CRO 2.0: $25M to $100M from the terminal
About this episode
Ascend grew from zero to $25M ARR with no growth team. No growth marketer, no ads manager, no paid engine. Word of mouth, referrals, and a small set of partnerships. Then Omar Ismail joined as COO and built the entire go-to-market stack himself, orchestrated end to end in Claude Code. The target now: $100M ARR without meaningfully scaling headcount.
Omar calls the second half of his job CRO 2.0: one person owning strategy and the machine that executes it. He argues the real trust problem with AI is not hallucination but software bugs in the systems it builds, which is why his next hire is a go-to-market engineer, not a marketer.
And when everyone has the same tools, differentiation moves back to taste, judgment, and the things AI can't do at scale: physical mail, conferences, human relationships.
Chapters
Guest
Omar Ismail, COO at Ascend. Connect with Omar on LinkedIn, or read his write-up of the stack on omarismail.com.
About the show
Growth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI instead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027.
About Haris
Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards, a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum. He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled. More about Haris →
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