Go-to-network is the new go-to-market with David Connors, CEO of The Swarm
with David Connors, The Swarm
Go-to-network is the new go-to-market with David Connors, CEO of The Swarm
Show Notes
David Connors is the co-founder and CEO of The Swarm, a relationship data platform that maps a company's extended professional network, scores every connection by relationship strength, and surfaces warm intro paths to target accounts - enabling sales teams to replace cold outbound with network-orchestrated revenue. The Swarm was founded in 2021, has raised approximately $8M, took its first check from Sequoia Capital (where David was previously an in-house product builder after Sequoia acquired his bootstrapped recruiting automation startup), and went number one on Product Hunt with nearly 800 upvotes. The team is nine people, and the product integrates with Clay, HubSpot, LinkedIn, and Gmail.
Before The Swarm, David built and ran a bootstrapped outbound recruiting automation company that Sequoia acquired, then spent time in-house at Sequoia as a builder-in-residence, shipping roughly 12 custom internal tools for the firm. That vantage point - inside one of the world's most networked organizations - sharpened his view of how relationships drive deal flow, hiring, and company building, and became the founding insight behind The Swarm.
Go-to-Network: The Successor to the Predictable Revenue Playbook
The Predictable Revenue playbook - popularized by Salesforce roughly 15 years ago - scaled professional outbound by hiring SDRs and BDRs to do high-volume cold calling and cold emailing. Tools like Outreach, SalesLoft, Apollo, and then Clay made it progressively easier to reach more people faster. The logical endpoint arrived with AI agents autonomously sending thousands of emails per day. The result is what investor Mark Cosco named the Great Ignore: buyers are so inundated with undifferentiated cold outreach that they have stopped engaging with it entirely. Email providers now route it to spam or separate folders where it never gets seen.
David's argument is that the solution has been visible all along: how do buyers actually make purchasing decisions? They ask their peers. They go to their WhatsApp groups, their community forums, their meetups. They ask people they trust. Go-to-Network is the motion that meets buyers where they actually live - by intentionally orchestrating your company's extended network to support revenue, rather than hoping a connection surfaces by serendipity at the right moment.
How The Swarm Works: Mapping, Scoring, and Warm Intro Paths
The Swarm starts by mapping a company's extended network - not just the LinkedIn connections of individual salespeople, but the aggregated networks of all employees, investors, partners, customers, advisors, and vendors. It identifies previous colleague overlaps, shared college connections, shared investors and their portfolio company executives, and any other public relationship signals that indicate a connection exists. Every relationship in the graph is scored: weak connection, familiar, or strong.
The primary workflow: take your list of target accounts and identify where warm intro paths exist. An example result - your VP of Finance used to be at a startup with the CFO of the target account for several years. That is a high-probability relationship. Route through the VP of Finance to that CFO for an introduction. That meeting converts at dramatically higher rates than a cold email from an SDR who has never met either person. The Swarm surfaces the data to make this routing systematic rather than accidental.
Public vs. Private Network Data: The Right Sequencing
The Swarm distinguishes between two types of relationship data. Public data - previous colleague overlaps, college connections, shared investors, portfolio company relationships - is available out of the box at the company level, requiring no individual consent or action. Private data - LinkedIn connections, email history, calendar meetings - requires each user to authorize access (via LinkedIn CSV export or Chrome extension, Gmail integration, and calendar sync).
David's key operational insight: always start with public. Waiting for every employee at a 100-plus-person company to download a Chrome extension, export their LinkedIn data, and connect their Gmail is a weeks-long process with low completion rates. Starting with the company-level public network map gets immediate value in front of every salesperson on day one. Individual private networks can be layered in over time as users onboard. This sequencing is what makes company-wide adoption actually happen, rather than stalling out in the rollout phase.
Companies Already Have Warm Intros - They Just Don't Know It
One of David's sharpest lines is that most companies already have warm intro paths to 20–50% of their target accounts - they just have no visibility into them. The relationship exists somewhere in the extended network: an investor's portfolio company CEO knows the right buyer, a former colleague of a sales engineer is now VP at the target, a customer's board member sits on the target company's advisory board. None of this surfaces unless you have mapped it.
The practical implication is significant: rather than treating every target account as requiring cold outreach, a sales team using The Swarm can segment its pipeline by relationship temperature before the first outreach touches. The accounts with warm paths get routed accordingly; the rest get whatever cold strategy the team is running. This raises average conversion rates across the entire pipeline without requiring salespeople to change their behavior - just their routing.
The Sequoia Veteran Founder Insight
From his time inside Sequoia, David shares an analysis of founder archetypes and outcomes that runs counter to the prevailing venture mythology. The archetype that gets the most press coverage is the Dynamo - the college-dropout founder in their early-to-mid twenties building a category-defining company. Think Zuckerberg. This archetype exists and succeeds, but it is not statistically the most successful profile in Sequoia's portfolio.
The most successful archetype, by their analysis, is the Veteran: someone in their 30s or even early 40s with deep domain expertise in a specific industry who then starts a company in that domain. The structural advantages are exactly what you would expect: an existing network of potential customers who trust them, the credibility to recruit experienced team members quickly, and the pattern recognition to avoid rookie mistakes. All of these compound into better outcomes. David's takeaway for founders who feel like they are “too old” to start: your network is your moat.
The Roadmap: Agents, Champion Tracking, and Network Orchestration at Scale
The next phase of The Swarm's product roadmap is a marketplace of agents - both first-party agents built by the team and third-party agents built by partners - that can automate the workflows layered on top of the relationship data. The most immediate agent use cases: automatically identifying and surfacing warm intro paths as new accounts enter the pipeline, tracking champion movement (when a buyer who championed your product at one company moves to a new one, alerting the team immediately), and proactively nurturing high-value network nodes before they become relevant.
David's prediction on fully autonomous agents for simple sales workflows: within the next six months, with complexity increasing steadily from there. He points to emerging infrastructure signals - payment rails designed for agents, API documentation that distinguishes between human and agent readers - as leading indicators that the underlying ecosystem is ready. The Swarm's long-term vision is a fully orchestrated go-to-network motion where AI handles all the top-of-funnel identification and routing, freeing humans for the relationship-intensive bottom-of-funnel work that still requires genuine human interaction.
Tools & Resources Mentioned
- The Swarm - Relationship data platform for go-to-network sales motion; theswarm.com. Integrates with Clay, HubSpot, LinkedIn, Gmail. Chrome extension with free email data available.
- Clay - Integration partner; The Swarm's relationship data is available directly within Clay workflows.
- Perplexity - David's most-watched LLM at time of recording for research and staying current on AI developments.
- Claude - David's go-to LLM for day-to-day assistant tasks; brainstorming, drafting content, answering questions.
- Replit / Lovable - Tools David uses for rapid prototyping and spinning up customer-facing demos quickly.
- The Great Ignore - Mark Cosco's term for the current era of buyer behavior; the saturation point where cold outbound has stopped working because buyers have learned to ignore it entirely.
- Predictable Revenue - Aaron Ross's Salesforce-era playbook; the historical go-to-market motion that The Swarm's go-to-network approach is designed to succeed.
Frameworks
Go-to-Network vs. Go-to-Market
The Predictable Revenue playbook saturated buyers with cold outreach until they stopped engaging entirely (The Great Ignore). Go-to-Network is the successor motion: intentionally mapping and orchestrating your company's extended network to support revenue. Buyers trust peer recommendations - the job is to be the peer recommendation, not the cold email.
Public-First Network Mapping
Start with public relationship data (colleague overlaps, college connections, shared investors) that is available at the company level without individual consent. Layer in private data (LinkedIn, email, calendar) over time as individuals opt in. Starting with private stalls adoption; starting with public delivers immediate value and creates pull for individual authorization.
Warm Intro Path Segmentation
Before any outreach, segment your target account list by relationship temperature. Use your mapped network to identify which accounts have warm paths - and what those paths are - before assigning them to a salesperson. The accounts with warm paths get routed through the relationship; the rest get cold strategy. Average conversion rates improve across the whole pipeline.
The Veteran Founder Advantage
Sequoia's data shows the most successful founder archetype is the Veteran: domain expertise developed over a career, an existing trusted network of potential customers, the credibility to recruit fast, and pattern recognition that prevents common mistakes. Network is the moat, and it compounds. Starting a company later in a career is a structural advantage, not a liability.
FAQ
What does The Swarm do?
The Swarm maps your company's extended network - employees, investors, partners, customers, advisors, vendors - scores every relationship by strength, and surfaces warm intro paths to target accounts. The goal is to replace cold outbound with network-orchestrated revenue by making warm introductions systematic rather than serendipitous.
How is The Swarm different from LinkedIn or a CRM?
LinkedIn shows you your individual connections; it does not aggregate the networks of your entire company. A CRM tracks interactions you have already had; it does not map relationships you have not yet discovered or leveraged. The Swarm combines both - aggregating the extended network of the whole company and then scoring and routing it against your sales pipeline.
What is the go-to-network motion?
The intentional orchestration of your company's extended network to support revenue - finding warm intro paths to target accounts, multithreading deals through multiple relationship paths, back-channeling, and champion tracking. The motion is predicated on the insight that buyers make purchasing decisions through trusted peers, not through cold email.
How does The Swarm handle employee privacy?
Public mapping (colleague overlaps, college connections, shared investors) requires no individual consent. Private data (LinkedIn, email, calendar) requires explicit user authorization and consent. The GDPR right-to-access framework makes LinkedIn data export frictionless for users in Europe; a Chrome extension handles it elsewhere.
What is the business model?
Freemium SaaS for the core product (free trial, low-cost paid tiers). Usage-based pricing for the API and data products, custom-priced by volume with minimum five-figure contracts at scale. Currently 2,000+ users who have tried it and 30+ API customers.
Why did Sequoia acquire David's previous company?
David built a bootstrapped outbound recruiting automation company that Sequoia evaluated as a build-vs-buy decision - and chose to acquire the technology rather than build it themselves. They then brought David in-house as a builder-in-residence, where he built approximately 12 custom internal tools for the Sequoia team before leaving to start The Swarm.