#24 Escaping the GTM Leadership Trap. AI Agents, and the Rise of Agent Managers. And more...
August 1st, 2025
Strategic GTM insights for Founders, CEOs, and Investors building AI-driven SaaS businesses.
Real stories, proven frameworks, and a mindset for healthy, scalable growth.
Manually curated by Luigi Mallardo.
👋 August is here.
Let’s be honest: most inboxes are half-dead by now, filled with AI hype, SaaS fluff, or vacation autoresponders.
So I’ll keep it tight, sharp, and (hopefully) useful.
This month, I unpacked the GTM leadership puzzle:
– Why the “superhero CRO” is a myth
– When fractional leaders help (and when they don’t)
– A framework to guide Founders to choose the right help…
You’ll find those 3 pieces at the top.
Then we shift gears, from Shopify’s pushback on agentic AI to Barcelona’s robotics play, from Tomasz Tunguz’s new obsession (Agent Managers) to the philosophical wars shaping the AI race.
Pick what clicks. Ignore the rest. And if something sparks a strong reaction, I want to hear it.
Let’s dive in.
🧠 My Work: The GTM Leadership Trilogy
This is my complete, unfiltered playbook for founders facing the GTM leadership dilemma:
Why the perfect hire doesn’t exist, and what happens when you chase one.
As a pioneer of this model, I share why it's often a temporary fix, not a durable strategy.
3️⃣ The Founder's Guide to GTM support
A practical framework to find the right partner: coach, advisor, mentor, etc.. for your current stage.
SaaS Market Moves
🛍️ Shopify vs. AI Agents: The Battle for Checkout
Shopify quietly added code to block AI agents from completing purchases without final human review. While Amazon embraces agentic commerce, Shopify draws a line. Platform wars are coming. Link.
🧭 From 0 to Value Prop in 90 Days
A first marketer’s 90-day playbook — from real customer calls to a “big company move.” A tactical guide to positioning that actually differentiates. Link.
AI, Agents & Robots
🚘 Uber, Lucid & Nuro: A $300M bet… or the next Yahoo-Bing?
Uber will deploy 20,000 autonomous taxis by 2030, powered by Lucid’s EVs and Nuro’s AI stack. A bold move or a desperate one? I’ve seen this movie before: Nokia-Microsoft, Yahoo-Bing… High-stakes alliances formed too late, chasing relevance instead of driving it. Disruption doesn’t wait. You either anticipate what’s next, or become a case study. Link.
After AI Agents, Get Ready for “Agent Managers”
Tomasz Tunguz nails the next big challenge: if 2025 is the year of agents, 2026 will be about managing them. The real bottleneck isn’t the AI. It’s our capacity to orchestrate non-deterministic agents at scale. “Agents managed per person” might soon be the new productivity metric. Time to build the tools. Link.
Practical AI for Lean GTM Teams
Forget the abstract theory. A 5-person marketing team details exactly how they use AI across content, growth, and PMM. A super useful, real-world list for any lean team looking to punch above its weight. Link.
🧠 AI SDRs: More Work, Better Results
SaaStr’s AI SDR campaign crushed response rates, but only after real human orchestration. The takeaway? AI doesn’t replace your sales team. It scales them. Link.
OpenAI's New Browser: It's All About the Data
OpenAI is set to release a web browser, a direct shot at Google Chrome. The real play? Bypassing Google to capture user web behavior and data directly for its AI models. Link.
Remember Steve Jobs’ prophecy?
“Computers are an aid to human, not their replacement”. Link.
Raising Stars
Theker Robotics: Barcelona’s Bet on the Physical AI Revolution
Forget Roombas. The next frontier for AI isn’t on your screen. It’s on the factory floor. Barcelona’s Theker Robotics just raised $21M, backed by K Fund, Kibo, and Inditex, to bring AI-powered robots into real-world industrial tasks that traditional robotics couldn’t crack.
This isn’t a SaaS GTM. It’s a deep-tech play where trust, security, and operational ROI are everything, and loyalty is earned one deployment at a time.
For anyone tracking the rise of “Physical AI”, K Fund’s deep dive is worth your time:
Interesting reads
🧠 The Two Philosophies of AI: Tools vs. Agents
Stratechery’s latest is a must-read on the philosophical divide shaping the AI race. Apple and Microsoft see AI as a tool to augment humans. Meta, Anthropic, and (philosophically) Google view AI as agents to replace us. This core split drives everything—hiring wars, product bets, GTM strategy. As GTM leaders, we don’t just sell features. We sell one of these two visions. Link.
The State of ChatGPT: Adoption in 2025
Pew Research data is in: 34% of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT (up from 17% in 2023), and 28% of workers now use it on the job. A clear signal that AI is moving from novelty to utility. Link.
Your CMO Complains About Sameness? Here's the Real Problem.
A brutal analysis by Dave Kellogg on how the positioning crisis is being masked by the "sea of sameness" myth. And what CEOs should do about it. Link
💬 Let’s Connect
That’s all for this edition.
Let me know what resonated. What surprised you? What’s keeping you up at night?
Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn, always up for a sharp GTM chat.
Thank you!
Luigi