sponsors for this episode, Attention & Metaview. Been awesome working with both of these teams for recruiting, and now infusing as part of our media arm.
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Some of our previous guests:
Eleanor Dorfman, Head of Commercial Sales @ Anthropic, see here
Pat Forquer, CRO @ Legora, see here
Graham Moreno, VP of GTM @ Parallel, see here
Tomer Chernia, VP of GTM @ Cursor, see here
Liam Mulcahy, Head of Sales @ Parallel (former GTM Operating Partner @ Kleiner Perkins)
Becca Lindquist, Head of Sales @ Clay
Nick Bogaty, CRO @ Vercel
Kyle Parrish, former VP of Sales @ Figma
Ghazi Masood, CRO @ Replit
Evan Cassidy, VP of Sales @ Decagon
James White, VP of Sales @ Rogo
Mark Ebert, SVP of Revenue @ Profound
Rob Saliterman, VP of Sales @ Harvey
Bardia Shahali, VP of Sales @ Granola
And many more in the pipeline - if you know any good leaders who fit this, shoot me a DM/reply/email ( [email protected] ). We’ll keep openings rolling and be super open to suggestions for similar guests.
We film in-person in SF & NYC at legit podcast studios and have retained a stellar post-production agency, so the quality will be high.
behind the scenes filming our episode with Graham Moreno, VP of GTM @ Parallel, back in May 2026
Links To Sections
Dini’s Background
Dini Mehta is an Operating Partner at Peak XV, where she parachutes into portfolio companies on go-to-market, sits in exec meetings, runs forecast calls, and hosts open office hours for founders and GTM teams across the portfolio.
She was CRO at Lattice, where she took the company from $3M to over $100M ARR and from a single product to a platform. Before that she led go-to-market at Drawbridge from pre-revenue to $140M ARR, and got her start in the early programmatic days at Comcast.
An immigrant who fell into sales and then into tech, she spent roughly a decade selling top-down enterprise before deliberately taking a job in a category she knew nothing about.
Discussed In This Episode
The AI theater problem: everyone on the podcasts says go-to-market is solved, every CRO behind closed doors says none of it is
Why you scale demand before you scale AEs, and the spreadsheet logic that keeps founders from believing it
The flip side trap: reps at 500% attainment means you are leaving money on the table
Her first 15 hires at Lattice had zero HR tech experience, and that was by design
The hot potato: what breaks when a founder hands sales to an experienced leader and steps away
Why AI needs a centralized owner, and the cost of five reps each discovering the same pre-call agent
The three things she diligences before joining a company, and the budget hypothetical she puts in front of founders to see what they actually believe
Why traction alone has eroded as a signal in the AI era
The full body yes, and her rule against making career decisions for the LinkedIn post
Run your own race: an 18-month horizon instead of a ten-year plan
Interesting Takeaways
1. Everyone Says It's Solved. Nobody Has Solved It.
Go on LinkedIn or the podcasts and everything is solved, Claude's done it all. Talk to CROs behind closed doors and it's the opposite: a bunch of experiments with unclear ROI. She calls it AI theater, and the version that worries her most is internal - people spending hours building a workflow that saves three minutes a day and calling it productivity. Her bottom line: we're very early in this game, regardless of what the internet has us believing.
2. AI Needs One Owner, Not Five Explorers
Her model for the best teams is a hybrid with a centralized owner of AI leverage: it starts with an AI-forward sales leader for sponsorship, then typically lives in AI Ops / RevOps. The failure mode without it: every rep independently discovers the same pre-call agent, and "now you've just wasted five reps" on the same learning journey. Centralize the system so best practices are baked in, then bring the whole team along - if she were running an org today, the goal would be the most AI-pilled GTM org out there.
3. Scale Demand Before You Scale AEs
The most common trap from 0 to $20M: the spreadsheet says triple the headcount, triple the revenue, so founders hire a year before they've figured out demand. Her pushback is simple: who are the reps going to outbound to? No ICP, no ABM, no brand coverage means nothing to feed five reps. The flip side trap is just as real: reps at 500% attainment isn't a flex, it means you're leaving money on the table and hiring too slow.
4. Her First 15 Hires at Lattice Had Zero HR Tech Experience
At Lattice, that was by design. She didn't want people jaded by what can't be done in the category; she wanted people fired up about the mission. The "risky" hires on paper became her top performers, which is why she tells founders to stop over-indexing on resumes and logos - and why she thinks demanding five days in-office in SF means losing talent to the labs on a fight you won't win.
5. The Hypotheticals That Expose A Founder
Everyone says the right things when they're recruiting you, so she puts real hypotheticals in front of founders: budget's tight and you have to cut headcount, where do you cut? Would you spend real dollars on marketing programs before hiring a bunch of reps? And the cleanest one: would you be comfortable if a rep made $1M? The answers tell you whether go-to-market is actually a first-class citizen, because the best companies ship code and ship revenue.
Key Timestamps
(02:39) Leaving the operator seat for Peak XV
(14:38) Top down versus bottom up, and where each one breaks
(18:06) Trap one: hiring AEs before you have demand
(20:27) Trap two: not hiring fast enough at 500% attainment
(22:14) Why she ignores resumes and logos
(24:31) Trap three: the founder who passes the hot potato
(26:27) Centralized or decentralized AI ownership
(29:05) Behind closed doors, none of it is solved
(34:19) The hypotheticals that expose a founder
Thanks for tuning in!
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For those who are new, my name is Chris Balestras, co-founder & head of talent, media, & brand @ Crew - a GTM recruiting, media, and investing firm, working with seed through series D AI-natives to help them grow.
Where to find Crew:
We work with many of the hottest AI-native startups in various capacities, and for those who are interested, shoot me an email at ( [email protected] ) or a DM on LinkedIn.
🫡 cheers,
Chris