Jay McGrath
I joined 3VC in 2018 as a Venture Partner, bringing decades of sales leadership experience from the trenches of high-growth startups. My most formative chapter was at UiPath, where I joined as the first sales leader in the US market when the company had around 100 employees and less than $10M in ARR. By the time of my tenure there, UiPath had grown to over 4,000 employees with reported ARR greater than $1.2B.
As a sales leader, I experienced firsthand what it takes to build a go-to-market strategy from the ground up. When I started at UiPath in 2017, only two people worked in the US: myself and my boss. Having no sales team to lead turned out to be my greatest advantage. I took every sales call personally, worked events myself, and built the pipeline, which taught me exactly what it took to sell emerging technology. This hands-on experience shaped how I think about hiring, scaling, and building sales cultures that can weather the journey from $10M to $100M to $1B and beyond.
In my role at 3VC, I partner with founders as they build their sales strategies and teams from the first ICP definition to $100M in ARR and beyond. Founders can count on me to bring both the strategic perspective and the tactical, in-the-trenches experience of someone who has lived through hypergrowth.
Companies make their biggest mistake when they hire salespeople before they truly have product-market fit. Revenue alone doesn't prove PMF. You need metrics that show customers are using your platform in a way that, if it disappeared, they wouldn't be able to do their work. People say that hiring salespeople grows your pipeline and revenue. In practice, it doesn't work this way. Be overly diligent about getting the product right and understanding how customers use it first. Then, as you build demand, your sales team can turn that demand into revenue.
The sales profession has too many leaders and reps whom people who don't know what they're doing have trained. Hiring based on past performance at another company is like rolling the dice. Even those of us who helped make UiPath successful may or may not work out in a different context. That's why you must deeply understand your customers and what they need, then build a hiring profile and create a scorecard to interview and test candidates against. You're not hiring a resume. You're hiring someone who fits your specific go-to-market motion.
When I'm not working with founders, I reflect on the evolution of sales methodologies: from product-selling to value-selling, from individual contributor to C-suite engagement. At UiPath, we evolved from selling technology and capabilities into a firm value-selling methodology. We moved up the organization by focusing on business outcomes: reducing risk, increasing revenue, decreasing expense. This made our deals much bigger and longer term. For me, dissecting these strategic shifts and understanding what makes sales cultures scale is both a professional discipline and a personal obsession.