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Grit · 3 min · Oct 5, 2026
Never accept a founder's forecast without the pipeline math
Jeanne Grosser
Joubin MirzadeganHost · Partner, Kleiner Perkins
Took Palo Alto Networks' cloud business from $2M to $50M+ ARR in a year.
About this segment
Jeanne recounts telling a new CRO he'd be fired within a quarter if he took the founder's $10M number without data. She says to re-forecast from pipeline and push the gap back onto product.
From “How Vercel Is Rethinking Go-to-Market With AI | COO Jeanne Grosser”, Oct 5, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
“founders are default optimists extremely exuberant and by the way do not know how to forecast a business it's just not in their like bread and butter”
Takeaways
- Founders are default optimists and rarely know how to forecast
- Work backwards from pipeline data, not from products that don't exist yet
- Put pressure on product to fill the gap the forecast depends on
In this episode
Full episode13:30Never accept a founder's forecast without the pipeline math3:24
- 16:31Build an operating model to show what must be true3:39Up next
- 57:49Vercel runs support, BDR and RevOps with agents2:36
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 13:43
I had this conversation on Tuesday with someone asked me to talk to an early stage CRO. Yep. He's like three months in, two months in. Yep. And he was like, we're going to go to 10 million this year. And I'm like, great. Like, you know, they started the year at one. I'm like, that'd be a great, amazing year. How much pipeline do you have? Can't get an answer. I'm like, okay, how many reps do you have?
- 14:13
Well, we just turned off two. we just hired two more yeah i'm like okay so how much pipeline do you have and like oh well we're creating like we need to create this amount of opportunities at this acv i'm gonna i'm not like talking about the future like just like today yeah how much pipeline do you have couldn't get an answer like okay so i'm just gonna assume that you don't have the data in front of you but that i think you hopefully know it somewhere right okay um how are you gonna get to 10 just like how are you going to get there? And he's like, well, we have the self-service product and I'm like, okay, um, how's it doing? We haven't released it yet. Okay. We have this deal with this big, I'm not going to name the tech company, but big tech company. I have relationships there.
- 15:01
My founder has relationships there. Okay, great. Like how big is the deal? Million dollars. I'm like, wow. Okay. How far along is it? Oh, we just had like our first meeting. Okay. And I'm like, hey like and i just met him like 10 minutes into meeting this guy yeah and i just said hey do not take this as anything else like other than i'm actually looking out for you you will get fired in a quarter yeah you will get if you take this number and you don't know the data like you're imminently going to get fired and i was like dude you are inheriting a founder's forecast founders are default optimists extremely exuberant and by the way do not know how to forecast a business it's just not in their like bread and butter yeah and for the most part they're like probably out like pitching the dream to investors and somehow they got to like justify the valuation
- 15:49
that they want to raise and so they need a big number yep and i just kind of was like you know um i'm not gonna assume anything other than like your founder is but you need to re-forecast what you think you can do in the business I would not forecast the PLG product that doesn't exist yet I would work backwards from a set of data that you better go get answers to very quickly and like give a reasonable forecast and then put the pressure back on the product team to make sure that they can fill the gap with the self-serve product that needs to be released. Otherwise, like I promise the product leader is not going to be the one that gets fired before you. And I have some version of like this thing all the time. Okay.
- 16:39
That's the, that's the, that's my long preamble. Yeah. No, I, I think that happens constantly.