Go, Kill, Return, and Go Again: A Rogue Heroes Playbook for Building Growth Teams

2:05 pm
-
2:35 pm
CT

During WWII, David Stirling walked into British Army HQ with a one-page memo and bold claim: a team of 60 men could destroy more enemy aircraft than the entire Air Force. BBC's series the Rogue Heroes follows what happened next - which turns out to be the most accurate description of how to build an empowered growth team that I've ever seen. This talk maps the SAS founding story chapter by chapter onto the real experience of building a growth team at my previous position at BitNinja: starting from a culture where nothing shipped on Friday, customer work got thrown away at 4pm, and releases were avoided so nothing would break - and ending with a team the rest of the company modeled itself after, weekly sprints, churn cut in half, and trial-to-paid conversion doubled. Executive alignment, 'stealing equipment', the first catastrophic failure, thwarting the negative voices, friendly competition, leading from the front - it's all there. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, and so do playbooks.

Session Agenda

  • How to get executive buy-in for a team that operates differently
  • Why "answer to no one" is a feature, not a bug: structuring your team as a company within a company to protect speed and experiments
  • The first failure is the test: what you do after the initial disaster determines whether the team survives or gets shut down

Speakers

Mate Benedek

VP of Marketing

Axoflow

Mate Benedek

VP of Marketing

Axoflow

15 years selling to people who read the docs first.

Mate has spent 15 years figuring out what makes technical buyers actually buy - and 10 of those leading the teams responsible for the answer.

Currently VP Marketing at Axoflow, he previously served as Fractional CGO at BitNinja Security, where he turned a culture of "don't ship on Friday" into weekly sprints, halved churn, and doubled trial-to-paid conversion. Along the way, he's consulted for a range of seed-series A startups on PLG, positioning, and go-to-market strategy.

He specializes in B2B and B2D SaaS in cybersecurity - because marketing to people who can and want to read the documentation is the most honest version of the job.His teams run on empowerment, scrum inspiration, and the firm expectation that you'll ship before you've over-thought it. He's a doer with a thinking problem.

Based in Valencia, Spain. Married, father of twin girls, casual gamer, and a surfer in ongoing negotiations with the ocean.

About this Session's Track

GTM, Strategy & Exec Leadership

Hear from seasoned executives on crafting go‑to‑market strategies, aligning cross‑functional teams, and leading transformative growth initiatives.