From Microsoft to Startup: Aserto’s Framework for Building Enterprise GTM from Zero
After spending thirteen years at Microsoft, most people would find it daunting to start over without the backing of an established brand. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Aserto founder Omri Gazitt shared his experience transitioning from Microsoft’s well-oiled GTM machine to building enterprise awareness from scratch.
The Big Tech GTM Safety Net
At Microsoft, market penetration came built-in. “Working in a big company like Microsoft, there’s so much awareness of what Microsoft does and new things and there’s so many channels that are already established,” Omri explains. This infrastructure makes launching new products significantly easier, but it can also create blind spots for executives who later become founders.
The Startup Reality Check
The contrast with startup life is stark. “Whereas as a startup you just have to build that from zero,” Omri notes. This zero-to-one challenge forced the Aserto team to fundamentally rethink their approach to market development.
Finding Your First Customers
Rather than trying to replicate Microsoft’s broad enterprise approach, Aserto identified two specific customer profiles with acute authorization challenges:
First: “B2B SaaS vendors that want to move from a coarse grained authentication model… to a fine grained authorization model.” These companies face pressure from customers wanting more granular control.
Second: “Enterprises that want to create a common authorization control plane for a number of their internal applications.” These organizations struggle with managing permissions across multiple systems.
The Product-Market Fit Journey
Building awareness doesn’t automatically translate to product-market fit. “We have a lot of good early indications that the problem that we are solving resonates and resonates strongly,” Omri shares. “But for product market fit… you really want there to be strong pull from the market on your solution.”
The Five Critical Questions
Omri distills the core GTM challenges into five essential questions every technical founder must answer:
- “Who is the user?”
- “Who’s the buyer?”
- “Who are the people that are going to have the biggest pain?”
- “How do you find those people?”
- “How do you help them find you at the exact moment that they have the problem?”
Building Category Awareness
In a nascent market, education becomes crucial. “We’ve gone from zero when we first started to about ten companies that are doing roughly what we’re doing,” Omri notes. This competition actually helps validate the category, but it also means competing for mindshare.
The Standards Strategy
One unique aspect of Aserto’s GTM approach involves their stance on standards. Drawing from his database industry experience, Omri notes: “You don’t want to kind of go in too early because pre-standardizing things before you actually have some market pull is dangerous. But for this to really grow as a category… we’ll have to go create some standards and then compete within those standard frameworks.”
Looking Forward
Success for Aserto means reaching a point where “no one is confused about authorization as something that they have to go build on their own. In fact, they don’t want to because that means that their application is going to be a snowflake.”
For technical founders transitioning from big tech to startups, Aserto’s journey offers crucial lessons. Building enterprise GTM from scratch requires more than just technical excellence—it demands careful market segmentation, customer identification, and strategic timing of category development efforts. The safety net of big tech’s established channels must be replaced by precise targeting and deliberate market education.