Union: the hire that mattered.

By the time the founder picked up the phone, we already knew each other. The trust wasn't built in the moment — it was built in a bunch of quieter ones before it. Earlier conversations where I tried to be useful with nothing attached. Intros I'd made into the company. The kind of relationship where, when something hard came up, I was one of the people they thought to call.

The ask didn't come dressed up. It came as a Sunday-afternoon call — sounding-board energy, not a formal request. Union needed a Head of Sales Engineering, and the gap was starting to show up in places that mattered: deals that wouldn't move, founder hours getting eaten by technical sales work that shouldn't be theirs. We talked it through, and by the end of the call we both knew the next move wasn't sympathy — it was a hire.

Before I called anyone, we sat with the brief. Not a job description — a scorecard. What 'right' actually looked like for Union's stage, in Union's motion. Where pedigree mattered and where it didn't. The tradeoffs we'd accept and the ones we wouldn't. The 90-day pre-mortem: what would have to be true in three months for us to know the hire was working. That conversation is the work people skip and then regret.

This is the part of the story I most want people to understand. Before I introduced Chris to Union, I sat down with him directly. I wanted to understand his background, his strengths and weaknesses, what he was actually looking for in his next chapter, what motivated him, and whether the fit was genuine — not just plausible. The opening line was simple: 'Tell me what you're looking for in your next chapter.' Conviction got built in that conversation. The introduction was the output of conviction, not a forwarded resume. That distinction is most of the work. The value isn't activating a network. It's being a trusted filter so the founder gets a high-conviction intro, not a high-volume one.

The hire strengthened Union's technical sales leadership and expanded organizational leverage in a way that showed up across the GTM motion. It helped the company scale the enterprise motion. It gave the founder real time back — time that went into building, not into doing technical sales themselves. The specifics are Union's to share, not mine. What I can say is that the right hire, made with conviction on both sides, became leverage the company is still compounding on.