What does it take to build not one, but three category-defining companies and still have the hunger to do it again? Sreedhar Peddineni has done exactly that. As co-founder and original CTO of Gainsight, he helped create the Customer Success category from scratch at a time when most companies hadn’t even heard the term.
Before that, he was deep in the trenches at Host Analytics, selling the SaaS model before “SaaS” was a word anyone used. And now, with GTM Buddy, he’s doing it again. This time with the wisdom to pick a battle he knows he can win.
Sreedhar has lived through every major technology wave of the last 25 years from on-premise to cloud, from CRM to customer success, from rule-based analytics to generative AI, and he sees the current moment with unusual clarity. He’s not panicking about AI, but he’s not blindly cheerleading it either.
His message: get in the build, stop watching from the sidelines, and understand that the business problems underneath the hype haven’t actually changed.
In this interview with Dr. Amy Cook, co-founder and CMO at Fullcast, and host of the Go-To-Market podcast, Sreedhar’s hard-won perspective cuts through the noise and lands on something practical: the companies that win won’t be the ones that feared AI the most or hyped it the loudest. They’ll be the ones that quietly made it their most powerful teammate.
Here are some interview highlights:
Amy Cook: You’ve built and sold multiple companies. What made you want to build again?
Sreedhar Peddineni: I took a sabbatical after Gainsight’s acquisition in 2020 and thought I was retiring, but I was in my mid-late 40s. I still had it in me to build another company. This time I knew what I didn’t want: I didn’t want to create a new category. When you’re too far ahead of the market, people aren’t even sure they need what you’re offering.
AC: How did Gainsight even get off the ground when Customer Success barely existed?
SP: In 2011 you could count on your fingers the companies that had a function called Customer Success. We had to invest heavily in education and branding. The first Pulse events were critical. The category had to be taught into existence. Gainsight became a brand punching way over its weight.
AC: Why revenue enablement? It’s not exactly a glamorous space.
SP: That’s exactly why I liked it. Highspot and Seismic are already giants — a billion dollars in combined tech spend — yet the number one complaint on G2 is still “I can’t find content.” It was a proven, funded category with a massive unsolved problem. The boring categories are often where the biggest opportunities hide.
AC: How has AI changed what GTM Buddy is building?
SP: We launched in 2022 with an AI-powered ontology layer that automatically tagged and understood every document using your business’s own language. Then ChatGPT arrived and changed user expectations overnight. People stopped wanting to search for documents and started expecting answers to questions. So we evolved. Static content repositories are now table stakes. The real question is: how does enablement move to support sellers in their flow of work?
AC: What’s your prediction for the next two years?
SP: It’s going to be wild — to the point of being unpredictable. We spend a lot of time in fear or hype, but not enough time in the build side of the equation. People who are still celebrating a cool prompt are already behind. The world is now all about skills, agents, and workflows. If you haven’t tried a skill in Claude or experimented with Cowork even out of intellectual curiosity, you’re not taking AI seriously.
AC: What should software founders do to build real value and not just an LLM wrapper?
SP: The business realities haven’t changed. Do more with less is a universal truth. People still move between companies. Ramp time still exists. What’s changing is what software does — from static content management to revenue activation. Don’t come to GTM Buddy because we have a fancy CMS. Come because we help you prove how enablement contributes to revenue. That’s the shift that creates durable value.
