Richard Poolman, Founder, Venturoxx
I built Venturoxx because execution cannot resolve a decision leadership has not made.
Across three decades in enterprise software, I watched capable companies add people, budget and activity while the market kept understanding them in a way leadership had never actually chosen.
The work that follows is not more execution. It is the decision underneath it.
The visible problem is rarely where the diagnosis should begin.
A weak quarter looks like a sales problem. Pricing pressure looks like a packaging problem. A fragmented story looks like a messaging problem. Sometimes those readings are right.
Often they are downstream of something leadership never settled: what kind of company the market believes this is, which alternatives it gets compared with, and which questions buyers therefore ask.
Find the real problem. Not the symptom.
This judgement was built inside the consequence.
I did not arrive at market framing through theory. I arrived at it through quota, pipeline, partners and enterprise buying committees, where a framing decision stops being abstract and starts determining which deals are winnable.
Three decades, from my own software company through Mercury Interactive, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Tanium and Quantexa, put me repeatedly in the same position: carrying a company into markets that already had their own language for what it was.
That is the reference set. It is not a guarantee.
I have made these decisions from several sides.
I built my own software company with a European focus, operating from Amsterdam and London, with an initial presence established in Silicon Valley. Building something from nothing teaches you how quickly a market decides what you are, and how little control you have over it once execution starts repeating an answer.
At ServiceNow I was responsible for establishing the company in the Benelux, beginning in the Netherlands and then Belgium and Luxembourg. The company was not yet well known locally. Buyers were still sceptical about SaaS delivery and where data lived. The market understood the problem through established IT Service Management and the vendors that owned it, while the company itself was becoming materially broader.
Credibility had to be built with prospects and partners at the same time as the local organisation was built. I later carried global major accounts including Deutsche Bank, Nestlé and Shell, and in my final years there I was part of the work to establish the global account management programme.
At Snowflake I joined in January 2020 with responsibility for major accounts across the Nordics and Benelux: two regions, twenty-one strategic accounts, and a team of seven I recruited, onboarded, coached and led, largely through lockdown. The market already had settled language for data warehouses and data lakes. The company was framing itself more broadly, and that frame had to survive contact with enterprise buyers and partners.
At Quantexa I held EMEA responsibility with a team distributed across regions.
Across those years I have worked through alliances and partner ecosystems, where a company’s direction is translated by people who do not work for it, and I have interviewed hundreds of people across go-to-market and other functions, at every level of seniority. Both teach you the same thing: a company-level decision only survives if the people carrying it can explain it without you.
I was at ServiceNow before, during and after its June 2012 IPO, and at Snowflake before, during and after its September 2020 IPO. That dates the operating environment. It is not a credential.
I did not create these companies’ categories, and I do not claim their growth as evidence that Venturoxx works. I operated where company-level framing decisions had to survive real markets, real partners and real buying committees.
Markets do not reward internal intent. They respond to external interpretation.
The details differed in every company. The governing lesson did not. A framing decision taken at company level shows up later as something concrete: which deals are winnable, which partners can carry the story, and how much explaining execution has to absorb before a conversation can start.
The problem is often not that someone is wrong. It is that several people are right at the same time, in different directions, and nobody has decided which of those truths the company should be organised around.
That distinction, between a functional truth and a company-level choice, is what three decades of operating actually taught me. It is also the thing execution cannot resolve on its own.
Execution cannot fix a broken frame.
Each function can be right about the company through the work it owns.
Sales knows what keeps a deal alive. Product knows what has been built. Marketing knows what gets recognised. Partners know what the channel can carry. The difficulty is not that any of those views is wrong. It is that the company-level decision is which of them should govern the others, and everyone in the room holds one.
That is structural rather than a capability problem. Each function arrives with real evidence and a real accountability attached to it, and a working wedge can quietly become the definition of the company before anyone decides that it should.
External does not mean better. It means no functional position to defend, which makes it possible to separate the evidence each function owns from the decision that sits above all of them.
Leadership still makes that decision. I am not there to replace it.
Calm challenge. Clear decisions. No dependency by design.
I diagnose before prescribing, and I do not assume the visible symptom is the governing problem.
The analytical load sits with me. The decisions sit with leadership, because they belong to the people accountable for capital, category and company direction.
A valid conclusion may be to accelerate, to reset, to stop funding the current response, or to leave the strategy exactly as it is.
The work should reduce dependence on external advice, not institutionalise it.
In. Fix. Out.
The category discipline gives that judgement a structure. The operating years give it a reference set.
Category design is a discipline and it can be learned. It supplies a structured way to frame the decision. It does not tell you which answer survives an enterprise buying committee, a partner who has to resell it, or a market that already has its own language for what you are. The value lies in combining both.
Richard Poolman is Founder of Venturoxx, a Certified Category Designer through the Category Design Academy, and an enterprise software operator with three decades of EMEA experience.
The authority of the work does not rest on the credential, the employer list or a borrowed framework. It rests on the quality of the diagnosis, the discipline of the architecture and the usefulness of the decision.
The market does not owe a company the interpretation it intended.
Leadership has to make that interpretation visible, credible and repeatable. That takes control over the problem, the category, the comparison, the claim and the proof.
This is the work I choose to do, because I have seen what it costs to get wrong and what it releases when it is right.
Richard Poolman
Founder, Venturoxx