Ethan LockshinSales at NVIDIA focused on AI adoption

OpenHands’ $19M Series A led by Madrona: CRO Ben Solari shares his journey and top leadership lesson

Name: OpenHands’ $19M Series A led by Madrona: CRO Ben Solari shares his journey and top leadership lesson
Uploaded: 2025-11-21T16:38:09+00:00
Duration: 9 s
Channel: Ethan Lockshin
Description: Ben Solari, CRO at OpenHands, says the best leaders work alongside their teams in the trenches: cold emailing, LinkedIn outreach, call blitzes…

21 Nov 2025 · 0 min

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0:09

Ben Solari, CRO at OpenHands, says the best leaders work alongside their teams in the trenches: cold emailing, LinkedIn outreach, call blitzes. Authenticity builds trust and makes people want to work for you.

You've gone from an individual contributor to a sales leader to a chief revenue officer, what leadership lesson hit hardest in your journey?
The people that you are leading tend to respond best to people that are in the trenches with them. I've always taken the mentality that, you know, the best leaders are often leading from the front, which means, you know, in the early days of datarobot or Jellyfish and now back to it at Open Hands. I'm doing cold emailing, I'm doing cold LinkedIn outreach. I'm making calls on call blitz days with the rest of the team. I think the other factor to that is like authenticity where it's nice to work for and work with people that are authentic and how they show up. If you can kind of work hard and do some of the small things with the team along the way and then also kind of be authentic in the way that you're showing up, at.
Least it's worked well for me.