At Sequoia we are privileged to work with daring founders on a quest to put a dent in the universe. Tanay Tandon, founder & CEO of Athelas and CEO of Commure after the Commure/Athelas merger, is one such founder. He emailed his whole team the following and it was so good, I asked him for permission to share with other founders. It resonated so deeply with founders, I asked him for permission to post it publicly.

Thank you, Tanay, for contributing your insights as a guest contributor to Outlier’s Path.

———- Forwarded message ———
From: Tanay Tandon
Date: Tue, Apr 1, 2025 at 5:23 PM
Subject: heat seeking missile for pain
To: Commure/Athelas Team

Over the last ~8 years of running Athelas, and now Commure, there’s a specific type of person I’ve found who rapidly rises within the ranks of a business. These are folks who have gone from ICs -> C-suite level in a matter of 2-3 years, or folks who have risen to VPs / SVP tier right out of school.

The term we’ve come up with for this type of person is a “heat seeking missile for pain”. This person actively seeks out the hairiest, gnarliest problems that customers have, or exist generally in the business (ie. GTM efficiency), and then surgically works to eliminate said problem. They have almost an addiction to seeking out the sources of pain, and blowing them up.

We’ve seen this internally with our employees, and also externally with partners and customers.

An example of what a heat seeking missile for pain might do on a given day – read through 100 gnarly support tickets, solve 20-30 of them, and then figure out the underlying product + operations issues attributable to those support tickets. Design a feature improvement that addresses a high percentage of the issues, writes up a new support + product training to propagate knowledge through the org, meets with 3-4 trusted engineers + a eng leader to explain + prioritize said issues and pushes for an aggressive timeline for a fix. In one single day. And then, he/she checks in every day + every week until feature and operations improvement is shipped.

On GTM – it might consist of watching 20-30 demo recordings in a day, going rep-by-rep on salesforce and figuring out where the bottlenecks on sales efficiency are. If there’s common close-lost reasons, or objection types, or common types of deals that stall – they actively seek out the root cause for the stalls, and find ways to nuke them.

Shockingly, at mediocre companies – this entire process might be 6 months to 1 year of work. Support escalates common tickets. CSM Leader makes a mega ticket for a PM. PM calls a meeting and does “discovery”. A few weeks later a project board of tickets is created by the PM. These tickets are slated for Q4 2026 release. A heat seeking missile for pain cuts through all of this bullshit with nearly unmatched vigor.

At a high level, all signal and progress in a business come from places of pain. Internal pain, customer pain, employee pain are all symptoms of problems within the business or with the product. The worst kind of folks stick their head in the sand and try to avoid the pains of the business – work on the easy “strategic” stuff, give simple email status updates, and generally try to stay away from the prickly stuff that might drive existential dread.

The next worst group are those who simply raise alarm or raise alert about pains, but offer no attempt or path to destroying it. Often these folks think they are being “value add” by just pointing out that something is broken, and contributing to high level “strategy”.

Folks that play on the “strategy” plane, usually get promoted within larger, plateauing organizations. They are entirely useless in fast-growing, product-driven organizations and should be performance managed out quickly.

Finding and cultivating a heat seeking missile for pain is rare. When you find these people in an org, promote them fast, drench them in unreasonable amounts of equity, and then have them train the next group. Make these folks celebrities within your team – icons to imitate and learn from.