Selling Airspace Awareness Before the Market Knows It Needs It with Melissa Swisher
Having the best technology does not guarantee you win. Customers do not buy engineering. They buy outcomes.
Melissa Swisher, Chief Revenue Officer at SkySafe, joins Greg to explore what it takes to turn sophisticated technology into a repeatable business, and why that challenge is becoming increasingly important as drones become a routine part of the world around us.
Melissa brings decades of experience building and scaling go-to-market organizations across enterprise software, healthcare technology, AI, and now airspace intelligence. Her career has included high-growth companies, IPOs, founding and successfully exiting Socrates AI, and learning firsthand how culture, focus, and customer understanding can determine whether a technically impressive company actually succeeds.
At SkySafe, Melissa has helped move the business from experimentation toward a focused, scalable go-to-market model. Since joining, the company has quadrupled revenue and grown from a handful of customers to roughly 50 by narrowing its focus, creating clearer buying motions, and building around federal, public safety, law enforcement, and critical infrastructure customers.
The conversation also explores the rapidly changing world above us. As drones become cheaper, more capable, and more common, organizations increasingly need visibility beyond the traditional fence line. SkySafe is building an intelligence network designed not simply to detect a drone, but to understand where it came from, whether it has appeared before, how it behaves, and what patterns emerge across locations over time.
Greg and Melissa get into:
Why having the best technology is not enough to win, and why customers ultimately buy outcomes rather than engineering
Melissa’s journey from enterprise sales and leadership to founding Socrates AI and eventually joining SkySafe
How mentors shaped her career and why she now pushes people into bigger opportunities before they necessarily feel ready
What dramatically different company cultures taught her about accountability, collaboration, customer focus, and why culture directly drives performance
Why SkySafe needed to move from experimentation to scale by creating greater focus, clearer qualification, and repeatable buying motions
The power of saying no, and why startups can die from having too many good ideas
How SkySafe detects drones and turns individual detections into a broader airspace intelligence network
Why the company focuses on persistent detection and intelligence rather than treating every unidentified drone as a threat
How networked RF sensing can reveal patterns, history, and behavior that a standalone sensor cannot
Why drone forensics can turn airspace data from a monitoring tool into an investigative asset for law enforcement
The emerging opportunity around critical infrastructure, including energy, utilities, oil and gas, and data centers
How disciplined execution helped SkySafe quadruple revenue, and why growth often comes from doing the boring, repeatable things consistently well
What Melissa looks for when hiring go-to-market talent, including curiosity, hunger, adaptability, and comfort with ambiguity
Her advice to technical founders whose go-to-market strategy is struggling: stop selling to everybody, identify who has an urgent problem they will pay to solve now, and build repeatability before expanding
Why a use case is not the same thing as a market, and why technical founders should bring commercial leadership into the business earlier
What nationwide airspace awareness could eventually look like as cities, critical infrastructure, public safety, and federal organizations become part of a broader intelligence network
Why Melissa believes meaningful career decisions often feel uncomfortable before they feel obvious
For robotics, hard tech, and AI founders trying to turn technical capability into a scalable business, this conversation is a practical look at focus, category creation, go-to-market discipline, and the importance of knowing which opportunities to pursue and which ones to leave behind.
Learn more about SkySafe:
Connect with Melissa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-swisher-00480a/
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregtoroosian/