At 22 years old, Jean-Baptiste (JB) Daguené thought he was invincible. Running high-level sales across Denmark and closing multi-million euro deals, he convinced himself the game was too easy. He quit his job to launch an e-commerce startup - and within 11 months, he went bankrupt.
Left with eight years of personal debt and a plane ticket home paid for by his parents, JB faced a brutal reality check. But instead of breaking, he took a sales role at Trustpilot, cold-called founders who were succeeding where he had failed, and closed 600 deals in two years to dig himself out of the red.
Today, JB is the Founder and CEO of EverGrowth, a partner at 70V who has backed 50+ startups, and a seasoned endurance athlete who has conquered full Ironmans, 400-kilometer solo winter bike rides, and the Tokyo Marathon.
In the latest episode of Chief Endurance Officer, host Greg McDonough sat down with JB to explore the intersection of extreme physical stamina, AI-driven go-to-market strategies, and executive leadership.
1. Meeting the “Inside” You
Most executives spend their days performing for the outside world - the curated profile you see on LinkedIn. For JB, getting hooked on endurance training started as a practical fix for teenage insomnia. But spending 6 to 8 hours a week running alone through forests without music or podcasts unlocked something deeper.
“I never really asked myself, ‘Who is JB inside?’” JB explains. “When you spend so much time with yourself, you have no choice but to figure it out. It becomes therapy and meditation. You stop defining yourself by what you think other people think of you, and you learn to prioritize what you actually need.”
2. Why Great Salespeople Learn to Love the Pain
Sales is not a cube; it’s a funnel. Rejection is built into the business model.
“The definition of endurance is your capacity to endure pain,” says JB. “In sales or entrepreneurship, you need to like pain. You get rejection in your face every single day, and you still need the discipline to make that next call. It’s just like showing up on race day feeling terrible - you still go through it, appreciate the process, and get back to training the next day.”
3. The Golden Rule of AI Agents: Do It Manually First
As the leader of EverGrowth, JB helps enterprise B2B teams automate complex research and outbound workflows using AI agents. But his advice to founders rushing to implement AI is surprisingly old-school: do everything manually first.
Crunch the list yourself: Make the first 100 calls and do the research by hand.
Treat agents like interns: Imagine you have 100 hyper-intelligent interns available 24/7. If you cannot articulate the exact task and expected output format, they will fail.
Build fallbacks to kill hallucinations: Tell your models - and your team - that if they cannot find the answer, the required response is simply “I don’t know.”
4. Racing for Grandpa: Purpose Over Podium
After taking a two-year hiatus from racing to rebuild EverGrowth from the ground up and care for his wife’s grandfather during his battle with cancer, JB received a notification for Norseman - widely considered the hardest triathlon in the world - on the very day of the funeral.
“Grandpa was sent to Siberia during the Soviet era, survived, beat multiple cancers, and never once complained - he was always grateful,” JB shares. Rather than racing purely for personal achievement, JB is tackling the brutal Norwegian mountain course to fundraise for cancer research and honor a life defined by resilience.