De-risk your U.S. expansion before you scale.
Before your first U.S. hire, launch budget, or event spend, we validate your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), pitch, pricing, and sales motion with real U.S. buyers. Two senior operators, on the ground in New York, who helped build Criteo’s U.S. business from zero.
No pitch. Just a working conversation about the decision in front of you.
The U.S. is too expensive to enter on the wrong assumptions.
Most European companies don't fail in the U.S. because the market isn't there. They fail because they scale before they validate. The most expensive mistakes look like this:
Copying the European pitch
The message that wins in Paris or Berlin often doesn't name the pain a U.S. buyer actually budgets against.
Hiring before validating
A U.S. Country Manager or sales hire without a validated ICP, pitch, and sales motion is a very expensive experiment.
Assuming references translate
European proof points rarely carry the weight you expect. U.S. buyers ask for different evidence.
Spending before targeting
Conferences, events, and outreach burn capital fast when you don't yet know which buyer owns the budget.
Built for companies facing a real U.S. decision.
We work with European B2B scale-ups in retail technology, retail and commerce media, adtech and martech, and data/AI: companies with real European traction and an expensive U.S. decision ahead. A first U.S. hire. An entry-timing call. A wedge to choose, a price to set. If that is you, the audit will tell you where you actually stand.
We are a deliberately small partnership, and we protect that. We are not the right fit if you want introductions without the work, guaranteed clients, junior outsourced sales, or a market study to file away. If you want evidence you can take to your board, keep reading.
We test what is winnable before you commit heavier capital.
Operator-led field validation: we narrow the wedge, put it in front of real U.S. buyers ourselves, and give you a clear recommendation. Not a market study, not an automated report, and not a rolodex: evidence.
Diagnose
A free discovery call to understand the U.S. decision you're facing — hiring, timing, ICP, pricing, or channel — and what evidence you already have.
Validate in the field
Targeted buyer and ecosystem conversations, objection mapping, pitch iteration, and proof-point translation — real buyer feedback, not assumptions.
Decide with confidence
A clear, evidence-based recommendation: invest, narrow, hire, partner, pivot, or pause — with the playbook to act on it.
What we are not.
We do not sell introductions. Our network opens doors as part of the work, but meetings are instruments of validation, arranged and debriefed, never the product. We do not sell lead volume; lists are a commodity your interns and your AI tools can generate. And we do not guarantee outcomes: an honest recommendation can be “pause,” and that honesty is what makes a “go” worth acting on. What you pay for is senior judgment, field evidence from real U.S. buyers, and a decision you can defend.
Three phases, twelve months, no blind bets.
Each phase de-risks the next: you invest more only when the evidence says you should. Every company arrives at a different point on this path, and the audit tells us where you are, so you only run what you actually need.
You leave with: an audit report your board can read: ICP and buyer map, first-wedge definition, proof points translated for U.S. buyers, pricing review, and a clear go, adjust, or pause recommendation.
You leave with: a validated (or corrected) wedge, your U.S. sales playbook V1, a qualified-signal list with named objections and real buyer language, and your pitch and demo iterated with the market.
You leave with: a working U.S. pipeline cadence, your first-deal push behind you, and your first U.S. hires de-risked: profile, job description, budget, success metrics, and the founder’s role, defined with you.
The audit always comes first: it tells us (and you) exactly what phases 2 and 3 should contain, and whether they should happen at all. And every engagement starts with a free discovery call, scoped to the specific decision you need to make.
Two U.S.-based operators with European roots.
We've sat on both sides of the Atlantic — building, selling, and translating European products for U.S. buyers — and we've both called New York home for years. Practical, senior, hands-on.
We met at Criteo in 2008, when it was a startup of about 60 people in Paris. Over the next 13 years, we helped build it into a NASDAQ-listed global adtech leader — Olivier relocating in 2009 to open the U.S. market from zero, Pierrick scaling customer success into a global organization spanning the U.S. and Europe.
The first 18 months in the U.S. taught us the expensive way: misread buyers, a European playbook that didn't translate, roughly $2.7M spent on wrong assumptions. The turnaround — local leadership, onboarding rebuilt from three months to two weeks, packaging and pricing redesigned for how U.S. companies actually buy — is what made the U.S. one of Criteo's largest markets. That 18-month detour is exactly what we help our clients skip.
Index Ventures, in its “Winning in the US” playbook, puts it plainly: “Regardless of your archetype or whether you ultimately need to relocate to the US, the founder must spend significant time there... develop firsthand experience of what customers, prospects, partners, and investors are looking for.”
That firsthand time on the ground is exactly what we bring, two operators already in New York, so you build that experience without relocating first.
Pierrick Joliveau
18+ years scaling B2B tech across the U.S. and Europe, including 13 at Criteo — where he grew retail media customer success from a 5-person team into a 60-person global organization serving hundreds of retailers across 10 countries. Since then: VP of Customer Success at Kevel and Potloc, lifting net revenue retention from 94% to 103%, and fractional CCO to B2B SaaS scale-ups. Pierrick turns the U.S. decision into an operating plan — commercial process, post-sales motion, and AI-ready revenue operations.
Olivier Kivitidi
15+ years launching and scaling platform businesses on both sides of the Atlantic, at the intersection of go-to-market and product. One of Criteo's first 60 employees, selected by the CEO to open the U.S. market — signing 50+ accounts and hiring the company's first U.S. and U.K. teams — he went on to lead Fortune 500 client strategy (Walmart, Estée Lauder, Macy's), working hand-in-hand with product teams to adapt Criteo's offering to U.S. buyers. At Meta, he led the cross-functional effort that brought the Marketing API back to the core of the ads product strategy, advising partner executives on integration and monetization. Olivier sharpens ICP, pitch, and proof points so they land with U.S. decision makers.
Questions we expect you to ask.
What do we actually get at the end of the audit?
A written report your board can read: where you stand on ICP, pitch, proof points, and pricing for the U.S.; what we heard from targeted U.S. buyer and ecosystem conversations; and one clear recommendation: go, adjust, or pause, with the Phase 2 plan if it is go.
Do you sell introductions?
No. Conversations with real buyers are part of the work, and we arrange and debrief them, but we sell validation and judgment, not access. Firms that sell rolodexes exist; we are deliberately not one of them.
How is this different from a lead-generation agency?
Lead volume assumes your ICP, pitch, and pricing already work. Ours is the step before: we test those assumptions with real buyers so that whatever you spend next, on outreach, events, or a hire, is spent on a validated wedge.
Do we have to commit to twelve months?
No. The three phases describe the full path, and each phase de-risks the next. Most companies start with the one-month audit; what follows depends on what the evidence says. Some engagements should end at the audit, and we will tell you so.
What does it cost?
The audit is a fixed fee; the field phases are monthly retainers. We scope both to your situation on the discovery call. As a reference point: the audit costs a fraction of one mis-hired U.S. salesperson’s first quarter.
Who is this not for?
Companies that want guaranteed clients, free detailed plans, introductions without the work, or outsourced junior sales. We also decline engagements when the honest answer is that you are not ready to act on the evidence.
Facing a U.S. decision?
Whether to hire, enter now or wait, which wedge to lead with: a 30-minute discovery call will tell you whether we can help de-risk it, and what you would have in hand at the end.
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