Founding Head of GTM - Cipherscale

The Opportunity: Zero-to-one category creation for AI-Native Zero Trust Access Cipherscale is building an AI-native Zero Trust access and enforcement plane for humans, software/workloads, and AI agents. The product doctrine is simple: AI may reason and propose; deterministic policy authorizes; trusted enforcement executes. We are looking for a commercial founder/operator who can turn that architecture into a category, a repeatable customer problem, real deployments, and initial revenue. Mission: discover and prove the repeatable commercial truth for Cipherscale - who urgently needs it, what gets them to deploy, what makes them pay, and what causes them to expand. What You Own • Own ICP discovery, exclusion criteria, buyer/champion mapping, problem validation, positioning, initial wedge, and design-partner recruitment. • Personally lead early customer discovery, technical/commercial conversations, executive outreach, design-partner conversion, and initial closing. • Build an evidence-driven GTM system: every important assumption has supporting/contradicting evidence and a next falsification test. • Use AI agents aggressively for research, account intelligence, personalization, competitive monitoring, meeting preparation, call synthesis, content, and experiment analysis. • Work directly with the CEO on category creation and major strategic accounts. • Work with Product and Engineering to convert recurring customer evidence into governed product inputs - without turning prospect anecdotes into roadmap commitments. • Define the first repeatable acquisition, deployment, conversion, and expansion motion before scaling a team. What This Role Is Not • It is not a traditional marketing leadership job. • It is not an MQL, impressions, content-calendar, or brand-campaign role. • It is not a decision to hire SDR, demand-gen, content, and marketing-ops teams before product-market evidence exists. • It is not ownership of OpenVPN growth. Rod, Head of Growth, owns the established-business growth mandate; This role is focused on Cipherscale zero-to-one GTM and must collaborate cleanly without duplicating authority. Important: This is a full-time remote job, and it will be a long-term B2B contract. This can be a permanent employment opportunity for candidates based in Spain, Poland, and Germany. Our philosophy is that we are a small, close-knit team, and we care deeply about you: Highly competitive salary + Bonus Fully remote work environments. Self-managed time off. Who We Want • You have personally helped take a deeply technical B2B security, infrastructure, identity, developer, cloud, or AI product from near-zero to repeatable initial revenue. • You can sit with a CISO, CTO, security architect, platform engineer, and AI-platform leader and earn credibility. • You understand enough security architecture to reason about identity, delegated authority, credentials, policy, enforcement, trust boundaries, auditability, and blast radius. • You are comfortable selling before there is a polished playbook and learning directly from rejection. • You treat AI as operating leverage. Your instinct is to build agentic workflows before asking for headcount. • You are analytical enough to distinguish activity from evidence and evidence from causality. • You are comfortable challenging the CEO and product assumptions when customer evidence disagrees. Strong Background Signals • Early-stage Zero Trust, identity, cloud security, developer security, infrastructure security, AI security, developer infrastructure, or adjacent enterprise-security categories. • Founder, first-GTM, product-led commercial operator, technical seller, or hands-on GTM executive backgrounds can all fit. • Large-company titles alone are not compelling. Anti-Profile • Your first answer to a growth problem is "hire a team." • You depend on agencies for core positioning or customer discovery. • You optimize lead volume before proving deployment and retention. • You cannot personally run technical discovery or executive selling. • You treat AI as a copywriting assistant rather than an operating system. • You blur probabilistic AI recommendations with authorization or security enforcement. First 90 Days: Window Expected outcome • 0-30 days: 10-15 qualified ICP conversations; ~5 credible design-partner candidates; evidence-backed recommendation on ICP, problem, buyer, positioning, and wedge. • 31-60 days: Convert the strongest partners into real or production-like deployments; measure