[In-Person] Finding early PMF with Sudip Shah

Sudip is a product leader with over two decades of experience building products from zero to one. Most recently, he was Director of Product at Meta, where he led the teams building GenAI models powering AI personality and voice experiences, and before that led the Oculus VR devices team across hardware and software. Prior to Meta, he was at Amazon, where he brought Alexa to screens and multimodal devices.

Sudip currently advises and invests in VCs and early stage startups in San Francisco and London.

What this workshop is

This is not a lecture on product market fit theory. It's a working session where each founder tries to answer hard questions, and leaves with a concrete, written 60-day plan. Not just a framework to think about later.

Most early stage startups don't lack opportunity. They have too much of it: multiple ICPs, ambiguous signals, and a runway clock that doesn't wait for lagging metrics like ARR or retention to confirm what's working. This workshop forces hard calls - which segment, which signal, which experiment. In the room, on paper.

Who is it for

Founders roughly 6-18 months in, past initial customer conversations but before confident PMF. Common patterns we have observed in other early stage startups that benefited from this workshop:

Too many ICPs and use cases: trying to do everything

Founder-led vs. true pull: Are customers pulling for the product, or for the founders?

User love vs. buyer math: End users love it… but will customers buy it?

The bigger play: current PMF exists, but the real money is in switching to something bigger.

Runway risk: A long time-to-signal might be a runway killer.

How it runs

80% structured exercises, 20% discussion. Founders work through a sequence of worksheets individually, and then share out. Founders leave with:

A defined wedge: one ICP + one use case

A named signal metric and threshold, not a vague sense that "things are going well"

A 15/30/60-day plan of leading indicators, so they don't wait for lagging ones to find out too late

Explicit "say no" rules protecting focus for the next 60 days

A written contract they can be held to, optionally with a 30-day follow-up check-in