I translate between leadership, product, sales, and the customer. I find the opportunity, shape the product, and build the path to market.
I take a product from idea to first customers, first revenue and first team. I have done it inside a company and as the company.
I have led executive teams from a16z and Y Combinator portfolios through product-market fit and revenue strategy, from venture-backed software companies to global enterprises, across short sales cycles and long ones. My strongest work is with complex or frontier technology moving from early adopters to broader adoption. No market has been too unfamiliar to map.
I am a servant leader. I align the team on the what and the why. I let the experts own the how. We solve hard problems together.
This is the superpower. I turn what one group says into what the next group needs to hear.
New technology fails in the gap between the people who build it and the people who buy it. I work in that gap.
At Predictable Revenue I led product-market fit work for executive teams and co-created a service that became a quarter of the company's revenue. At Finn.ai (acquired by Glia) I represented a tier-one bank inside the product team through three public launches of conversational AI. At Charli3 I co-founded a data infrastructure company on Cardano and led product, operations and customer success for five years, the whole time in a bear market. Every one of those jobs came down to the same thing: understanding the customer well enough to make good decisions with the people who build the product.
Four companies, most recent first.
Fifty-plus markets. A sample, to show the breadth of the work and how the method adapts to any market.
From chain restaurants to the Fortune 50. Companies from $2M to $5B+ in revenue, all B2B. Personas from CEO, CTO, and CIO to Head of Digital Transformation, lead pastor, and label engineer. Leads generated into Fortune 1000 companies including FANG, Walmart, Pepsi and Morgan Stanley, and hundreds more.
I don't code. I lead technical products.
I work with engineering managers, architects and project leads to take products from customer problem to production. I own the product. Technical leads own the architecture and implementation.
Each one is on the public record. Proof of delivery is reviewed and approved milestone by milestone.
Problem. Developers needed more free price feeds on Cardano, and a place to learn how to integrate them.
Shipped. An expanded set of free community price feeds, and the Oracle Developer Portal for documentation and integration guides.
Problem. Protocols wanted to call a price inside their own user flows, including payment, not wait for a scheduled update.
Shipped. The first pull oracle on Cardano. Later used to give a bank customer proof of reserve updates on demand.
Problem. Cardano's 20-second block time was too slow for the data customers needed.
Shipped. A Substrate research concept, then an L2 partnerchain MVP with 6-second blocks and a custom bridge back to Cardano.
Problem. A production oracle securing tens of millions of dollars needed independent review of its on-chain, off-chain and security design.
Shipped. The audit, the findings resolved by the team, and the process led through to acceptance.
Problem. USDM, the first 1:1 fiat-backed stablecoin on Cardano, needed cryptographic proof that bank balances matched token supply.
Shipped. The first Proof of Reserve oracle network on Cardano, solving bank endpoint privacy, rate limits and mismatched update timelines along the way.
Problem. Third-party price APIs exposed the oracle network to stale data and corrupt endpoints.
Shipped. An MIT-licensed Python SDK that reads prices straight from DEX liquidity pools, then a live API serving the aggregated data.
Experience with most common SaaS tooling, including administration of many of them, Google Cloud among them. I use multiple frontier LLMs to build agents that improve my own workflow.
The same seven steps in every market. Legwork first, strategy second, experiments decide, then the revenue team gets the playbook.
Mission, vision, and the leadership team's gut on where product-market fit is. Their assumptions become the first things to test.
Sales and sales enablement. Where deals are won and lost, what drives revenue, which sales were the best and why.
Success stories, failures, and churn. Direct discovery calls with customers wherever possible.
Segments, competitors, and the whitespace nobody is selling into.
Strategy sessions that turn the legwork into JTBD-style sales hypotheses worth testing.
Outbound experiments for the sales team. Whatever finds traction becomes the strategy.
Once a hypothesis has traction, give the revenue team the assets, flows, and playbooks to take it to market.
Work in progress. Articles on topics that interest me, added as they're written.
On finding product-market fit for frontier technology, and what five years of running a data infrastructure company taught me about it.
I am most useful when product, engineering and go-to-market need someone operating between them. Pick a time below, or email robert.hever@blockdevs.io.