Great technology isn’t the problem. Turning it into traction is.

After more than 20 years working with emerging technologies, I’ve seen the same pattern repeat itself.

A company builds something genuinely valuable.

The technology works. The market need is real. Customers see the potential.

And yet meaningful traction remains elusive.

Positioning is still evolving. Sales depend too heavily on the founders. Pricing changes from deal to deal. Partnerships are opportunistic rather than strategic. The ideal customer profile is still taking shape. Proofs of concept stretch longer than expected, and few deliver on the promise of a stable customer base. There are five possible markets to pursue and limited resources to pursue them.

Those aren’t necessarily product problems.

They’re commercialization problems.

And they’re a big part of why I started Levrist.

I’ve spent most of my career in the space between technology and the market.

Early in my career at Yankee Group and IDC, I had a front-row seat to the strategies and processes that helped build, shape, and grow many of the technology companies we know today. From startups and growth-stage companies to established global leaders, the underlying challenges were often similar, but the right approach depended on the company’s stage, market, resources, and ambitions.

At DataMarket, we built one of the earliest enterprise data marketplaces. In doing so, we developed a leading-edge data visualization SaaS platform at a time when both categories were still taking shape.

There wasn’t a mature playbook to follow.

We had to define the market, create new enterprise positioning, build the right partnerships, and develop the sales motion and business model as we went. Along the way, we evolved from a pure-play marketplace into a SaaS platform that made it easy for users to search, combine, visualize, and share data from internal and external sources. We secured lighthouse customers, turned early wins into commercial momentum, and landed our first multimillion-dollar enterprise agreement , helping grow revenue more than fivefold. Ultimately, DataMarket was acquired by Qlik.

I then had the great opportunity to work on the other side of that acquisition at Qlik, commercializing and integrating DataMarket into a much larger global technology organization while building a new partnership program to support the joint product.

Many of the questions were the same, just at a completely different scale: How should we package and price the offering? How should it fit within the broader product strategy? Which partnerships mattered? How should we take it to market?

Later, after successfully integrating DataMarket into Qlik, I started a consultancy called Data Launch Partners, focused exclusively on helping nascent data and analytics companies get off the ground. Although this was a short period in my career, the conversations and lessons learned from some great founders and investors sharpened my understanding of where promising companies tend to get stuck. It also helped solidify many of my ideas about commercialization, the importance of focus, finding the right market, and identifying the few moves that can meaningfully impact a company’s trajectory.

Later, I co-founded Elipsa, where we built an AI platform that transformed fragmented operational data into normalized, trusted datasets for training and deploying our intelligent monitoring and agentic workflows.

Once again, the technology was only part of the challenge.

We were early in the space, so building the company meant working through positioning, market selection, pricing, strategic partnerships, enterprise sales, product-market alignment, channels, and the countless decisions required to turn emerging technology into something customers understand, value, and buy.

Different technologies. Different companies. Different stages.

But the underlying challenge kept looking remarkably similar.

These experiences taught me there is no universal playbook for growth. The real work is identifying the few moves that matter most at a particular moment  and aligning the organization to execute them.

There’s a gap between having something valuable and building a business around it.

Strategy can help determine where a company should go.

Sales can pursue opportunities.

Marketing can create awareness.

Product can keep building.

Operations can keep the train running.

But some of the hardest problems sit between those functions.

Who is the right customer?

What problem should we own?

How should we position the technology?

Which market should we pursue first?

What should we charge   and how should we package it?

Should we sell directly, through partners, or both?

Which partnerships actually create leverage?

Which early customers can change the trajectory of the business?

How do we move from founder-led selling to something repeatable?

Do we have the operating model, processes, and capabilities required to scale?

Are we applying AI and other modern tools where they can create meaningful commercial leverage?

And perhaps most importantly:

Of all the things we could do, which few things should we actually do?

That messy middle is commercialization.

And it’s where Levrist operates.

What Levrist does

Levrist works alongside founders, CEOs, and leadership teams to connect strategy with commercial execution.

The work generally falls across six areas:

Commercialization Strategy — turning promising technologies and ideas into executable paths to market.

Go-to-Market — defining the market, positioning, ideal customer profile, routes to market, and commercial motion needed to gain traction.

Strategic Partnerships — building partnerships, ecosystems, and channels that create leverage and accelerate market access.

Pricing & Business Models — designing pricing, packaging, licensing, and business models that translate value into revenue.

Market Creation — identifying new opportunities, shaping categories, and creating demand for technologies customers may not yet know how to buy.

Commercial Execution — moving from strategy to action by building pipeline, securing lighthouse customers, structuring deals, and creating repeatable commercial momentum.

For some companies, that means a focused engagement around a specific commercialization challenge.

For others, it means working more deeply with the leadership team as a Fractional Chief Business Officer,   providing senior commercial leadership without adding another full-time executive.

I didn’t start Levrist to produce strategy decks and hand them back to management.

The goal is to work inside the problem and help turn decisions into action.

Why “Levrist”?

The name comes from the idea of leverage.

A Levrist is someone who finds and applies leverage to create meaningful progress ,  someone who recognizes where the right move, made at the right moment, can change the trajectory of a business.

That idea has become increasingly important to me.

Early and growth-stage companies rarely suffer from a shortage of things they could do.

Usually, the opposite is true.

There are too many markets, too many product possibilities, too many potential partners, too many potential customers, and too many strategic directions competing for limited time and capital.

Progress often comes from finding the few moves that have disproportionate impact.

The right market.

The right positioning.

The right customer.

The right partner.

The right business model.

The right supporting technology.

The right sequence.

That’s leverage.

Why now?

AI is making it dramatically easier and faster to build technology.

I believe that makes commercialization more important, not less.

As the cost and time required to create new capabilities continue to fall, technology alone becomes less of a differentiator.

The harder questions increasingly become:

What should we build?

Who is it really for?

Why will they care?

How do we reach them?

How do we monetize it?

And how do we turn an early advantage into a durable one?

Technology creates possibility.

Commercialization turns possibility into traction.

That’s the problem Levrist was created to solve.

Make moves that matter