Hey, it's Greg

If you run a hardware company, this week's episode is one you'll want to send to your head of sales. Ed Marsh brought a level of clarity to a topic most founders avoid, and I walked away thinking about our own approach differently.

What's working in your go-to-market right now? Hit reply. I get back to every one.

In this week's edition:

I sat down with Ed Marsh, founder and principal of Ed Marsh Consulting, for a conversation about what happens when industrial companies start treating their revenue engine with the same discipline they bring to the factory floor.

Ed has spent decades across engineering, the Army, industrial sales and marketing, international business, capital equipment, and consulting. Today he works primarily with middle-market industrial companies and private equity-backed manufacturers on organic revenue growth, spanning strategy, marketing, sales, technology, talent, and executive leadership.

At the center of his work is Overall Revenue Effectiveness, a framework inspired by Overall Equipment Effectiveness in manufacturing. Instead of accepting leakage across the customer journey as inevitable, Ed argues that companies should examine every stage of the revenue engine the same way they would examine a production line.

A few things that stood out:

• The compounding problem is real. Small inefficiencies across marketing and sales compound into extremely low overall revenue effectiveness, even when individual parts of the system appear to be performing reasonably well. Manufacturers would never tolerate the same level of yield loss in production.
• Industrial buyers evaluate solutions by their operational impact. Sellers need to understand how a solution affects KPIs, staffing, downtime, shipments, capacity, and the buyer's day-to-day reality.
• AI is changing the CRM layer. AI-first CRM platforms are transforming CRM from a manually maintained database into a memory, context, and orchestration layer that can automatically capture emails, meetings, messages, buying signals, and opportunity information.
• Ed built his own AI prospecting workflow. Using Claude skills and MCPs, he assembled a system that identifies ideal accounts, finds relevant contacts, enriches data, conducts research, populates CRM, and prepares prospecting blocks automatically.
• Your first salesperson shapes everything. A startup's first sales hire can shape the company's entire perception of sales, either reinforcing negative assumptions or establishing a powerful go-to-market culture. Founders should look for business acumen, consultative selling skills, and entrepreneurial instincts.
• PE-backed companies are often the best environment for this work. Private equity-backed industrial companies often provide fertile ground for transformation, while family-owned businesses may have completely valid reasons to prioritize margins or stability over aggressive growth.

Worth the full listen if you are building, selling into, or investing in industrial and hard tech companies.

A few active searches that might be relevant to you or someone in your network:

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Founding Fabrication Engineer | Los Angeles, CA

A venture-backed photonics company building chip-based LiDAR seekers for counter-UAS and precision-guided munitions. You will establish and own the nanofabrication capability from scratch, bringing an optical metasurface process in-house, commissioning equipment, and defining the path to volume production. Reports directly to the CEO. ITAR: U.S. person required.

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NVIDIA acquires Hugging Face for $12.9 billion (TechCrunch)

NVIDIA's second-largest acquisition ever. Hugging Face hosts more than 3 million models used by 18 million developers and 200,000+ companies. Jensen Huang committed to keeping the platform open, hardware-neutral, and multi-cloud. The deal moves NVIDIA beyond chips and infrastructure into the developer platform layer that influences how organizations choose models, frameworks, and compute. For anyone building in physical AI, the company behind your GPU now owns the place where most open models live. Closing expected in the first half of 2027.

Lyte raises $165M Series C at $1.6B valuation (Crunchbase News)

Founded by the architects behind Apple's Face ID depth-sensing technology, Lyte builds custom silicon, multimodal sensors, and spatial software as an integrated perception stack for robots. The Maverick Silicon-led round brings total funding to $272 million. Their LyteVision platform won CES 2026 Best of Innovation in Robotics. The thesis: perception has a hardware problem before it has a model problem, and off-the-shelf components won't cut it for production-grade robotics.

ARM Institute gets $90M for 10 projects to modernize military manufacturing (The Robot Report)

The Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute and 15 member organizations will deliver robotics and physical AI solutions at 12 military manufacturing sites within two years. Projects range from AI-driven safety in energetics production to drone-accelerated mission readiness to removing production bottlenecks through robotics. Significant defense capital flowing directly into applied automation at the arsenals, depots, and ammunition plants that build and maintain the equipment powering the U.S. military.

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