Growth, GTM, and $1B+ Outcomes: Kat Wendelstadt on Scaling Startups

Her experience spans launching health tech clinics, running growth in emerging markets, and now advising companies on go-to-market strategies and AI-driven growth. In this conversation, she shares how she transitioned from corporate safety to high-stakes entrepreneurship, the playbooks she’s built for scaling businesses, and her perspective on the future of marketing.

Early in my career, I followed what seemed like the logical path: consulting, then marketing at major tech companies. At Nokia, I saw firsthand what happens when a company stops innovating and starts to decline. The consequence was that they restructured annually and kept cutting jobs. An environment where survival took priority over growth became the norm. I was lucky and adapted quickly, taking on more responsibility each year. But by the time Microsoft acquired Nokia’s mobile division, I had already realized that corporate stability was an illusion.

That realization was a turning point. If corporate life did not guarantee safety, what was I holding onto? I saw colleagues losing their jobs despite doing everything right, and I started questioning the entire premise. It made more sense to take risks on my own terms rather than wait for decisions beyond my control.

A chance meeting introduced me to Singularity University, an entrepreneurship programme based in Silicon Valley that was run in partnership with NASA and Google. The program was intense: over three months, we had to find co-founders, develop a startup from scratch, and refine our ideas through real-world validation rather than theory. It was nothing like the corporate world. There was no hiding behind processes or job titles. I loved it! 

By the time I returned to Brazil, where I was living at the time, I knew I couldn’t go back to a traditional corporate role. I was ready to go all in with the project I worked on at Singularity University.

At Singularity, they teach you that there are no limits to what’s possible, so despite having no health background, I ended up co-founding HelixNano, a biotech firm. It sounds super cliché but it’s very powerful to not be limited by your mind – or imposter syndrome. I also quickly learned that being a founder is not about expertise in a single domain. It is about building the right team, shaping a compelling vision, and executing. My strength was in taking an idea, turning it into something investable, and selling it to the right people. That is where I focused.

The biggest test of my conviction came when it was time to fundraise. I made the decision to take my entire redundancy package from Microsoft and invest it as the first angel check into the company. That was not an easy choice. I knew the risk. Startups fail all the time. But I had complete confidence in my co-founders. They were some of the most brilliant people I had ever worked with, and I believed that if this worked, it would not just succeed but scale massively.

And it did. HelixNano went on to raise from investors like Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Today, the business is raising its Series B round, working on breakthrough mRNA technology and cancer vaccines.

It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made. I was pregnant with my first child, and I quickly realized that the relentless pace of running a startup was impossible to reconcile with the demands of early parenthood. The company needed a full-time, hands-on founder, and I knew I couldn’t do both at the level I expected of myself. Additionally, my husband had just started a venture and we realized that one of us needed a stable income.

It was painful because, as a founder, you pour everything into a company. It is not just a job, it becomes your identity. But I had to be realistic. The company deserved someone fully committed to its next stage of growth, and at that moment, I was not that person. Instead, I transitioned to being an investor and took a step back from daily operations.

What that experience taught me is that success isn’t a linear path. 

Walking away from the company I started felt like a loss at the time, but in hindsight, it opened the door for what came next.

It was a completely different business – a chain of primary care clinics selling to the middle and lower middle income population in Brazil. I had to very quickly understand what the biggest growth levers would be, how to get distribution fast and cost effectively and how to make it repeatable. 

One of the biggest lessons from that phase of my career was the power of standardization. Over time, we developed a standardized clinic model, ensuring that operations, patient acquisition, and marketing were repeatable and scalable. This systematic approach dramatically reduced inefficiencies and allowed us to expand much faster than traditional healthcare providers. We were able to open 18 clinics in 12 months – an unheard of pace – with this model. That business grew rapidly and was invested in by some of the biggest funds in the US. 

These experiences reinforced something I had started to suspect: You don’t need to be an expert in a single field to be successful, you just need to know how to identify opportunities, build teams, implement effective Go-to-market strategies and systematically scale what works.

I had learned a lot from my first startup, what worked, what didn’t, and how to move faster. But I was also curious about applying those lessons at scale. Brazil, where I was based at the time, had a rapidly evolving tech scene but very little in terms of established startup playbooks. I took on my first CMO role there, helping a company scale its marketing function from the ground up. It was a high-growth, high-pressure, and completely unstructured environment, making it the perfect place to refine my approach to building go-to-market systems.

When you’re a first-time founder, you’re making up the playbook as you go. As an operator, you inherit existing structures, but those structures aren’t always optimized. The challenge was building repeatable, scalable growth systems without losing agility. 

At Dr. Consulta, a Brazilian health tech, I was able to build an ‘execution machine’ that was laser focused on efficiency. If finance looked after the ‘flow of money in and out of the company’, then my role was to ensure ‘the flow of customers in and out of the company’ in the best way possible. We built a system around that notion, focused on low CAC and fast payback.

I also learned that I had to adapt marketing strategies to local nuances. For example, acquisition channels that work in Europe don’t necessarily translate to emerging markets. In Brazil, digital advertising alone wasn’t enough. We had to invest heavily in out-of-home (OOH) campaigns to drive awareness at scale. When we launched a new clinic, we didn’t just run Google and Facebook ads: we bought billboards, ran bus stop ads, and even had street teams on the ground.

Praava Health was a completely different challenge. The company was founded by an American Bangladeshi entrepreneur, Sylvana Sinha, and she had built something remarkable: a modern healthcare network in a country where access to quality primary care was very limited. But unlike my experience in Brazil, this was during the COVID-19 pandemic, and I was leading growth remotely. That changed everything.

What made it infinitely harder than Brazil, was building a team – for example, I had no frame of reference for what “good” looked like. In Brazil or Europe, I had a sense of the talent market and how to evaluate skill levels. In Bangladesh, that was completely missing for me. Not many people had the same level of Western education or training, so I had to learn quickly what the best possible talent looked like in that environment.

Learning how to make decisions without being physically in the market was also hard. In Brazil, I could visit clinics, speak to patients, and walk through a city to see how our brand was perceived. In Bangladesh, I had to rely entirely on data, team feedback, and external research. I spent an enormous amount of time speaking with local employees, trying to grasp how patients made healthcare decisions, what trust looked like in that market, and which communication strategies would resonate.

One of the biggest differences was the role of trust and word-of-mouth in healthcare adoption. In Western markets, consumers are used to choosing healthcare providers based on online reviews, insurance coverage, or convenience. In Bangladesh, family and community recommendations carried far more weight. That meant growth couldn’t rely on traditional performance marketing alone. Instead, we had to build credibility through local partnerships, direct outreach, and visible offline presence.

Leading growth remotely forces you to trust your team more, but it also demands a much higher level of structure. In an office, you pick up on signals naturally. You notice body language, informal conversations, and unexpected roadblocks without realizing it. In a remote setup, all of that is invisible unless you actively create ways to surface it.

I had to be extremely deliberate about communication rhythms. That meant structured check-ins, over-documenting processes, and making sure team members had clear ownership of their areas. It also meant recognizing that not all cultures operate with the same level of directness in communication. In some Western work environments, people will immediately raise concerns if something isn’t working. In Bangladesh, I found that feedback often had to be actively invited, and people wouldn’t push back on decisions even if they disagreed.

The biggest shift for me was learning how to read between the lines, understanding when silence meant uncertainty rather than agreement, and making it safe for people to voice concerns. That was not something I had to think about as much when leading teams in Brazil, where communication tends to be more expressive and immediate.

The biggest lesson was that you can’t apply the same growth tactics everywhere. The way people make decisions, the way they trust brands, and the way they interact with marketing are completely different depending on the region. What worked in Brazil didn’t necessarily work in Bangladesh, and if I had just copied the same approach, it wouldn’t have been effective.

I also realized that leading growth remotely forces you to operate differently. You have to be structured, proactive, and aware of local market realities. You can’t assume that the same ways of working will apply across different countries.

 I wanted more flexibility. After building and scaling multiple companies, I realized that I thrive in the zero-to-one phase: defining the playbook, figuring out what works, and getting things off the ground. But I didn’t necessarily want to stay in a company long-term to manage incremental changes.

I also saw a massive need for practical go-to-market guidance. Startups often have great products but struggle to translate them into a scalable acquisition engine. Many founders have never built structured growth teams before, so they either over-hire too early or operate in chaos for too long. Coaching and advisory roles let me step in at the right time, help companies design & execute a proper GTM strategy, and then step back once they’re set up for scale.

It’s mostly early-stage companies, usually from Seed to Series A, where they have a product but haven’t yet cracked repeatable growth. My clients are across health, B2B SaaS and AI.

As we know, AI is in a hype cycle, so you have a lot of companies building incredibly technical products but struggling to articulate who their buyers are and what problem they’re solving for them. The marketing challenge is different because traditional playbooks don’t necessarily work. You can’t just rely on performance marketing or cold outbound. Sales cycles can be complex, and decision-makers often need technical education before they even consider the product. That’s where I help: positioning, messaging, identifying the best growth motion for their market and then implementing it.

Flawless is an AI company that visually translates films by perfectly moving actors’ mouths, meaning any film can now be seen in any language. They started with a managed service model, where they worked directly with film studios to localize movies. That worked, but it wasn’t very scalable. The challenge was shifting from custom projects to a more scalable SaaS-like offering, while still keeping their high-end customers engaged.

The first thing we did was map out the buyer ecosystem. The film industry is small at the top – there are only a handful of studios that matter. That meant traditional broad-scale marketing wouldn’t work. Instead, we built a hyper-targeted, content-led LinkedIn strategy, where we didn’t just go after executives but engaged the entire chain of decision-makers – producers, post-production leads, and localization specialists.

We got ‘smart’: we scraped data from film production databases to track which movies were in post-production, their budgets, and who was responsible for localization, so that we could be extremely relevant to our prospects during outreach. If a film had just finished shooting, we knew they would be thinking about translation services soon. Instead of blasting cold emails, we focused on warming up the right people with organic content on LinkedIn, so when we reached out – at the right time -, they already knew who we were.

It was a mix. We used Lemlist and PhantomBuster to automate outreach, but we kept the messaging deeply customized. Every touchpoint had to feel high-value and industry-specific. Instead of generic sales emails, we shared real insights about film distribution trends, dubbing quality issues, and localization challenges, which positioned Flawless as an expert rather than just another vendor.

We also used tracking pixels to understand user behaviour across the internet. If someone from a major studio visited our website, we retargeted them with more relevant content. Over time, this created an echo chamber effect, where key people kept seeing our content in different places, from LinkedIn and Reddit to film industry forums, before we ever reached out directly.

AI companies tend to be product-heavy but go-to-market-light. They invest in building incredible technology, but they often assume the product will sell itself. That’s rarely true. A  big challenge is getting them to simplify their messaging, so their value proposition is clear to buyers who aren’t technical – or they stand out in a crowd of AI companies.

Many AI founders also underestimate how long their sales cycles will be. Enterprise AI buyers need proof, including case studies, benchmarks, and sometimes pilot programs, before they commit. 

That means growth has to be education-first, not sales-first. If you go straight to conversion tactics, you will struggle. Instead, some of the best AI companies create high-value content, technical deep dives, and thought leadership to build credibility before they ever make an ask.

AI is a huge part of how I scale my work, but it’s not a replacement for strategic thinking. The way I see it, AI is incredible at finding information for you, drafting, summarizing, and structuring information, but it can’t make judgment calls about positioning, messaging, or go-to-market strategy. That still requires human insight.

For content, I use Claude and ChatGPT to generate ideas, summarize interviews, and structure outlines. But I never let AI do final messaging. AI tools are great at creating first drafts, but they lack nuance, especially for B2B positioning.

I believe AI makes execution faster, but it does not replace strategy as it misses nuances. The companies that win will not be the ones automating everything blindly but the ones that use AI to scale smart decisions. The fundamentals of growth, including understanding your buyer, crafting the right message, and finding scalable channels, are not going away. AI will just make it easier to test, refine, and scale those efforts.

Asking “How can I help you?” It’s the easiest way to open doors, build relationships, and create opportunities. Paying it forward always pays off.

Patagonia. Great product, strong values, and a brand that actually delivers on its promises.

Take risks. The biggest career leaps happen at the edge of your comfort zone.

I’m always happy to connect with founders and operators tackling growth challenges. The best way to reach me is on LinkedIn—just send a message or a connection request. My website is also a great place to start.