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Kiva Kolstein

Kiva Kolstein is President and Chief Revenue Officer of AlphaSense, an AI-powered market intelligence platform used by financial services firms, corporations, and consulting firms [1][5][16]. He has held the combined role since 2017, describing his president duties as aligning functions such as marketing, content, product, finance, and strategic initiatives with the company's growth goals, while his CRO responsibilities center on sales, service, RevOps, and enablement [5][16]. He states that under his tenure AlphaSense grew from roughly $10 million in annual recurring revenue to more than $500 million, with a workforce expanding past 2,500 people worldwide, and that the company reached a $4 billion valuation [4][16]. He has described the platform as aggregating content from tens of thousands of sources, including sell-side research, SEC and global filings, earnings call transcripts, company presentations, and, following an acquisition, nearly 150,000 expert-transcribed calls, serving more than 4,000 enterprise customers split between financial services and corporate/consulting sectors [16].

Kolstein attributes AlphaSense's growth to what he calls operational excellence, which he breaks into several components: a sales enablement function he compares to "Navy SEAL style" onboarding, a RevOps team that measures performance across the funnel by representative, tenure, manager, geography, and vertical, and a dedicated strategic-initiatives team tasked with incubating and testing new go-to-market ideas before wider rollout [16]. He credits RevOps specifically with supplying the data he uses to brief the executive leadership team and board, and describes receiving a weekly internal report he calls an "eyes and ears" update on how the sales organization is reacting to changes such as new compensation plans or territory shifts [16]. Earlier in his career, while serving as an enterprise sales leader at Handshake, he laid out a framework for building enterprise sales teams that distinguishes between transactional sellers, who close smaller deals repeatedly, and relationship-driven sellers who build influence within complex organizations to close larger deals, arguing that companies typically need both profiles but should hire the transactional seller first to help fund the longer sales cycles of the second [17].

Beyond AlphaSense, Kolstein is a founding member and instructor at Pavilion's CRO School, where he has served as dean since 2022, and is a founding member of Pavilion Gold [7][8][9]. He is a member of YPO's NEO and Mosaic chapters, sits on the Fast Company Executive Board, and previously participated in Vistage Worldwide's CEO Network from 2020 to 2022 [6][11][12]. He has also served as a strategic advisor to Alysio [10]. In interviews, Kolstein has connected his approach to organizational leadership to lessons drawn from parenting, saying his role as a leader, like that of a parent, is to create an environment in which people can grow rather than to control outcomes, and to hold belief in others' potential before they recognize it themselves [15]. He studied at the University of Delaware [13].

Insights & ideas

AlphaSense's Kiva Kolstein frames growth as something engineered through operational discipline rather than left to chance. He argues that go-to-market strategy must start from the customer's perspective, with pricing, packaging, and segmentation built around specific verticals and personas, and sales teams trained to speak the customer's language [1]. He describes sales enablement as a "secret weapon" in scaling a high-velocity, complex sales organization, citing intensive onboarding and continuous equipping of sellers with tools, content, and analytics [1].

Kolstein also emphasizes RevOps as the connective tissue linking sales, marketing, and customer success, providing granular data by rep, manager, geography, vertical, and persona that informs strategic decisions such as where to double down or pull back [1]. He views this data not just as operational reporting but as a storytelling tool for aligning the company, leadership, and the board [1]. He blends his dual roles as President and CRO around a single goal: driving aligned, efficient growth across every function [1].

Experience

  1. President and Chief Revenue Officer
    AlphaSenseJun 2017 to Present
  2. Member, NEO and Mosaic Chapters
    YPOJul 2022 to Present
  3. Founding Member
    Pavilion GoldSep 2025 to Present
  4. Dean of CRO School
    PavilionAug 2022 to Present
  5. Founding Member / CRO School Instructor
    Pavilion2017 to Present
  6. Strategic Advisor
    AlysioJun 2025 to Present
  7. Executive Board Member
    Fast Company Executive BoardAug 2024 to Present
  8. Member of CEO Network
    Vistage Worldwide, Inc.Jan 2020 to Oct 2022

Education

Media & appearances

In the news

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