Devan Batavia

Being a CEO can be an isolating job — the kind where you carry decisions no one else fully sees the weight of. Devan has been the exception to that isolation. What started as an advisory relationship with ETW years ago has evolved into something more enduring: a constant presence I can call on when it matters most.

Devan brings sharp judgment, vast sales experience, and consistently practical advice, but more than that, brings the reassurance that comes from knowing someone is genuinely in your corner. In a role that can feel lonely, having Devan has made a real impact.

I worked with Devan during the most important years of my company. If you’re a founder thinking about working with him, here’s what you should know.

When Devan and I started working together, involve.ai (now Jeeva AI) was in a hard spot. Our old product had plateaued and we were betting the company on a new one. I had never done this before. Devan walked with me through all of it.

He helped me kill the old product without killing the company. We figured out together what to keep, what to let go, and how to tell the team and the board a story they could believe in. That transition could have broken us. Instead it set us up for our best years.

Then he helped me sell the first set of customers. He got into the details with me on our first 100 deals for the new product. Pricing, positioning, objection handling, which deals to chase and which to walk away from. When it was time to build a real sales team, Devan helped me design the org, set comp plans that actually drove the right behavior, and hire our first sales leader. He had built go-to-market teams at companies that went public and got acquired, so he had seen every version of this movie. I got to skip a lot of expensive mistakes because of him.

He also made me a better operator. We set up OKRs that the team actually used instead of ignoring. He pushed me on culture, on hiring the right people, and on the hardest part of the job, letting go of people who were not working out. I used to delay those decisions. Devan taught me that waiting is the most expensive thing a CEO can do.

Board communication was another big one. I used to walk into board meetings hoping to survive them. Devan taught me to run them. How to frame the hard news, how to get ahead of concerns, how to turn my board into an asset instead of an audience.

When we raised our Series A, he was in my corner the whole way. Pressure-testing the story, prepping me for tough questions, keeping me steady when things got shaky. We closed a $16M round led by Sapphire Ventures. Devan’s fingerprints were all over that outcome.

And then there’s the part nobody talks about. Being a CEO is lonely. There were stretches where I doubted myself, and carried things I couldn’t share with my team or my board. Devan was the person I could be completely honest with. He never judged, never sugarcoated, and always helped me get back to clear thinking. That alone was worth everything.

Devan is not a coach who gives you frameworks and disappears. He does the work with you. He asks the questions nobody else will ask and he does it because he genuinely cares. Every founder should be lucky enough to have a Devan. I was.

Devan brings something most advisors don’t: a framework that connects go-to-market and fundraising as two sides of the same problem. He doesn’t separate them. His starting point is always the business model and the metrics that actually matter to investors, then works backwards into how you build and sell.

For a founder navigating both at the same time, that clarity is rare and genuinely useful. He asks hard questions, pushes back when the logic doesn’t hold, and doesn’t tell you what you want to hear.

If you’re at the stage where GTM and fundraising are happening in parallel, Devan is the person you want in the room.