Ted Krantz has lived a transition a lot of scaling leaders struggle with. He built his career in revenue. Then he stepped into the CEO seat, first at Data.ai, now at interos.ai.
The hard part was not learning new functions. It was unlearning how he showed up.
“I think the one that comes to mind… is coming from such command of kind of the revenue cockpit and top line,” Ted told me, “and being more open to listening and active learning… being last to speak as you’re ramping into the other functions.”
That single behavior change says a lot. In sales leadership, speed and certainty are rewarded. In the CEO chair, speaking first can shut down the room before you even know what you do not know.
The First Scaling Move Is Allocation
When Ted talks about scaling, he goes straight to the uncomfortable work that happens after the excitement fades.
“The first order of business is really getting the mix between product and technology, GNA and sales and marketing, that distribution in an optimal situation,” he said.
This is the CEO job at scale. You are constantly adjusting the allocation of attention, headcount, and capital to match what the business actually needs now, not what it needed last year.
Ted made one more point that matters for any CEO who wants growth without constant fundraising. He is not trying to run these companies like private equity. He is trying to get them to “responsible growth,” to a place where the business is self sustaining, and not living in “big burn situations” that force you to chase the next round.
That mindset shifts your decisions fast. It changes what you tolerate. It changes what you fund.
Product Virality Replaces Artillery
Ted has been in enterprise long enough to remember the old playbook.
Big enterprise teams. Heavy outbound. Cold calling. Expensive “artillery.”
He thinks that era is fading. “The old days of lots of artillery… unsolicited proposals,” he said, are “a bit dated.”
What replaces it is simple and brutal.
“You need a real viral product,” he said. “You need inbound from customers.”
Ted pointed to companies like Palantir and Slack as examples of organizations where client success and product driven momentum matter more than the classic enterprise hunting motion.
If you are a CEO trying to move from startup mode to scale up mode, this should feel like both a warning and a relief. You cannot sales your way out of weak product pull forever. But if you build real pull, your entire go to market model gets lighter, faster, and cheaper.
Partial Product Market Fit Is The Trap
Ted kept coming back to product market fit, and he knows that can sound like a cliché. Then he made it specific.
“I do think it’s often overlooked that you have partial product market fit and you assume that you have full product market fit,” he said. “Yeah, that’s a very different dynamic.”
This is the silent killer in SaaS. You have a handful of customers who like you. You see revenue. You see logos. You assume you are ready to scale.
Then you hire ahead. Spend ahead. Push outbound harder. And discover the product is still “nice to have” for most of the market.
Ted’s framework is practical. He looks at how often customers use the product.
“That nice to have versus need to have chasm,” he said, is the first thing he tries to measure. So he asks:
- Is it a monthly active use case?
- A weekly active use case?
- A daily active use case?
“If it’s the latter,” he said, “the more you’re getting closer to DAO… the stickier it’s going to be.”
Daily use is not a vanity metric here. It is evidence that your product is embedded in real work.
Stickiness Comes From Integration
Ted also looks for stickiness the way an enterprise buyer does.
“How well do you play and integrate with the other ERP systems?” he asked. He rattled off the ecosystem he came from, “the PeopleSofts, the SAPs… ServiceNow,” and made a point every CEO should remember. Those systems have “very low churn rate investments” because they sit inside end to end workflows.
If you are a separate tool, you are easier to cut. If you are woven into workflows, you are harder to rip out.
Then he added another adoption test that CEOs should copy: how many users do you have inside the enterprise?
“Which constituents are using the product,” he said. “How many different users do you have within the enterprise?” He uses those answers to get to what he called “evidence based product market fit.”
What Ted Had To Relearn
I asked Ted what he meant when he said CEOs sometimes have to relearn things when they move from big logo companies to building at scale.
He gave a clean example. At SAP, the logo opens doors. “You have the SAP logo,” he said. “What a massive advantage… an assumptive position of command.”
When you do not have that, you have to earn the right to be in the room. That means doing the work to show up with an outside in point of view. “Much tighter focus and fidelity needed,” he said, and “more collective homework,” including “tearing through annual reports.”
That is how you win when you cannot borrow credibility from a logo.
SaaS Plus Data Plus AI Is A Hard Orchestration
Ted has a strong opinion that “traditional cloud based SaaS” is yesterday’s news. He believes the next decade belongs to AI. But he also described what that conviction forces inside a company like interos.ai.
If you want to win with AI, you need three things operating at the same time.
- Data as a service: proprietary data knowledge you can build intelligence on
- Software as a service: a cockpit with “eyeballs on the product” so you control decision support
- Applied AI: to construct, enrich, and extract value from your knowledge graph
He called it “a very challenging orchestration” because “doing all three at the same time does require trade-offs.”
At interos.ai, the domain is supply chain risk intelligence across cyber, ESG, regulatory, geopolitical, catastrophic, and financial risk. He described the underlying scale.
A global supply chain map with “250 million plus companies” and “11 billion relationships.” Hundreds of signals. A knowledge graph that must be built and maintained. And AI is not just for predictions. “You have to use applied AI just to actually build” the graph, he said.
Then he warned about a common trap.
“You want to be careful not to get trapped in a DAS realm,” he said, where you become just an API and the customer does the intelligence on the backend. If you made a SaaS investment, and you lose control of the user experience, you lose the advantage.
This is a clean strategic line for CEOs building AI companies. If your product becomes “data plumbing,” you will get commoditized. You need a cockpit that owns the decision layer.
AI In The Company, Not Just The Product
When I asked Ted how he uses AI in daily work and across operations, he did not hesitate.
“I do think that agentic AI… is truly applicable to virtually every domain,” he said. Recruiting. BDR. Engineering. QA. Market research. Competitive analysis. Corporate development.
He also admitted what every CEO is dealing with right now. The stack is messy. “Everybody’s A-B testing,” he said. He is using a mix of Microsoft tools, Anthropic, and others depending on the task, because each model has different strengths.
Then he got very specific about where he wants the most aggressive deployment.
- BDR: “ripe for the taking,” especially as the old outbound motion stops working
- Engineering: “whoever masters… production code and high quality fastest will be an ultimate winner”
That is not theory. That is an operating advantage.
What You Should Take From Ted’s Playbook
Ted’s episode was a blueprint for modern scaling, especially for CEOs moving from revenue leadership to the full CEO role.
Here is the through line.
- Speak last so you can learn first
- Allocate capital based on your current bottleneck, not your past strengths
- Treat partial product market fit as a warning sign, not a green light
- Measure stickiness through usage frequency and user spread inside accounts
- Integrate into workflow systems so you are hard to remove
- Build AI businesses as an orchestration of data, SaaS UX, and applied AI
- Use AI inside the company, not just in the roadmap, with extra focus on BDR and engineering
If you are trying to move your company from “nice to have” to “need to have,” this is the mindset you need. Listen to the full episode of The Scaling CEO here.
I am Glenn Gow. I coach CEOs. If you want help diagnosing whether you have partial or full product market fit, and what to change in your operating model to make your product daily and sticky, get in touch with Glenn Gow.
