Steven Mankoff pushes founders to talk with dozens of potential customers before building anything, drawing on his years as an early employee and executive at Siebel Systems to focus on real execution details like product design, service delivery, and timing for going to market—he also looks beyond early adopters to see if later customers see a product as truly essential, and he skips generic competitor charts in favor of a deeper look at where the market is heading. He encourages founders to start thinking about branding, positioning, and demand generation early on, even before they've fully found product-market fit, and his experience extends into board-level work, including serving on Genstar Capital's strategic advisory board and the board of Nomis Solutions.