Run your own race. This is Dini Mehta’s mantra.

She embraced these words during the hardest stretch of her life, when the math between effort and outcome stopped working.

As an incredibly high slope revenue leader, she had built a career on a simple equation: if you work hard and do the right things, good outcomes follow. Focus on your inputs, the outcomes happen. Fertility challenges shattered that formula. She could show up to every appointment, follow every protocol, optimize every variable, and still have nothing to show for it.

“Inputs do not equal outputs here,” she realized. “So how do I show up the best I can and not compare myself to anyone else?”

This experience didn’t just change how she thought about her personal life, it shifted how she looks at her career: past, present, and future. In startup revenue leadership, the highs are high, the lows are low, and emotional grounding is more important than ever.

What High Slope Talent Looks Like

At Waypoint Works, we call people like Dini High Slope Talent. These are leaders whose rate of learning and impact climbs faster than the organizational growth rate. In our PEAKS framework, they show persistence, emotional grounding, action orientation, knowledge orientation, and systems thinking in ways that would floor you.

Dini sees herself in all of these traits, but persistence, emotional grounding, and action orientation really stand out as her trifecta.

“In startups, things rarely work the first time,” she says. “You have to stay persistent, stay emotionally steady through the madness of startups and sales, and keep taking action.”

What did not come as naturally was the “knowledge sponge” side, at least the sharing part of it. Dini has always been a learner, but culturally, the notion of sharing what you know is looked down upon.

“I come from a culture where sharing is viewed as arrogant,” she explains. “You put your head down, you do the work, you do not talk about what you know.”

Early in her career, that meant she would quietly gather information, form sharp points of view, and keep them mostly to herself. Over time, she realized that in leadership, hoarded knowledge is not humility. It is a bottleneck.

“Sharing what you see is part of bringing people along,” she says now. “If you want people to follow you up the mountain, they have to see the terrain you are seeing.”

That mix of inner drive, steadiness under pressure, and growing willingness to share what she knows has pulled her into rooms that, on paper, she did not look like she “belonged” in. The story of Dini is an energizing and inspiring one. It’s a story of what happens when a persistent and emotionally grounded person is acknowledged by their CEO and enabled to grow into their full potential.

Training for a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Like many high performers, Dini started her career sprinting.

She measured her value in hours worked. Long nights felt like proof of commitment. Weekends were a chance to “get ahead.” It worked for a while… until it didn’t.

“I had to retrain my brain,” she says. “Day to day I can feel like I am in a sprint, but my mindset has to be that this is a marathon.”

She built a different training plan for herself.

First, she got obsessive about inputs, not outcomes. Early in sales, that meant focusing on calls made, meetings held, follow-ups done. Later, as a CRO, it meant focusing on time with reps, or working cross-functionally on the system around the number.

“You cannot control the outcome, especially in sales,” she says. “But you can control whether you consistently show up and do the work. People think motivation leads to action. It is the opposite. Action drives motivation, and that creates momentum.”

Second, she started protecting her recovery windows.

At Lattice, she learned that working eighty hours a week was not a badge of honor. It was a way to run herself into the ground. While hustle culture and 9-9-6 is making a comeback in startups these days, it takes a level of self-awareness to understand what inputs yield one’s best outcomes. Slope is not measured by hours spent, but by impact.

“I actually do better work when I work forty-five to fifty hours, disconnect on the weekend, and spend time with family and friends,” she says. “I had been obsessed with the number of hours. Letting go of that was big for me.”

Her weekends became the quiet miles where she could reset. No frantic inbox checks, no “just one more deck.” That rest allowed her to show up on Monday as the emotionally grounded leader her teams knew her to be.

Third, she started journaling. Every morning, she writes a short gratitude entry about the day before. It sounds simple, but research supports this as an effective method for managing the highs and lows that are common in roles like Dini’s.

“It resets me on what really matters, instead of getting lost in the little things that can get to you,” she says.

For founders, these habits are a blueprint. If you want high slope people to sustain their slope, design a culture that respects pacing, rewards smart inputs, and does not glorify burnout as commitment.

The Rooms That Looked Different

Dini has been on a high slope trajectory for years. She identifies with the traits, the rational data is supporting evidence. But when I asked when she first knew she was on a high slope, she paused. She never put this label on herself.

“I never thought I was on some special path,” she says. “The impostor syndrome was real. Objectively I was moving fast, but in my head it was always, ‘I am not doing enough, I need to do more.’”

The rooms around her told a different story.

At Quantcast, early in her career, Dini was promoted into her first management role where the company asked her to manage her peers. A lot of them had all started together. Now she was their manager.

When she later joined Drawbridge, she came in as the first rep, working closely with founder and CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan. Over time, they built out a global enterprise sales organization. Drawbridge had a complex enterprise sale, so many of the reps hired had decades of more experience than she did so it was a big move  that her CEO promoted her to manage the West region. It worked. “ A year in, my  team was driving the majority  of the companyrevenue,” she reflected.

Eventually the company made a call: instead of trying yet another outside leader, they would give Dini the shot. She would run global sales.

On paper, she was the youngest and least experienced person in the room. And more than age, being a woman and a person of color leading global sales was a rare sight. Luckily, her CEO Kamakshi understood her slope.

Lifted by a Literal and Symbolic Drawbridge 

Kamakshi did not treat Dini like an exception. She treated her like an executive.

“She held me to my potential, not to where I was that day,” Dini says. “From day 1 she measured me against the execs in the room.”

Here’s what she did to balance the challenge and support of Dini as a High Slope up-and-comer executive. It was a masterclass in taking a chance on emerging talent. Here’s what she did:

1. Treat them like every other executive. 

At every executive meeting, Kamakshi made Dini go first with her update.

“At the time it was annoying,” Dini laughs. “I remember thinking, why do I always have to go first?”

Going first was the point. It told the whole room that revenue was central. It also told Dini that she was not a junior voice waiting for her turn. She was setting the tone for how the company talked about the business.

Over time, she realized she was good at it. She knew the numbers cold. She could present the business story clearly. She could frame tradeoffs in a way that moved the room forward. Everyone could see the value she brought to the executive table.

2. Give them a chance to do the full job.

Drawbridge had an impressive board with investors from Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. It would have been easy for Kamakshi to keep Dini behind the scenes, building the slides while someone more “seasoned” presented the deck.

Instead, she told Dini: you are presenting the revenue numbers.

That board meeting became one of the defining reps of her career. It proved she could stand shoulder to shoulder with people who had been doing this for decades. She hurdled past her fear.

3. Instill a company-first mindset.

Most first timers to the executive table are practiced as a people manager, protecting the needs of their specific team or department. Under pressure, even experienced leaders often default to fighting for their own silo. At Drawbridge, Dini learned a different reflex.

“I did a lot of growing up there,” she says. “I learned to focus on the company and the business over my team and my own motivations.”

Holding High Slope Talent to their potential, giving them real stage time, and framing their role as company-first rather than team-first accelerates the curve. It is a playbook other founders can replicate.

Trust and Autonomy at Lattice

If Drawbridge was the hill where Dini built her lungs, Lattice was the stretch where she refined her stride.

There, she worked closely with founder and CEO Jack Altman. Most CROs are handed a number. Here is your target for the year, go figure it out. 

With Dini, it was different. Jack showed how much he trusted her and that changed everything.

“Jack basically said, you tell me what you think makes sense for us to do next quarter” she recalls. “He trusted that I cared about the company almost as much as he did.”

That trust came with weight. If you are the one proposing the number, you feel a different kind of ownership over hitting it. You also feel a deeper responsibility to build the right system behind it.

Compared with an early-career manager who micromanaged every step of her process, the contrast could not have been sharper.

“That manager would say, here is the goal and here is exactly how you are going to get there,” she says. “I was hitting the numbers, but not in the way they wanted. It felt bad at the time. Now I see they were stifling my creativity.”

Put simply: weaker managers give High Slope Talent both the what and the how. Great founders give them a clear what, real constraints, and then room to figure out the how in a way that fits their strengths. 

If you want people who “find a way around the wall instead of only telling you there is a wall,” as Dini puts it, you have to stop handing them a script.

There are many paths any talent can take to get to the destination, and if you only route them your way, you might be slowing the race. 

The Tallest Wall

For all her career success, the race that changed Dini the most had nothing to do with revenue.

Fertility challenges were the first time she hit a wall that did not respond to more effort. No pipeline review, no late-night deck, no heroic push would fix it.

“As a type A person, it was brutal,” she says. “You are used to believing that if you work hard you can accomplish anything. This is one of those areas where that is not true. Inputs and outputs do not line up.”

It forced her to confront comparison more directly than any promotion cycle ever had.

“Everyone around you seems to be on a different timeline,” she says. “It is very easy to fall into ‘what am I doing wrong’ or ‘am I behind.’”

Her career mantra of ‘Run your own race’ took on new meaning here. It was no longer a motivational phrase for hard quarters. It was a survival tool.

How do I show up the best I can today, without any guarantee of results? How do I measure myself not by where other people are at mile 10, but by whether I am still putting one foot in front of the other on my own course?

The experience was humbling. It also made her a better human.

She now carries that lesson into every conversation about performance, growth, and “timelines” at work. There are inputs that matter. There are also factors that sit well outside an individual’s control.

This story has a beautiful finish line: Dini now has a beautiful 7-month old baby that gives the full race more meaning. 

Overlooked, Underestimated, and Owning Her Why

Throughout her career, Dini has often been the only one like her in the room.

“In revenue leadership, the higher you go, the rarer it gets to see women,” she says. “It is even rarer to see women of color.”

Layer in being the youngest in many of those rooms, and you have a constant hum of “do I belong here” in the background.

She could have taken that as proof she was an exception who needed to blend in. For a long time, it simply added to the chip on her shoulder. Over time, it became something more purposeful.

“It became my why for a long time,” she says. “If I want this reality to change, I have to be the example of the representation I wish I had growing up.”

High Slope Talent may name it something different, but there’s an underlying theme of a purpose bigger than income or status that each High Slope Leader we talk with carries. For Dini, her reason is clear.

Advice for Founders

Today, Dini works in venture capital and has the pleasure of advising many founders on revenue and team building. When Dini advises founders on hiring and developing high slope leaders, she does not start with a resume. She starts with posture.

“Someone high slope is deeply passionate,” she says. “About what your company is building, and about their own craft.”

From there, she looks for a few things.

• Student of the game. Do they talk about their role like someone who wants to get 10% better every year. Do they consume new ideas, try new approaches, and reflect on what worked?
  
  
• Adaptability with range. High IQ and high EQ together. Can they navigate different personalities and changing constraints? Do they see multiple paths to a goal and pick the most efficient one for this company at this stage?
  
  
• Problem orientation. When faced with a wall, do they just point at it, or do they start looking for a path around or through it? High Slope Talent has the action-orientation to own the solution in times where most would point out the problem.

Next, you have to design a culture that actually supports these types of hires. Dini suggests:

• High transparency with high accountability. Everyone would understand the full business context. Numbers would be shared. Tradeoffs would be explained. In return, people would be expected to own outcomes, not just tasks.
  
  
• People first as the path to performance. In many revenue teams, leaders think they have to choose between being “people first” or “performance first.” Dini does not accept that tradeoff. “The best way I know to be performance first is to invest in your people,” she says. “When you do that, they step up and invest in your customers and your business.”
  
  
• A culture of abundance. Scarcity thinking tells teams that for one person to win, someone else has to lose. That mindset rots a company from the inside. Dini would design the opposite. “If you win, I win, we all win,” she says. “Optimize for the greater good. Company first, then team, then self.”

That shows up in who gets rewarded, how cross-functional work is recognized, and how leaders respond when teams are tempted to point fingers instead of solving the shared problem.

Advice for Emerging High Slope Leaders

If Dini could go back to her first promotion into management and give her then self advice, she would share this:

“Do not overthink it,” she says.

She has never been the ten-year-plan person. While peers declared, “I am going to be a CRO in ten years,” she spent more time asking a different set of questions:

• What capabilities do I have that make me excellent at this job?
• Do I enjoy this job? What parts of it light me up?
• What is the next role that would give me more of that and less of what drains me?

Her practical playbook for emerging leaders:

• Crush the role you are in. High slope people often look up the mountain and get anxious. The fastest way to climb is still to deliver where you are.
  
  
• Find your unique mix of “good at” and “enjoy.” Your long-term arc should move you closer to work that sits in the overlap. That takes honest reflection, not wishful thinking.
  
  
• Think in eighteen month blocks. Dini looks at her career in roughly eighteen month increments. Commit to learn and grow in a role for that window. Then ask: Do I still enjoy this? Am I working on the things I am uniquely good at?  If yes, keep going. If not, adjust.

It is the same logic as marathon pacing. You do not plan every stride of twenty-six miles. You break the race into sections, listen to your body, and adjust your pace as the course changes.

What the next mile looks like

She still does not know what she wants to be “when she grows up.” She is fine with that.

Her race is not a straight line up and to the right. It is a series of climbs, plateaus, and course corrections where she keeps coming back to the same grounding practices.

Focus on inputs. Protect recovery. Journal. Seek discomfort with support. Share information transparently and generously. Hold yourself to your potential, not your last title.

And, when the comparison game creeps back in, repeat the mantra that carried her through mile after brutal mile:

Run your own race.

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