Sriram Subramanian, CEO of LinkToAny, built his company around a decision most fast-growing SaaS businesses never make: no dedicated sales team, at any stage of growth. Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, spoke with Subramanian about how that decision took shape and what it took to defend it. When a technical founder resists pressure to build a conventional sales organization, Subramanian holds that channel partnerships can do the job instead: LinkToAny now serves more than 50,000 businesses globally and operates as a trusted integration layer for Shopify, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Lightspeed, without a sales org, built instead on relationships that started as unsolicited requests from the platforms themselves.
This episode is for CEOs of technical, platform-dependent businesses who are deciding whether to build a traditional sales team as they scale, or formalize channel partnerships instead.
Key Takeaways
- LinkToAny sells exclusively through platform partners, not directly to merchants, and still has no dedicated sales organization despite serving more than 50,000 businesses.
- Subramanian hired SDRs with general sales backgrounds at investors’ urging, then let them go when they could not perform in a deeply technical sales process, a decision he now cites as a lesson in trusting his own model over outside advice.
- Subramanian declared internal AI use “non-negotiable” for every function at LinkToAny, not just developers, and the company is diversifying its AI infrastructure across DigitalOcean and Databricks rather than relying solely on OpenAI or Anthropic.
- LinkToAny runs fully transparent all-hands meetings where Subramanian shares actual profitability numbers and answers direct employee questions about company debt, a practice he credits with high retention over multiple years.
- Subramanian dropped scheduled weekly one-on-ones after confirming with his team that they were not needed, describing his broader approach as building your own leadership playbook rather than copying practices from books about other companies.
How CEOs Can Scale to Tens of Thousands of Customers Without a Dedicated Sales Team
LinkToAny’s channel-only model did not start as a strategy. It started as a request. Subramanian and his co-founder were talking with the platform team at Vend, a New Zealand-based point-of-sale company later acquired by Lightspeed, now one of LinkToAny’s own customers. Vend’s team told them integrating with the growing number of e-commerce platforms asking for support was a burden they didn’t have the bandwidth to carry, and asked if LinkToAny could be the middleman.
That inbound request became the model. Subramanian and his team decided to sell only to platforms and make them the channel, rather than build a sales motion aimed at end-user merchants. He treated the decision as a hypothesis: if selling through platforms produced a real business, LinkToAny would keep going. If it didn’t, the company would not force a direct-to-merchant sales motion to compensate.
The results validated the hypothesis. LinkToAny has no sales organization today. Deals move forward through Subramanian himself, the company’s head of product, and a fractional marketing person, supported by a defined workflow for tracking deals. Over the last three to four quarters, that model has scaled upmarket into deployments spanning 300 to 500 locations at the national level, still without a dedicated sales hire, and Subramanian believes the growth of AI tooling will let the company go further on the same model rather than less.
How CEOs Should Respond When Advisors Push a Hiring Model That Doesn’t Fit
Not every pressure on the model came from inside the company. Advisors and investors told Subramanian that LinkToAny needed a traditional sales team, or it would not succeed. He hired against that advice, bringing on SDRs with general sales backgrounds.
The hires didn’t work. LinkToAny’s sales process runs through deeply technical conversations, often starting with a partnerships contact and escalating to a CTO-level discussion, and a general sales background wasn’t enough to carry that conversation. Subramanian had to let the SDRs go.
Subramanian now names the lesson directly: the difficulty wasn’t the hiring decision itself, it was the hesitation to trust his own model when people who had scaled other companies were offering different advice. His conclusion is that a good idea from an experienced advisor is still worth testing on your own terms and your own timeline, not adopting simply because it worked somewhere else.
How CEOs Can Make AI Adoption Non-Negotiable Across Every Function
Subramanian draws a clear line between AI adoption for developers, which he considers already well covered across the industry, and AI adoption for the rest of the company, which he treats as LinkToAny’s real internal focus. The standard he sets: before spending two hours manually comparing two contracts, an employee should ask whether a tool like Claude, using Opus or Sonnet depending on the complexity of the task, could do the work faster.
LinkToAny runs an active internal AI learnings channel where every function shares what is working for them. Subramanian describes the company’s internal AI policy as a “code red”: daily use is required across every function, not optional, though individual employees have latitude to choose which tools fit their own workflow, with the company funding the tooling and access they need.
On infrastructure, LinkToAny is deliberately diversifying its AI model providers, working with DigitalOcean, Databricks, and other companies that offer self-hosted and open source models, so the company is not solely dependent on OpenAI or Anthropic. Internally, Claude Desktop is used heavily across the organization, including HR and operations, though developers remain the most intensive users.
How CEOs Can Build a Transparent, Retention-Focused Leadership Style
Subramanian runs fully transparent all-hands meetings, sharing actual profitability numbers against forecast, including the quarters where LinkToAny missed its own goals. When an engineer recently asked him directly why a specific debt line had increased, Subramanian answered the question in the meeting rather than deflecting it.
That transparency extends to how LinkToAny handles headcount. Subramanian has committed that the company will not casually reduce headcount simply because AI tooling makes a role easier to automate, treating those decisions as ones the company will not take lightly or make randomly. He credits this approach, paired with financial transparency, with producing high retention at LinkToAny over multiple years.
The same philosophy shapes smaller operating decisions. Subramanian dropped scheduled weekly one-on-ones after checking with his team and confirming the format wasn’t serving them. His broader view is that a CEO does not need to adopt a management practice simply because it is a common norm, or because it worked for the companies described in leadership books. The standard he applies instead is building a leadership approach that fits his own team.
What Scaling CEOs Can Take from LinkToAny’s Growth
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Let the market build your go-to-market model | Treat unsolicited requests from platform partners as validated demand, and formalize that channel instead of building a sales team from scratch | LinkToAny’s channel-only model began when Vend’s platform team, later acquired by Lightspeed, asked Subramanian to be the integration middleman; the company still has no sales org while serving 50,000+ businesses |
| Hold your model against outside pressure | When advisors or investors push a hiring or process change that conflicts with your company’s technical DNA, be willing to reverse the hire rather than force the fit | Subramanian hired, then let go of, SDRs with general sales backgrounds after they could not perform in LinkToAny’s deeply technical, platform-level sales process |
| Make AI adoption a company-wide mandate, not an engineering initiative | Require every function, not just developers, to use AI daily, and diversify AI infrastructure rather than depending on a single vendor | LinkToAny declared internal AI use non-negotiable across the company, runs an active AI learnings channel, and is diversifying model providers through DigitalOcean and Databricks |
| Transparency drives retention | Share real financial numbers, including misses, and explain them directly rather than filtering information through management layers | Subramanian’s practice of answering direct employee questions about company financials in all-hands meetings has produced high retention for LinkToAny over multiple years |
Quotes from This Episode
- “You also need to stand your ground and say that, well, it’s a good idea, but maybe we’re not necessarily going to try it out right now.” — Sriram Subramanian, CEO, LinkToAny
- “Make it part of your daily problem solving.” — Sriram Subramanian, CEO, LinkToAny
- “This is non-negotiable.” — Sriram Subramanian, CEO, LinkToAny
- “We have very high retention for multiple years as a result of some of these basic tenets that we have followed.” — Sriram Subramanian, CEO, LinkToAny
- “Build your own playbook.” — Sriram Subramanian, CEO, LinkToAny
Frequently Asked Questions
How can a CEO scale a company without hiring a dedicated sales team? Sriram Subramanian scaled LinkToAny to more than 50,000 businesses by selling exclusively through platform partners like Shopify, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Lightspeed rather than building a direct sales team. Deals move forward through Subramanian, his head of product, and a fractional marketing person, and the company has never hired a dedicated sales function.
How should a CEO respond when investors push a hiring decision that doesn’t fit the business? Subramanian hired SDRs with general sales backgrounds at investors’ urging, then had to let them go when they could not perform in LinkToAny’s deeply technical sales process. He now holds that a CEO should treat outside advice as worth testing on the company’s own terms, not adopting simply because it worked at another company.
How can a CEO get non-technical teams to adopt AI daily? Subramanian declared daily AI use “non-negotiable” for every function at LinkToAny, not just developers, and built an internal AI learnings channel where each function shares specific tooling wins. Employees choose which tools fit their own workflow, while the company funds the access and diversifies its model providers through DigitalOcean and Databricks.
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Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach. He coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, there are two ways to go further: Apply for Executive Coaching | Apply to Be a Guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast
