6.0 What Founding Means
The Founding stage is the period from the company's first line of code to its first signed design partners - the small group of customers willing to commit time, attention, and ideally money to a product that does not yet fully exist. It is the stage before product-market fit is even a meaningful question, because the product is still a hypothesis. Most companies are in this stage for somewhere between six and twenty-four months. A few burn through it in three. A few stay in it for four years and call themselves something else.
There is no CPMO seat at Founding. The role exists, but the title does not. The function - the integration of insight, framing, product, launch, and growth into a single accountable loop - sits inside the founder's head, alongside everything else they are accountable for. Almost without exception in B2B Enterprise, the founder is the first CPMO. They are also the first CTO, often the first CRO, and frequently the first CFO. The hat is invisible because every hat is invisible. But the loop is real, and the loop is being run, and how it is run at this stage shapes everything the company becomes.
This chapter is written for two audiences. First, founders who are running a CPMO function without recognizing it, and who will benefit from a clearer mental model of what they are doing. Second, aspirants - the PMs and PMMs reading this playbook because they want a CPMO seat eventually - who will benefit from understanding why the role looks the way it does at later stages. The Founding stage is where the patterns are set, and many of the dysfunctions visible at Engine and Scale are inheritances from Founding-stage choices that were never revisited.
6.1 The CPMO's Job at the Founding Stage
The job at Founding is to find the wedge.
A wedge is a specific, narrow, defensible point of entry into a market - a particular customer with a particular problem who is willing to pay for a particular solution, where the solution is small enough to be built by a small team and important enough to be worth the customer's switching cost. Every successful B2B Enterprise company started with a wedge. Stripe started with developers who needed a simpler payment API. Atlassian started with software teams who needed a lightweight bug tracker. Figma started with designers who needed real-time collaboration in the browser. The wedge is not the eventual market. It is the entry point that lets a company earn the right to expand later.
The CPMO function at Founding is the work of finding that wedge - and, equally important, refusing to act as if it has been found before it has been. Most founders, especially technical ones, have a strong opinion about the market they are entering before they have the right to that opinion. The opinion is a hypothesis. The Founding stage is the period during which the hypothesis is tested against reality, in tight cycles, until the wedge is found or the company is killed.
Concretely, the CPMO function at Founding is doing five things in parallel, every week, with overlapping outputs.
The first is sustained customer discovery - typically thirty to fifty hours of customer conversations per quarter, conducted personally by the founder, with detailed notes and a discipline of looking for disconfirming evidence rather than validation. The discipline that distinguishes a useful Founding-stage discovery practice from a useless one is whether the founder is genuinely trying to find out they are wrong. Most founders are trying to find out they are right, and accumulate confirming evidence while filtering out the disconfirming kind. The wedge does not appear until the disconfirming evidence is taken seriously.
The second is design partner cultivation. A design partner is not a customer in the traditional sense. They are a co-conspirator - a buyer at a target company who has committed to using the product in its early form, providing feedback, and tolerating the bugs and gaps in exchange for influence over the roadmap and, often, favorable pricing. The CPMO function is responsible for identifying the right design partners (not the easiest, not the most enthusiastic, but the most representative of the eventual ICP) and structuring the relationship. Three to seven design partners is the typical right number. Fewer than three and the signal is too narrow. More than seven and the founder cannot maintain the personal relationships the stage requires.
The third is narrative drafting. The company's story is not yet ready for the market, but it is ready to be written, tested in conversations, and revised. Most founders avoid this work or delegate it to a future marketing hire. This is the wrong move. The narrative drafted at Founding becomes the foundation of every later positioning iteration. A founder who cannot articulate, in three sentences, what their company exists to do and why anyone should care, will produce a company whose Frame stage is permanently weak. The drafting is the work. The output is just a side effect.
The fourth is rapid product iteration tied to design partner usage. The product is being built, and at this stage every meaningful feature decision is also a positioning decision. What goes into the product expresses who the company is for, what it values, and what it is not. The CPMO function is the discipline of refusing to let the product drift toward whatever the engineering team finds most interesting and instead anchoring it to the design partner signal, even when that signal is uncomfortable.
The fifth is founder-led selling. Until the wedge is found, no salesperson can be hired. The reason is simple: there is nothing to sell yet, only something to learn. The founder sells, not because they are the best closer, but because the act of selling is the act of testing the wedge against the market in the highest-fidelity way possible. The objections heard in a sales conversation are signal that no other research method produces. The CPMO function at Founding is in the meeting, taking the objections seriously, and feeding them back into the product, the positioning, and the next conversation.
6.2 Team Shape: Founder as CPMO
The team at Founding is small enough to fit around a single table - typically two to six people in product and adjacent functions, with the founder personally running the CPMO loop and the rest of the team executing slices of it.
The standard composition in a well-run B2B Enterprise Founding-stage team includes the founder, one or two engineers (or a co-founder CTO with a small team), one designer (often part-time or contract), and possibly a product-marketing-flavored hire who functions as a writer, content producer, and customer interview synthesizer. There is no dedicated marketing hire. There is no growth hire. There is no product manager other than the founder. There is no analyst, no ops person, no salesperson, no customer success manager. Every additional hire at this stage is a luxury that should be deferred until the wedge is more clearly defined.
The most consequential team-shape question at Founding is whether to bring in a head of marketing or a senior product marketer. The temptation is real. The founder is exhausted. The narrative work is hard. The website looks bad. The content engine is non-existent. A senior marketing hire would, in theory, take all of this off the founder's plate.
This is the wrong move at Founding, and one of the most common Founding-stage mistakes in B2B Enterprise. The wedge has not been found. A senior marketer hired into a company without a wedge will spend their first six months attempting to manufacture demand for a product that does not yet have a market, will produce campaigns that miss because the positioning is still wrong, and will either burn out or be fired. The hiring decision will look like it failed. In fact, the underlying decision - to hire a senior executor before the strategic foundation existed - was the failure.
The right hire at Founding, if any senior marketing-flavored hire is made, is a writer. A person who can produce founder-quality narrative content, capture customer interview synthesis in publishable form, and serve as a sparring partner for the founder's own thinking. This is not a marketing leader. It is a craft hire. It is the right shape for the stage.
The reporting structure is flat. Everyone reports to the founder, including the design contractor who works two days a week. The founder is the integration point. There is no layer of management between the founder and the people doing the work, and there should not be. A Founding-stage company that has built management layers has either grown faster than its wedge can support or has hired senior people for status reasons rather than work reasons.
6.3 Cadence: Daily Discovery
The operating rhythm at Founding is daily, and the unit of cadence is the customer conversation rather than the planning cycle.
There is no quarterly planning at Founding because the company does not yet know enough to plan a quarter. There is no monthly business review because the metrics that would populate it do not yet exist. There is a weekly all-hands, but it is a stand-up, not a review - fifteen to thirty minutes, focused on what was learned in the past week and what will be tested in the next.
The CPMO function at Founding operates on a daily cadence with a weekly synthesis. The daily cadence is the discipline of customer conversations, design partner check-ins, and product iteration decisions. The weekly synthesis is the working document - usually called the Sense memo, in the language of Chapter 4, though most founders do not give it a name - that captures what was learned in the week and what it implies for the wedge. The Sense memo is the founder's instrument. It is not shared publicly. It is shared with co-founders and the small leadership team. It is the basis on which every other decision gets made.
The most common cadence failure at Founding is the absence of synthesis. Founders run from conversation to conversation, accumulating signal in their head without ever writing it down. The signal degrades. Patterns that would be visible in writing remain invisible in memory. Decisions get made on the most recent conversation rather than on the accumulated body of evidence. The discipline of the weekly synthesis is the difference between Founding-stage companies that find their wedge in a year and those that take three.
The annual cadence at Founding is barely real. There is no annual plan worth writing, because the company will pivot at least twice in the year. There is, however, a single annual question worth holding: at the end of this year, what will we have learned that would let us either commit to scaling or kill the company. That question is the Founding stage's only annual artifact.
6.4 Metrics: Conviction Over Numbers
The metrics that matter at Founding are not the metrics that will matter at any later stage, and the most common metrics failure at Founding is the premature import of later-stage metrics.
A Founding-stage company that is reporting MRR, CAC, payback period, and pipeline coverage is reporting fiction. The numbers exist. They are not yet meaningful. The customer base is too small, the time horizon is too short, and the variance is too high for any of these metrics to carry signal. A founder who is optimizing for them is optimizing for noise.
The metrics that genuinely matter at Founding are different in kind, not just in quantity. They are qualitative or near-qualitative, and they measure conviction rather than performance.
The first is the strength of design partner engagement. Are the design partners using the product weekly without prompting? Are they introducing the product to colleagues without being asked? Are they paying for it, even at a discount, even when they could have negotiated for free access? These are signals of genuine engagement, and they cannot be faked or accidentally produced.
The second is the quality of the customer interview synthesis. After thirty to fifty conversations, what patterns are visible? Are the patterns sharp or fuzzy? Are different customers describing the same problem in similar language, or in different language? When the language converges, the wedge is approaching. When it remains divergent after dozens of conversations, the wedge has not been found.
The third is the founder's own conviction trajectory. This is a strange metric to write down, but it is real. The founder's conviction in the company's wedge should be growing over time as the evidence accumulates. If conviction is decreasing, that is a signal - either of something wrong with the wedge or of something wrong with the founder's relationship to the work. If conviction is high but not connected to evidence, that is a different signal, and a more dangerous one.
The fourth is the rate of disconfirmation. How often is the founder updating their hypothesis based on customer evidence? A founder who has not changed their mind about anything significant in the past month is either right about everything (rare) or not actually testing their hypotheses (common). The discipline of measuring disconfirmation rate is the Founding-stage discipline.
Numerical metrics start to matter at the end of the Founding stage, not the beginning. The triggers that signal the company is ready to leave Founding and enter Wedge - covered in the next chapter - include the first signed paid contracts, the first repeat reference within a target segment, and the first time a sales conversation closes without the founder personally driving every step. Until those triggers are hit, conviction and learning rate are the metrics that matter, and dashboards are a distraction.
6.5 Traps: Hiring Marketing Too Early
Five traps catch Founding-stage companies frequently enough that they are worth naming directly.
The first is the trap already discussed: hiring a senior marketing leader before the wedge is found. The hire is well-intentioned, the resume is impressive, the references are strong, and within nine months the company has spent meaningful capital on campaigns that did not work, on a brand exercise that did not land, and on a leader who is now blamed for failing to produce demand for a product that did not yet have a market. The trap is not the hire. The trap is the timing.
The second is premature scaling of the engineering team. A Founding-stage company that has fifteen engineers but only three design partners is structurally over-built. The engineers will produce features, the features will get shipped, and the design partners will not use them. The CPMO function - the discipline of anchoring engineering output to design partner signal - fails when the engineering team is too large for the design partner base to absorb.
The third is the founder who delegates the customer conversations. The conversations are not delegable. The signal that comes from a conversation conducted by someone other than the founder is degraded by an order of magnitude, because the founder is the only person who can hear an objection and make a real-time decision about whether it implies a product change, a positioning change, or a customer-fit change. Founders who delegate this work - usually to a junior product manager or a research contractor - produce companies whose Sense stage is permanently impaired.
The fourth is the design partner who becomes a customization customer. The design partner relationship is a co-conspiracy structured around a generalizable product. When a design partner starts requesting features that are specific to their workflow, their environment, or their organizational structure, and the company starts shipping those features, the company has stopped building a product and started doing consulting at a discount. The signal is not whether the design partner is happy - they are usually thrilled - but whether the features being shipped will benefit anyone other than them. The CPMO function at Founding is the discipline of saying no to the design partner often enough that the product remains generalizable.
The fifth is the founder who confuses personal credibility with company traction. A well-known founder can sell a wedge that does not exist, because the buyer is buying the founder rather than the product. Early revenue can flow on the strength of the founder's reputation, the founder's previous company, or the founder's personal network - and that revenue can mask the absence of a wedge for months or years. The diagnostic is brutal but necessary: would this customer buy from a stranger with the same product? If the answer is no, the wedge has not been found, regardless of what the revenue looks like.
The Founding stage ends when the wedge is real - when the company has identified a specific customer segment, a specific problem, and a specific willingness to pay that holds up across multiple buyers who do not personally know the founder, who use the product because it solves their problem, and who refer it to others because it works. When that condition is met, the company is ready to enter the Wedge stage, where the question shifts from "can we find a wedge" to "can we build a repeatable motion around it." That is the subject of the next chapter.
