How Long Should Founders Keep Selling?: Jonas Wüst & Rosendo Mañas (EP#582)

This episode was co-produced by Founders Hive, a community of successful startup founders, industry experts, and investors promoting entrepreneurship in Switzerland and helping early-stage business concepts get ready for seed-stage investment. Founders Hive is a partner of the Entrepreneurship Training programme, empowered by Innosuisse, the Swiss innovation agency supporting SMEs, startups, research institutions and other Swiss organizations in their research and development activities. Click here to find out more about Founders Hive, empowered by Innosuisse.

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Episode description:

Rosendo Mañas is Co-Founder and Partner at Resilio, where he works directly with clients on sales and growth. Jonas Wüst is Co-Founder and CEO of Tethys Robotics which sells complex underwater robotic systems to industrial and public-sector customers. Both still play an active role in sales, but their companies are at different stages when it comes to building a commercial team around the founders. 

In this episode, they discuss the shift from founder-led sales to a more structured sales organization. Rosendo explains why having the founder in the room can still make a big difference when trust and expertise are central to the sale. Jonas shares how Tethys started handing parts of the process to a wider commercial team while keeping founders involved in strategic deals. 

The conversation also looks at what founders need to understand before they can delegate sales effectively. They talk about when it makes sense to bring in more people, how to build a repeatable process, and why founders often stay involved for much longer than expected. The key takeaway is that the transition is rarely a clean handover: strong sales teams are usually built on top of what the founders have already learned themselves.

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The cover portrait was edited by⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.smartportrait.io⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.‍

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