How Sondero started
Behind Sondero
Where Sondero comes from, why it exists, and what the name actually means.
Spring 2023. A couple of months after we sold a company doing $35M in revenue, I was sitting in an apartment in Kolkata, meeting my wife's mother for the first time.
At midnight I was hunched over my laptop, trying to figure out how my share contract actually worked. Cap tables, liquidation preferences, vesting. On a whim I opened ChatGPT and typed in my question. Then another. Then ten more. An hour later I stopped and thought: something fundamental just changed. For the first time it felt like having a knowledgeable partner sitting next to me.
That night changed how I think about building sales and marketing engines: the teams, the processes, the whole revenue organization. I have spent the last sixteen years doing exactly that, as Head of Sales, Director, VP Sales and Chief Revenue Officer, in Europe and for seven years in the US. With teams of up to 70 people, I spent years chasing everyone to keep the CRM up to date. In all those years the bottleneck was capacity: research, pipeline analysis and writing cost my best people hours they did not spend with customers.
Today I barely open my CRM. After a call I tell Claude what happened, and Claude moves the deal, writes the notes and adds the new contact. I built this system for my own work first, the way I would have wanted it for my teams. Everything Sondero brings to a sales team ran there first: prep, debrief, CRM, proposal, follow-up.
One thing I won't automate is the conversation with the customer. That still needs a person. AI is there to give you more time for it.
The name comes from the word sonder: the realization that every stranger has a life as vivid and complete as your own. Inside every team, each person lives a fuller story than the org chart shows. AI should work quietly underneath, so those people get to do more of what only they can do.
The way Sondero looks came from Dee, my wife. She drew the logo, picked the greens and set the tone, before there was a company to put on top of it. The rest is my job.
Christoph
My point of view
What I believe
Seven questions about how I think, what I am building, and who I am building it for.
What do you actually believe about AI?
I am optimistic. I do not think AI is going to replace your best people. I think it is going to multiply them. The repetitive work disappears. The judgment, the relationships, the strategic decisions get more room.
Why a boutique and not a SaaS product?
Because the AI agents that actually work are the ones built for your specific motion, your specific data, and your specific people. A SaaS product gives you a generic tool that ten thousand other companies are also using. A boutique installs something that works for your team and nobody else’s. The trade-off is that I work with fewer customers, and they get a better result.
Why Go-to-Market specifically?
Because I have spent my career in it. I have built and broken pipeline, sales motions, customer success programs, and the systems around them. I know which AI agents would have actually helped me back then, and which would have been a distraction. Sondero builds the ones that would have helped.
Who do you say no to?
Anyone looking for a generic AI tool, a 90-day overhaul, or a slide deck instead of an installed system. I take on a small number of customers per quarter. I say yes when the fit is real. I say no the rest of the time, and I say it early.
Why are you focused on DACH?
Two reasons. First, I live here, I sell here, my network is here. Second, European companies have a different relationship with data, compliance, and the people side of work than US companies do. I see those constraints as an advantage, and I build them into every system from the start.
Do you replace my team with AI?
No. The agents I build join your team. They do the repetitive parts that nobody wants to do anyway. The people you hired stay, do more of the work that made you hire them in the first place, and stop spending their evenings copying data between tools.
You offer ongoing support?
Yes. After go-live I stay on: regular advisory sessions and reviews of whether the agents deliver what they should.
Strategy Call