I’m Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast. In this episode, I talked with Sriram Subramanian, CEO of LinkToAny, an AI-native commerce integration and automated onboarding platform that now serves more than 50,000 businesses worldwide. When a technical founder resists advisor pressure to build a traditional sales team, Sriram holds that routing growth through platform partners such as Shopify, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Lightspeed produces faster, more durable growth than direct field sales. LinkToAny proves the point: the company has scaled past 50,000 businesses without ever building a dedicated sales organization.
This episode is for CEOs deciding whether to build an internal sales team or grow through platform partnerships instead.
Key Takeaways
- LinkToAny has never built a dedicated sales team. Every deal moves through platform partners, including Shopify, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Lightspeed, and the company still serves more than 50,000 businesses.
- Sriram hired a general-background SDR on an advisor’s recommendation, then let the hire go once he confirmed LinkToAny’s selling process requires deep technical fluency, not a generic sales playbook.
- Sriram’s path ran from developer to product manager to founder. At each step, he had to let go of the work he was best at and trust his team to cover it instead.
- Sriram runs company all-hands with full financial transparency, walking the team through real numbers, missed goals, and the specific corrective steps taken, including explaining a rising technical debt line item directly to the engineer who asked about it.
- Sriram declared AI use non-negotiable across every function at LinkToAny, not just engineering, and backed the mandate with an internal channel where employees share real use cases from their own roles.
How CEOs Can Grow Without Building a Traditional Sales Team
I asked Sriram how LinkToAny grew to 50,000 businesses without a sales org, and the answer traces back to how the company found its first customers. LinkToAny’s first platform relationship came from a New Zealand company called Vend, which told Sriram and his co-founder it was too costly to build and support integrations for every e-commerce platform asking for one. Vend asked LinkToAny to be the middleman. Vend was later acquired by Lightspeed, one of LinkToAny’s current customers.
That first inbound relationship set the model: sell to platforms, not directly to merchants. LinkToAny tried selling directly to end-user businesses early on and found the selling and support motion did not fit the company. Sriram made a deliberate call to sell only to platforms and treat them as channels.
Advisors and investors pushed back on this model at times, telling Sriram he needed a conventional sales team to succeed. He hired a general-background SDR on that advice, then had to let the person go. The selling process at LinkToAny is technical: a partnerships contact often escalates to a CTO, and the conversation has to hold up at that level. Sriram holds this as his rule for evaluating outside advice on hiring: “If they cannot ramp up or if they haven’t done deeply technical sales, it’s just not going to work.” The company still has no dedicated sales function today. Sriram, his head of product, and a fractional marketing person move deals through a shared workflow instead, and Sriram expects AI tooling to extend that model further before the company adds a sales function at all.
How Technical Founders Shift Their Mindset to Lead as CEO
Sriram’s path ran developer to product manager to founder, and each step required giving something up. As a developer, he wrote code. As a product manager, he stepped back from code to own the product. As founder, he had to own go-to-market, fundraising, and team-building on top of product, whether or not those functions matched his strengths.
The hardest part was not learning new skills. It was releasing the ones he already had. Sriram names trust as the mechanism that made the shift work: “I needed to have trust my team and hire new people whenever the need arose.” Sales and marketing were the clearest example. He had never done either through his PayPal career, and LinkToAny could not afford to hire a chief revenue officer at the founder stage. He had to learn the company’s selling process himself, discover that it was technical, and apply his own product and engineering background to make it work, rather than waiting until he felt expert enough to hand it off.
How CEOs Build Trust Through Financial Transparency
Sriram treats financial transparency as a leadership practice, not a reporting requirement. At LinkToAny’s all-hands meetings, he pulls up actual numbers and forecasts and walks the team through them directly, including goals the company missed and the specific steps taken in response.
At a recent all-hands, an engineer asked Sriram why a specific line of technical debt had increased. Sriram explained it on the spot. He describes the standard this sets for the whole team: “We will do our best to be transparent and retain and grow this team.” Sriram connects this practice to LinkToAny’s retention: the company has kept high retention over multiple years, and Sriram credits transparency, along with a policy of not cutting people lightly or by default, as part of what produced it.
How CEOs Make AI Adoption Non-Negotiable Across the Company
Sriram separates AI adoption among engineers, which he sees as already happening across the industry, from AI adoption everywhere else in the company, which he treats as a leadership mandate. His instruction to the team is direct: “Make it part of your daily problem solving.” The standard is not staying current on new models. It is applying AI to the task in front of you, such as comparing two contracts, and asking whether the work should take two hours or a few minutes with the right tool.
LinkToAny runs an internal AI learnings channel where every function shares what is working, and Claude Desktop is now in heavy use across the company. Sriram frames the mandate in blunt terms: “I did declare a code red to say that look, this is non-negotiable.” Employees choose their own tools and workflows. What is not optional is using AI daily, regardless of function.
The Framework: Four Principles from This Conversation
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence |
| Sell through the platforms your customers already trust | Route growth through established platform partners instead of building an internal sales team, and let the partners’ existing relationships carry the introduction | LinkToAny grew to more than 50,000 businesses through partnerships with Shopify, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Lightspeed, reversing a general SDR hire once it did not fit the company’s technical selling process |
| Trust your team before you add headcount | Let go of the functions that are not your strength, and hire only when a real capability gap shows up, rather than by default | Sriram moved from developer to product manager to founder, taking on sales, marketing, and fundraising himself before building out a team around each function |
| Make transparency the retention strategy | Share real financial numbers, including missed goals, at company-wide meetings so employees understand the reasoning behind decisions | Sriram walks LinkToAny’s all-hands through actual profitability numbers and forecasts, and explained a rising technical debt line item directly to the engineer who asked about it |
| Mandate AI adoption company-wide, not just in engineering | Require every function to use AI daily in real workflows, backed by a shared channel where employees exchange what is working | Sriram declared AI use non-negotiable across all functions at LinkToAny, supported by an active internal AI learnings channel |
Quotes from This Episode
- “That’s where 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
- “I needed to have trust my team and hire new people whenever the need arose.” — Sriram Subramanian, CEO, LinkToAny
- “We will do our best to be transparent and retain and grow this team.” — Sriram Subramanian, CEO, LinkToAny
- “I did declare a code red to say that look, this is non-negotiable.” — Sriram Subramanian, CEO, LinkToAny
Frequently Asked Questions
How can a CEO scale a company without hiring a sales team?
A CEO will scale without an internal sales team by routing every deal through platform partners who already have distribution and trust with the end customer. Sriram Subramanian built LinkToAny this way, growing past 50,000 businesses by integrating with platforms including Shopify, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Lightspeed instead of hiring sales staff. The approach works when the product requires a technical sales conversation the founder can run personally, and it fails if a company forces a generic sales hire into that process.
How should a technical founder prepare to become CEO?
A technical founder will prepare for the CEO role by deliberately handing off the functions closest to their comfort, not by holding onto them longer. Sriram Subramanian moved from developer to product manager to founder, and describes the shift as learning to trust his team and hire new people whenever a real capability gap appeared, rather than keeping sales, marketing, or fundraising to himself. CEOs who wait until they feel expert in every function before delegating will slow the company’s growth.
How can CEOs make AI adoption non-negotiable across a company?
CEOs will make AI adoption stick company-wide by tying it to daily problem solving instead of treating it as an engineering initiative. Sriram Subramanian declared AI use non-negotiable across every function at LinkToAny and backed the mandate with an internal AI learnings channel where employees share real use cases from HR, operations, and other non-technical roles. The mandate works because employees choose their own tools while leadership requires that the habit itself is universal.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies and Careers
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, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
