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Song: Platform founders can never fully disconnect from sales at any scale

Rick Song · From reluctant founder to $2B valuation: The story of Persona | Rick Song (Co-founder and CEO) · May 8, 2025 · at 35:08

Rick Song is the co-founder and CEO of identity platform Persona, discussing the unique go-to-market dynamics of multi-product platform companies.

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“One of my core beliefs now is that you pretty much have to do a bit of like founder engaged, like almost at all scales, you will, the founder will never be fully disconnected from sales because like understanding the, it's no longer like, here's the simple thing that solves this problem anymore. You always have to understand like a platform at its core is solving not so much like You know, a core problem statement, but rather an entire suite of different problems, right? Like the value of a platform is that it's dynamic and solve major problems. Inherent within that becomes there is a solution in nature to all of your sales process, and the solutions people are looking for will probably continuously evolve. So if you go towards the platform motion, I think that you will never really leave a founder engaged sales motion at any sort of scale.”

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