Help pls! Best personal growth plan in early VC start-up? Love you savages 🫶

Hey savages,

i loved all your advice yet and we also implemented quite some thoughts of yours in our org.

This time, I’m mostly interested in better understanding and shaping my career plan.

First some context:

I joined this start-up a the first hire before we raised our Pre-Seed round. 15 months later, we’re 16 people and have great first PMF (awesome NPS & Ellis scores), having 6-digit ARR after 5 months, looking to raise our Seed Round in the next few months.

I work very closely with the Business Co-Founder and we set up quite some processes together from scratch.

I’m solely responsible for our CRM and Top of Funnel, and closed approx. the smaller 20% of deals alone and push the topics playbook and culture quite strongly. I even fully hired a part-time SDR myself and trained him to book his first demo within his second day (ACV 10-40k ARR).

The founders have a strong trust in my integrity which I highly value and see the drive in me to build up new things. They see that I really want to build a great org.

Why I need your help:

But as the organization is growing ever faster, I want to give a clear preference to the Co-Founders, where I want to develop myself.

Big but: I’m not sure myself yet.

I’m still quite young (mid 20ies) and don’t have crazy B2B SaaS experience yet.

I definitely know that I will always want to work in an entrepreneurial role, as I enjoy building stuff.

However, I know that the time will come when it’s better for the org to have senior people coming in and putting our org from Level 1 to 10. Maybe even someone between me and the Founders.

And I’m self-reflected enough to know that it might be better for the org to have an experienced VP of Sales in there than putting myself there when we grow to a bigger sales team.

What’s the best next step?

So here I am. Even though I build up and shape everything today as a “VP of Sales” (lol, don’t care about titles), I want to understand what the best path for me is. Is it pushing for an (ENT) AE role? Should I rather build my mmgt skills (e.g. Team Lead SDRs)? Should I focus on expanding into new markets and building up processes from scratch?

What’s the path with the fastest growth in building hugely valuable skills?

Thank you so much! All answers are highly appreciated :)