Austin Hughes
@austinh___
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Co-founder & CEO @unifygtm
San Francisco, CA
Joined December 2012
Excited to share that we’ve raised a $40M Series B at @unifygtm to transform growth into a science. Many of the fastest growing companies like Cursor, Perplexity, Flock Safety and Airwallex choose Unify to reimagine growth in an AI-native world. This round comes just 9 months
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The people winning are the ones who stopped caring about looking ridiculous. You’ll take some heat-especially from friends. but if you aren’t a little shameless, you’re holding yourself back.
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On September 20th, Sophie and I got married surrounded by our friends and family. Easily the best day of my life. Her support is the reason I get to pour so much energy into Unify. Feeling lucky for everything we’ve built and everything still ahead. ❤️
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A stark reminder of the positive impact of immigration on the US startup ecosystem
The top 5 universities by number of unicorn founders in the US are: #1 Stanford (135) #2 MIT (100) #3 Harvard (80) #4 UC Berkeley (68) #5 Indian Institute of Technology (65) One college in India is #5 in the world for American unicorns. That's the power of immigration.
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Quickly, the dynamic completely flipped. Our sales conversations went from "Who are you?" to "Oh, I've seen your content, I get what you do". It became a very different place to start the conversation. Our public storytelling began to warm up the market for us. So don’t
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In our first 3 months of selling, our pitch was a disaster. We were selling a bare bones MVP and had zero public presence or credibility. Every single sales call started with the same painful question: "So, what is Unify and what do you guys actually do?". The fix wasn't a
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What I learned through the process of posting about Unify, especially on LinkedIn, is that building in public isn't vanity. It’s about creating a public narrative so you don't have to start every conversation from zero. Be relentless, be cringe, and build your point of view
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Tiny guide for early teams looking for PMF: 1. Book as many calls as you can (20+ per week) 2. Listen, take notes 3. Spot patterns 4. Double down on your best fits (it should feel easy) Nothing fancy. Just reps, feedback, and a thick skin.
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If you’re stuck guessing about your target market, you probably need more conversations. Not more spreadsheets, not more surveys. Just real, messy, back-to-back calls all week.
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Here’s the thing nobody tells you about growth: Technical teams can outmaneuver everyone else. The more technical we got, the wider the gap became. Outbound strategies that seemed impossible for others became our baseline.
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Unify runs on Langchain. Huge congrats on the announcement Harrison and team!!
🔥Today we’re excited to announce new funding for LangChain (at a $1.25B valuation) to allow us to build the platform for agent engineering. LangChain started as a single Python package 3 years ago. Since then, we’ve evolved into a comprehensive platform for agent engineering
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Everyone cringes at their own boldness the first few times. But honestly, if you want to win, you have to get used to shaking off the embarrassment and going for it. Relentlessness beats cool every single time.
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At Ramp, I learned this: credentials don't guarantee impact on the job. Picking people for how quickly they can learn and adapt gets you a team that evolves as your company does. That mindset shaped everything about how I’ve built the team at Unify.
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If you're scaling a team, ask: will this person double their impact year over year? Hiring for resumes is easy. Hiring for growth trajectory is how you get 10x hires though.
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Here’s the signal I'm looking for now: curiosity, resilience, hunger. Diplomas and big-name employers don’t predict who will actually accelerate once the real work starts. Grit and speed of improvement do.
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In building Unify, I took a lot of the hiring philosophy I learned from my time at Ramp. One philosophy we borrowed is hiring for slope over intercept. People that are sharp, hungry, and want to grow really quickly rather than people that have all the right credentials, brand
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When hiring, reference checks aren’t done until you’ve found at least one person who’s negative on your candidate. Nobody’s perfect. The important question: why did it happen, and what can you learn from it?
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996 grind culture is overrated. It's easy to pack a calendar with meetings and projects and feel busy, but much harder to prioritize well and work on the right things. Startups aren't about hours - they're about impact. No points for busywork.
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