Making The Grade

Less than 1 in 100 Startups manage to achieve funding beyond Series D or an exit.Investors typically expect 8 out of 10 of the businesses they invest in to fail. It’s time to make building a business less depressing and scale more wisely. Tune into Making The Grade to hear first-hand experiences of venture-backed software companies in their journeys from Seed to Series B funding. Every week, we’ll be joined by Founders, Investors and senior Go-To-Market Leaders to explore the factors driving the decline in graduation rates, misaligned go-to-market operations and ineffective sales and marketing strategies. All while making you leave every episode with actionable insights and expert advice to help you navigate these common Startup hurdles and thrive in a competitive market, showing that it can be done differently.

Making The Grade is a business podcast hosted by ScaleWise, Tom Glason, with 22 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

ScaleWise, Tom Glason hosts Making The Grade, a business show with 22 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Episode #10

  The GTM Playbook that works in 2026: Amelia Scott on scaling Culture Amp from $15M to $170M without sales commission

  Apr 8, 202640 minS2

  <p>What does it actually take to build a world-class sales culture? </p> <p>Amelia Scott knows better than most. She spent nearly seven years at Culture Amp, joining as a senior AE when the business was at $15M ARR and leaving as VP of Global Sales at $170M. </p> <p>During her tenure, she took the EMEA business from $1.5M to $40M, and learned some hard, invaluable lessons along the way about talent, culture, regional expansion and what revenue leadership actually requires.</p> <p>Now working as a fractional CRO, Amelia is right at the sharp end of how AI...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #9

  Bootstrapping to $45M ARR: Guillaume Moubeche on scaling efficiently without any VC trade-offs

  Apr 1, 202648 minS2

  <p>What does it actually take to build a $45M ARR SaaS business without raising a penny of VC money? </p> <p>Guillaume Moubeche, Founder of Lemlist, knows better than most. Starting with just €1,000 and rejections from 30 VCs, Guillaume built one of the most recognised outbound sales tools in the world, bootstrapped, community-led, and stubbornly focused on doing fewer things better.</p> <p>In this Making The Grade episode, Guillaume unpacks the full journey from building in public before it was fashionable, why the constraint of having no money forced the creativity that capital never could have bought, and his ref...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #8

  What Investors Really Look for: Hillel Zidel on the moves and decisions that make or break the One to Ten Million journey

  Mar 26, 202640 minS2

  <p>What does an investor actually see when they look under the hood of a 1 to 10 Million journey? And what really separates the companies that break through from those that quietly stall?</p> <p>We’re joined by Hillel Zidel, Managing Director at Kennet Partners, to find out. Kennet Partners invests in founder-led, capital-efficient B2B SaaS companies at precisely the stage where growth either compounds or gets stuck, making Hillel one of the most informed voices on what this journey actually takes.</p> <p>In this episode, Tom and Hillel dig into the predictors he uses to assess whether a...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #7

  From Chaos to Predictability: Pete Crosby's Honest Lessons on the One to Ten Million Journey

  Mar 19, 202642 minS2

  <p>If you're building a venture-backed software startup and trying to navigate the messy, exhilarating, often brutal stretch from $1M to $10M ARR, this episode is essential listening.</p> <p>In this Making The Grade episode, we’re joined by Pete Crosby, Founder of Revelesco and one of the most experienced revenue coaches in the UK startup ecosystem. </p> <p>Pete has helped countless founders and CROs find clarity, fix alignment, and scale with real commercial rigour. In this conversation, Pete shares the patterns he sees repeatedly across the companies he works with, and the frameworks he uses to help the...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #6

  Reshaping GTM in the AI Era - Harrison Rose on repeatable GTM and scaling beyond Founder-Led Sales

  Mar 12, 202645 minS2

  <p>Harrison Rose has lived the journey most founders only see from the outside.</p> <p>As Co-Founder of Paddle, he helped scale from zero to $100M+ revenue - without the “overnight success” story everyone loves to tell. Now he’s doing it again with GoodFit, turning the market-mapping and ICP systems Paddle built internally into a product built for modern GTM teams.</p> <p>In this episode, Harrison breaks down the real inflexion points that unlocked Paddle’s growth, why founder-led sales is often misunderstood, and how teams get trapped at $2–3M ARR when “founder privilege” masks the lack of a scalable...

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on Making The Grade. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.