Wade Foster

🎙️ From Square to Mercury: How Rohini Pandhi became one of fintech’s top product leaders—and how velocity of learning at high slope companies shaped everything. Rohini dropped so many gems in our first episode of First Builders: 💎 Generalist → Specialist: In her early career, she was a generalist and tried everything. This led her to critical discoveries. She specialized in product and fintech when the “time was right” 💎 Follow the Engineers and Designers: Square was a high slope environment for Rohini, packed with talent density and learnings. She finds high slope environments by studying where smart engineers and designers are going. 💎 Fake News about PMs: PMs don’t just “move fast and break things.” Her team runs 30-50 customer interviews per quarter, providing rigor behind every decision. 💎 It’s Usually Too Early to Hire a PM: A top question she gets from founders is whether they should hire a PM. She usually says: “it’s too early.” 💎 Hiring a World Class Team is Like Tennis: When finding a tennis partner, you want someone a little better than you who can challenge you to improve your game. Give us a listen and leave a review on your favorite podcast location (see comments for links)! #FirstBuilders #StartupPodcast #ProductLeadership #TechCareers #Leadership

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The US market is excited for the GTM engineer role and how it enables reps to deliver more. The mature Indian market is still wondering why Revops is a separate department and what value do they add. Early stage haven't heard about Revops. The impact of hassle free ops and valuable insights to up the pitching game is seldom understood. This mentality of cost centres is what keeps Indian execution quality at its lowest. All while taking pride in first principles thinking, and missing the next step in the game. Designing a machine does not start manufacturing. Setting up a whole plant does.

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Three months of learning to code from scratch. No technical background. Just a problem he knew needed solving. That bet paid off when a VP said "I want this" and four hotels started paying to use it. In the latest episode of Shinka - A Podcast on Biz Tech Evolution, we spoke with Rohan Watt, founder of Techie Stays, who is building AI-powered voice and review solutions for hotels across Thailand. Rohan's path is one of the more fascinating ones we've had on the show. From a startup acquired by Oracle, to growing a QR ordering platform to a million end users a year, to now building an AI solution that saves hotel leadership teams around 30 hours a month on review responses alone. What I found really compelling was his point on building on top of existing tech rather than fighting to replace it. His voice solution sits as a widget on the hotel website, no deep integrations needed, and already generated around $7,000 to $8,000 in bookings in its first month of trial. My favorite quote from Rohan: "You can't speak to 100 guests at once, but this is what AI does. Now it's up to you to train the AI team member to sell and talk about your hotel in the way that you want to." His advice for founders was equally sharp: build around a problem you actually know. Not a trend, not a buzzword, a real problem you understand deeply. Are you seeing AI adoption in your industry yet? What has the change management side looked like from your experience? Link to the full episode in the comments!

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Series B founders face a perfect storm: - Growth outpaces org design - Early hires hit ceilings - Culture frays across time zones - Ops lag behind momentum Bhavani Raman, co-founder of Element5 (a Series B startup) and Pionyr founding member, overcame scaling challenges by treating growth like an engineering problem. Here’s how and how you can too: 👉 Build culture and structure before growth Element5 hired seasoned execs early, used OKRs for alignment, and prioritized cross-cultural integration from day one 👉Solve scaling with repeatable systems When Mexico ops hit roadblocks, they templated support, redistributed roles, and built global playbooks. 👉 Focus narrowly to win big Doubling down on post-acute healthcare automation helped them land 9 of the top 10 providers 👉Make process your operating system of growth OKRs became their backbone; and scalable operational tools turned chaos into cadence managing complexity at scale 👉 Don’t scale alone After nearly burning out at her first startup, she turned to domain experts, complementary partners, and candid support from investors and advisors Read the full story for deeper insights. Link in comments. What’s been your biggest post-Series B challenge? 👇 Follow Pionyr for actionable founder insights.

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When you mentor founders, you are not just helping build companies. You are influencing the kind of leaders the next decade will produce. Over the years, I have worked with student founders across fourteen universities, from Southern California to India. The ideas were different. The environments were different. The challenges were different. Yet one pattern showed up again and again. Most early founders do not lack funding advice. They lack founder formation. Enduring companies are not built by decks, frameworks, or spreadsheets alone. They are built by people with the ability to think clearly under pressure, question assumptions, and stay anchored to their values when shortcuts are tempting. Curiosity is not just interest. It is the discipline to ask better questions, even when the answers are uncomfortable. Resilience is not optimism. It is the willingness to rebuild when the first plan fails, because it almost always does. Ethics is not a talking point. It is the quiet structure that holds trust together long after momentum fades. I have watched twenty-one-year-old founders stay up late not to refine a pitch, but to make their product more honest. Those moments matter. They show what mentorship truly shapes. Not direction, but judgment. Not outcomes, but decision-making. We often talk about building the next generation of startups. What we need just as urgently is the next generation of founders. Leaders who are thoughtful, steady in their purpose, and disciplined enough to outlast noise, hype, and trends. That is the real multiplier in any ecosystem. What qualities do you believe will define strong leadership in the decade ahead? #mentorship #students #founders

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I constantly oscillate between sharing in-progress work and completed work. This means I'm long overdue to share some exciting updates on Wonderment Delivery Promise, our pre-purchase ETAs product. Wonderment now supports Rules for transit estimations and fulfillment estimations to allow you to account for per-product ETA customizations (like embroidery and engraving), warehouse delays, or other events that would impact coming estimates. Here's a quick demo of how you can use them for communicating pre-orders, backorders, and delays: https://lnkd.in/eb88vmcu

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