Threedy’s Hard Pivot: When the Technical Founder Finally Hired Commercial Expertise

Threedy’s Hard Pivot: When the Technical Founder Finally Hired Commercial Expertise

There’s a moment every technical founder faces, usually later than they should: the realization that understanding a problem doesn’t mean you can solve it.

Christian Stein, CEO of Threedy, spent years recognizing that his industrial 3D platform had a go-to-market problem. He could articulate what was wrong. He knew his sales team was overburdened with complexity. He understood that their messaging needed simplification.

But understanding the problem and building the solution required different expertise.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Christian shared the inflection point that changed Threedy’s trajectory: the decision to restructure the entire commercial side of the company and bring in senior leadership who could do what he couldn’t.

“I think the core decision was understanding and accepting that given all the understanding that we might have as a Founder, there’s a point in time when other expertise is also required,” Christian reflects.

That acceptance—that admission—is harder than it sounds.

The Gradual Recognition

Threedy’s commercial challenges didn’t appear overnight. They were the accumulated weight of years of incremental problems that never quite got solved.

Coming from Fraunhofer research, the company had early enterprise customers through academic and research channels. Those relationships worked. But when they hired salespeople to replicate that success, something broke.

“When we hire the first guys for the sales to go out and share the vision and sell the technology, I guess we overburdened them with the complexity of talking to different ICPs, of delivering, let’s say the full story and kind of going into detail on all the different aspects and possibilities,” Christian explains.

The team tried to fix it. They simplified messaging. They identified core use cases. They restructured the sales organization around specific topics and customer segments. “Over the first years now we kind of stripped it down into different core use cases, into sweet spots where we can deliver very strong values,” Christian shares.

These were smart moves. They helped. But they didn’t solve the underlying problem: Threedy needed someone who could architect an entire commercial operation, not just iterate on the existing one.

What Makes This Decision Hard

For technical founders, admitting you need senior commercial leadership feels like multiple failures simultaneously.

First, it’s an admission that your own efforts weren’t enough. You’ve spent years thinking about go-to-market strategy, talking to customers, refining messaging. You’ve read the books, listened to the podcasts, talked to advisors. And still, it’s not working at the level it needs to.

Second, it’s expensive. Senior commercial leaders command significant compensation—salary, equity, sometimes both. For a company that’s been careful with capital, this represents a major bet.

Third, it’s a power shift. You’re bringing in someone who will have opinions about strategy, team structure, and priorities. Someone who might disagree with decisions you’ve made. Someone who will want authority to make changes.

Fourth, it’s a competence signal. When you hire a VP of Engineering, it signals scale—you need specialized leadership as the team grows. When you hire senior commercial leadership as a technical founder, it can feel like admitting you don’t know how to sell your own product.

All of these psychological barriers exist before you even start the search process.

The Series A Catalyst

For Threedy, the decision crystallized during their Series A process. Not because investors demanded it—though they likely had opinions—but because the fundraising process itself revealed the gap.

“The important decision was who to hire, like which kind of person, which kind of technological foundation to kind of take this burden that I just mentioned and break it down into something more scalable and handleable by, let’s say, your regular sales guy,” Christian explains.

Notice the framing: “technological foundation.” Even describing the commercial challenge, Christian thinks in systems terms. He recognizes that sales needs architecture, processes, and structure—the commercial equivalent of what he builds in software.

But recognizing what’s needed isn’t the same as building it. “And this was not so much a decision, but rather maybe a step by step learning on how to improve on that. So I think this brought us to a certain point and then the next important decision, I guess was as part of the Series A, that we decided to restructure the whole commercial side of the company and get a very senior expert on board who can handle this and bring the company to the next level.”

The Series A forced a reckoning: the existing commercial operation could get them to this point, but it couldn’t get them to the next level. And investor expectations for what that next level looked like were clear.

The Full Restructuring

This wasn’t about hiring a VP of Sales to manage the existing team. It was about restructuring “the whole commercial side of the company.”

That phrase—”the whole commercial side”—signals something bigger than adding headcount. It means rethinking:

• How sales and marketing integrate
• What the ideal customer profile actually is
• How lead generation and qualification work
• What the sales process looks like
• How customer success fits into revenue
• What metrics matter and how they’re tracked
• How compensation aligns with desired behaviors

These aren’t tweaks to the existing system. This is rebuilding the system with someone who knows how commercial organizations should function at scale.

What Technical Founders Can Actually Do

Christian offers an interesting mental model for technical founders struggling with commercial challenges: treat it like an engineering problem.

“For me, as a technical guy, at least the same way that you would build your software, you need all these small parts that fit into each other,” he explains. “You need to have very clear understanding on how your processes should be structured, how the information flows, where, which kind of departments should be involved. So really building a machine that continuously optimizes the way it works.”

This systems thinking helps technical founders understand what’s needed. You can map the components, identify the interfaces, spot the bottlenecks. You can think clearly about what a well-functioning commercial organization requires.

But—and this is crucial—understanding the architecture doesn’t mean you can build it. You wouldn’t hire a civil engineer to design microprocessors just because both involve systems thinking. Commercial leadership requires specific expertise that most technical founders don’t have.

The Hiring Decision That Changes Everything

When Christian says “the important decision was who to hire,” he’s pointing to something that gets glossed over in most founder stories: the specific person matters enormously.

Not just any experienced sales leader will work. You need someone who:

• Understands complex technical sales
• Can work with technical founders who have strong opinions
• Has experience restructuring commercial operations, not just managing existing ones
• Can operate at the stage your company is actually at, not just talk about scale
• Aligns with your culture and values enough that the team will follow them

Finding this person during a Series A process, while everything else is chaotic, while you’re probably sleep-deprived and stressed about fundraising—this is when you’re making one of the most important hiring decisions of the company’s history.

The Maturity Moment

What makes Christian’s framing valuable is how he positions this as personal growth, not business strategy.

“I think the core decision was understanding and accepting that given all the understanding that we might have as a Founder, there’s a point in time when other expertise is also required.”

“Understanding and accepting”—these are internal processes, not external strategies. The challenge isn’t intellectual (recognizing the need) but emotional (accepting your own limitations).

This is the maturity moment for technical founders: realizing that being smart, being hardworking, and being committed to learning aren’t always enough. Some problems require specific expertise built over years of doing that exact thing.

The Inflection Point Signals

How do you know when you’ve hit this point? Christian’s experience suggests several signals:

You’ve tried multiple approaches over multiple years and gained incremental improvement but not transformation. The fixes you implement help but don’t solve the underlying issues. You can articulate what’s wrong but your solutions don’t stick.

Your product maturity is ahead of your commercial maturity, creating friction in customer and investor conversations. You’re having conversations about Series A metrics while still operating with seed-stage commercial processes.

The team knows something needs to change but doesn’t have consensus on what. Different people have different theories about what’s broken, suggesting the problem is systematic rather than tactical.

You’re spending significant founder time on commercial challenges that aren’t getting resolved, taking attention away from areas where you can uniquely contribute value.

What Happens After

Christian doesn’t elaborate on what changed after bringing in senior commercial leadership, but the implications are clear. Someone who can “bring the company to the next level” presumably means:

• Commercial processes that work without founder intervention
• A sales team that can execute consistently
• Clear metrics and accountability
• Scalable customer acquisition
• Professional operations that match the product sophistication

These outcomes require more than good intentions and smart founders. They require expertise.

The Permission Structure

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Christian’s story is the permission it gives other technical founders: it’s okay to need help with commercial operations. It’s not a failure of founder capability—it’s recognition that different problems require different expertise.

You can be brilliant at technology, visionary about product, and still need someone else to build your commercial organization. These facts don’t contradict each other. They’re just different domains requiring different skills.

The question isn’t whether you’ll eventually need senior commercial expertise. For most technical B2B founders, you will. The question is whether you’ll recognize that inflection point when you hit it—or spend years trying to solve it yourself while the business opportunity erodes.

Christian’s answer is clear: “Understanding and accepting that given all the understanding that we might have as a Founder, there’s a point in time when other expertise is also required.”

The hard part is knowing when that time has come.