Listen on YouTube // Apple // Spotify
Thank you to our sponsor partner:
Primer unlocks B2C ad channels for B2B marketers with precision targeting and next-gen measurement.
There are two ways you’re wasting ad budget: (a) you pay to reach people who will never buy, and (b) the buyers who do show up walk away unidentified. Primer fixes both. This includes excluding the wrong people across Meta and Google before you pay for the impression. No more burning budget on students, competitors, and tire-kickers.
You get unlimited website reveals: every account researching you, identified - no caps, no per-reveal pricing. See who is actually in-market and feed it straight back into targeting.
GTMnow Network exclusive offer: Extended 45 day trial and 15% off with code GTM15 - just apply the code when you go to upgrade from the free trial.
See who’s really in your funnel: sayprimer.com
Who you’ll learn from
Shensi Ding is the Co-Founder and CEO of Merge. She joins GTMnow to break down how she built a company that now powers integrations for OpenAI, Perplexity, Netflix, Uber, Mistral, and enterprise logos like Mastercard, JP Morgan, and Amex, backed by $75M from Accel and NEA.
Shensi gets tactical on the GTM decisions behind that growth: why she went enterprise-first into greenfield, why she's now layering a self-serve motion back on top (20,000+ self-serve orgs, 400+ enterprise customers), how forward-deployed engineers turned a 1% edge case into 5 to 10x usage growth, and why she rebuilt marketing to run like an engineering team. She also gets candid on founder-led sales, the mercenaries-versus-missionaries hiring trap, the open-source model shift and the China question, and why every founder who started pre-AI should build one product 0-to-1 themselves.
What you'll learn:
Why she reversed the standard GTM playbook (enterprise first, then PLG) and how to run both motions at once
How forward-deployed engineers close the 1% edge case that unlocks 5 to 10x enterprise usage
Why marketing now runs like an engineering function at Merge, and how it took her from 1 to 2 dinners a quarter to 3 to 5 a month
Why product got fast and go-to-market became the new bottleneck
How to know when to hire your first salesperson (hint: you should be “dying” first)
The mercenaries-vs-missionaries test, and the “anti-sell” she uses in hiring
The 2026 shift away from “token-maxing,” and how model routing cuts AI spend
The truth about open-source (often Chinese) models: where they’re built vs. where your data actually lives
Why founders who started pre-AI should build one product 0-to-1 to understand what’s now possible
Episode highlights
1:14 - What Merge does: products, workforce, and three core offerings
2:05 - Agent Handler, Gateway, and the new Embedded Routing Stack
4:52 - The 2026 shift away from “token-maxing”
7:29 - Open-source models, the China question, and where data really lives
10:14 - How Merge works with open-source model providers
12:00 - What she’s learned as a first-time founder: get over your ego
13:22 - Reversing the GTM playbook: enterprise-first, then PLG
15:50 - Running both motions: 20,000+ self-serve, 400+ enterprise
17:31 - Why buyer behavior moved to Twitter and brand
19:06 - Founder-led sales, and what a real sales process taught her
22:27 - When to hire your first salesperson
23:49 - Forward-deployed engineers and 5 to 10x usage growth
27:00 - Keeping go-to-market up to speed with product
28:33 - Rebuilding marketing as an engineering function
30:45 - The dinner agent: 1 to 2 a quarter to 3 to 5 a month
31:24 - How AI buying reshaped the marketing org
33:54 - Maintaining agents: prompts over legacy builders
35:02 - Mercenaries vs. missionaries, and the “anti-sell”
40:25 - The market view: from hostility to collaboration
42:06 - Is a valuation reckoning coming?
43:07 - Why she stayed hands-on building Agent Handler and Gateway
45:18 - What’s next: training your own models off open-source
46:52 - Where to find Shensi and Merge
Key takeaways
1. Merge ran the GTM playbook in reverse: enterprise first, PLG second.
Three years ago, Merge made the go up-market decision to go up-market while enterprise was greenfield and build the security and depth that make you hard to replace. It worked. Most revenue now comes from the 400+ enterprise logos like Mastercard, JP Morgan, and Amex. Only now is Merge adding a self-serve layer back on top, because AI buying got consumerist and developers need to know you, not just the C-suite.
2. Tokenmaxxing is so 2025 - 2026 is about intentional spend.
Last year everyone defaulted to the newest, biggest model because the cost was subsidized and experimentation was the point. Now teams are trained, spend adds up real quick, and open source has caught up. The unlock is smart routing: send more simple tasks to Haiku, not Opus 4.8, and save the expensive models for the tasks that need them.
3. Where a model is built and where your data lives are two different things.
The stigma around Chinese open source models conflates origin with hosting. A model built in China can run on a US host (Baseten, Bedrock, Fireworks) with US servers, and customers can block routing to China entirely. Shensi works directly with ByteDance, Alibaba (Qwen), and Kimi, with data retention terms and US fallback hosts built in.
4. Forward deployed engineers are the enterprise cheat code.
Merge’s product fit 99% of enterprise use cases, but the last 1% blocked adoption. Forward deployed engineers closing that gap grew usage 5 to 10x almost immediately, then the pattern repeated across accounts.
5. Treat marketing like an engineering function and productize it.
When product started shipping faster than marketing could keep up, Merge broke marketing into repeatable, automated actions: changelogs pulled from GitHub, launch images and videos auto-generated in the brand voice. The standout is a dinner agent handling outreach lists, closed-lost accounts, and seating charts. Field dinners went from 1-2 a quarter to 3-5 a month!
Shensi Ding
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shensiding
Merge: https://merge.dev
Sophie Buonassisi (Host)
X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona
Newsletter:
GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
X / Twitter: https://x.com/GTMnow_
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
The GTMnow Podcast - subscribe to support
It would mean the world to us if you subscribe to the show on your platform of choice. This helps support our growth, which in turn helps us continuously bring on bigger guests and deliver the content that you want to hear most.
The GTMnow Podcast shares how the best in tech build, scale and invest.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes, The GTMnow Newsletter editions, and other content.
GTMnow is run by GTMfund, an early-stage venture firm made up of 350+ go-to-market executives from the fastest-growing companies.
