The operator, not the advisor.
I'm Larson Stair. I co-founded a Techstars Boulder startup, raised over $4M in venture capital, and learned the hard way what breaks when a founder tries to run everything themselves. Now I step in as a fractional COO for pre-seed and Series A B2B SaaS founders — because I've been on your side of the table.
Why StairStep exists.
I co-founded Gondola, a remote sales platform built for enterprise SaaS teams, and took it through Techstars Boulder. We raised over $4M in venture capital from investors including Slack Fund, First Mile Ventures, and Next Frontier Capital.
Before that, I spent over a decade in SaaS as a sales and presales leader — working with thousands of startups and some of the world's largest enterprise brands. I've been on both sides of the table: as the founder making the calls, and as the operator building the systems that make those calls possible.
I started StairStep because I kept seeing the same problem. Founders with real products and genuine traction, stuck because the business side of the business hadn't kept up. No systematic sales process. Marketing happening in spare moments. Operations running on founder heroics. The product was working. Everything around it wasn't.
That's the gap I fill.
HOW I WORKThese aren't values plucked from a wall. They're the operating principles that show up in every engagement.
Operating Principles
Do the work, not just the thinking.
You don't need another advisor with a deck. You need an operator who's in the tool, on the call, and editing the doc with you. That's what I do.
Build it to run without me.
The goal is never to make you dependent on me. Every system, cadence, and process I build is designed to hand off — to you, to a future hire, or to a full-time COO when the time comes.
One step at a time.
Early-stage startups don't fail from a lack of ideas — they fail from trying to execute all of them at once. We find the constraint that matters most, solve it completely, then step up to the next one.
Honest over nice.
I'll tell you what I actually think, including when it's inconvenient. That's the job. If you want someone to nod along, I'm the wrong person.
What I work on.
If your startup needs it and it's not engineering or product, it's in scope.
In scope
Sales and revenue operations
Marketing and demand generation
Customer success and onboarding
Business operations and process
Financial planning and modeling
Fundraising strategy and execution
Hiring, org design, early team building
Board prep and investor updates
Out of scope
Writing code or managing engineering
Product design and roadmap
Anything that requires a technical co-founder
Think we should talk?
The first conversation is free, 30 minutes, and low-pressure. If it's not a fit, I'll tell you — and probably point you toward whatever is.