MBA Reject to Serial Early Stage Scaler

In GTMBA’s Revenue Leader Series, we give a voice to early & growth stage GTM leaders building their company's Go-to-Market motion. In today’s spotlight, we sat down with Bardia, VP Sales @ Fireworks AI. Previously, he scaled Teleport from seed ($20M valuation) to Series C ($1B valuation) where he built a 100+ person revenue org, and now is scaling AI infrastructure start-up Fireworks from $5M to 9-Figures ARR.

Julian: You have a strong “anti-entitlement philosophy.” Talk to us about where that comes from and how it influences the way you think about hiring and building teams.  

Bardia: A lot of viewpoints are shaped by your upbringing.  When I was 10 years old, my family moved from Iran to Toronto.  My father was a successful businessman in Iran and had to start over at 50 years old as a sales associate at an electronics store and learn working proficiency English.  But within 3 years, he worked his way up to VP Sales at a fintech company. 

Any time I go through a hard time in the workplace, I think about what my father did.  I believe that you are not owed anything and need to put your head down and do the work.  

When interviewing, I test for mindset - start-ups are hard.  

Julian: I often see the immigrant family story breed resilience.  One thing that strikes me is how you’ve dealt with rejection in your career.  Tell us about how you’ve turned rejection into opportunity.  

Bardia: Rejection is part of life.  After undergrad, I was struggling with career decisions, scored well on my GMAT, and was rejected by every MBA I applied to.  I was crushed, but picked myself up and found my way to Intercom.  

After Intercom, I wanted to go early stage, but was rejected by great companies like Figma, Notion, and LaunchDarkly that went on to become home runs.  One person who rejected me was Kyle Parrish, who’s become a legendary GTM leader.  Although he rejected me, I knew he was someone I wanted to stay in touch with.

Over the years, I found excuses to reach out to him with very targeted asks.  For example: “I’m new to being Head of Sales.  Our team has closed many deals and I’m struggling to structure a comp plan.  I have 3 ideas - can I get your feedback on which one you’d pick and why?”

We built a relationship and he introduced me to phenomenal mentors like Cailen Dsa, who convinced me to double down on being the first GTM hire at future companies and changed my career trajectory.  

Julian: You’ve made some great early bets on companies, which then compound in terms of career success.  Talk to us about your framework for picking companies.

Bardia: There’s no right answer, but while some people focus on the team first, I start with the space.  If you’re in the wrong space, it doesn’t matter if you’re working with a great team - as Ed Sim says, “pick the right swim lane.”

When I was evaluating Teleport, my first breakout opportunity, I focused on the type of technology.  I wanted to avoid surface-level applications like sales tools.  After analyzing IPO track records, it was clear infrastructure tech companies (think Datadog, Gitlab, Confluent) were the most likely to have outsized outcomes.  From there, I narrowed in on a pattern of successful open-source companies like HashiCorp, MongoDB, and Elastic.  I also really liked that Infrastructure is a stickier product and more likely to grow over time once deployed.  

I narrowed further to focus on early stage start-ups because I knew that this is where the highest upside was in terms of career growth.  By derisking the bet by focusing on the right space, I picked Teleport.  All this said, there is luck involved, but you need to make informed bets.  

One caveat is that in today’s day in age (July 2025), AI has changed the game.  The app layer is much more attractive than ever before.  

Julian: You went from IC to managing 100+ people by the time you were 31.  What were your biggest mistakes when you made the transition?

Bardia: My style when it comes to sales is to be very passionate, intense, and hands-on.  I have a very specific way of running a sales process, which led to success closing deals.  However, that made me a bad manager at first.  I expected others to do things my way and would give very direct feedback that could demotivate team members.  

It took me over a year and several conversations with mentors (the Kyle’s and Cailen’s of the world) to rewire and learn to deliver feedback in a way that matches how that person receives feedback.  I now invest time upfront to really get to know my team - understand their personal goals (at work and outside of work) and understand strengths and weaknesses.  I like to overinvest in strengths because I believe that strengths are what drive outlier performance.  I’m still a very direct person, but I also expect others to be direct with me so that I can course correct.  

Julian: You've hired at different stages, seed-stage Teleport vs. growth-stage Fireworks. How does your hiring approach evolve with company maturity?

Bardia: In the early stages, you’re looking for a Swiss army knife.  People who can do anything from prospect, negotiate, manage a deal process, and synthesize product feedback to the Eng team with great writing skills.  I like to hire at least two reps at a time so that I have multiple data points of what is working and not.  Once the company starts having a repeatable pattern of success (might be tied to funding stage, but not necessarily), it’s time to specialize and invest in enterprise AEs who can navigate complex organizations.  

One thing I’d do differently hiring today is that I’d ensure that my first SDRs are more like GTM Engineers and could use tools like Clay for maximum leverage in outbound.  

Julian: Tell us about how you invest in your team to help them achieve greater success?

Bardia: At Teleport, there were multiple people on our team who started out in relatively junior positions and made huge impacts on the company and have had tremendous career success. Two names that immediately come to mind are Ryan and James.  Ryan McEntush joined as an SDR and now is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz on their American Dynamism Fund.  He was always a great writer and I loved supporting his content and offering feedback.  James Murphy was our first AE hire at Teleport.  He moved on to manage one of our sales teams and we worked together on how he could deliver feedback to uplevel him as a manager. 

Julian: In a market that is so crowded and hypercompetitive as AI Inference, why should people reading this blog want to join Fireworks and why now?

Bardia: The space is very competitive, but it’s also one of the most top of mind spaces for buyers.  It’s also a technical space selling to technical buyers.  Given this, first look at the Founding team - what is their track record.  With Fireworks, the founding engineering team comes from PyTorch and Meta and understand the inference problem better than anyone else, which attracts other “cracked” 10x engineers.  

The traction speaks to itself.  We believe your data is the most valuable asset and the way to build a proprietary advantage.  So when companies can fine tune open-source models with their own data, that gives you a huge moat.  If you believe that, then Fireworks is a place to lean in.

Finally, we’ve built a stellar GTM team that has built repeatable success closing large deals without just firesale discounting to win business - we’ve got a healthy margin.  

Julian: Give us two hot takes: one on the future of GTM and AI, and one about anything else.

Bardia: Transactional sales is going to be largely automated and smaller GTM teams will have larger per rep quotas.  This is already happening.  

Outside of GTM, I think that companies hiring “seasoned” execs to run early-stage AI companies are taking a big risk.  There is a big paradigm shift and what worked in the SaaS era won’t necessarily work now.  

For additional resources on Bardia’s journey and approach to building GTM teams, check out Growth Compound or the Battery Catalyst Network.