"One of our key strategic priorities was driving C-level awareness through dinners. We did it with Spear – super successful. The hardest part is filling the seats. Spear was the perfect solution."
CEO, Oso
About Oso
Oso is a Sequoia-backed authorization and AI security company that helps organizations control who – and what – can access critical systems, data, and resources. Oso is known for its developer-focused authorization platform, enabling teams to implement fine-grained permissions and access controls without building complex authorization systems from scratch.
Today, Oso helps organizations secure and govern AI agents by providing visibility into agent activity, enforcing access policies, detecting violations, and maintaining audit trails. By applying principles such as least-privilege access and centralized authorization, Oso enables companies to adopt AI technologies while reducing security and compliance risks.
Trusted by companies including Brex, Webflow, Duolingo, Visa, and Vanta, Oso has established itself as a leader in authorization infrastructure and AI security. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Felicis, and other leading technology investors.
The Challenge
Oso helps companies run AI agents in production with confidence – giving security teams the visibility, access controls, and automated least-privilege enforcement they need to govern agent behavior at scale. It's a mission-critical product. It's also a hard sell.
Security leaders are among the most skeptical buyers in B2B. Cold email sequences go unread. Automated "personalization" registers as noise. The typical outbound playbook – high volume, low precision – fails almost completely when the target audience has both a finely tuned spam filter and a genuine allergy to being sold to.
Oso's answer was intimate events: dinners, virtual roundtables, breakfast briefings. Small, curated gatherings of 15 to 20 security leaders, where the conversation itself was the draw. The format worked. Getting the right people in the room was the hard part.
Each event required a precise prospect list – the right titles, the right seniority, the right company profile – reached through outreach that felt worth responding to. Running that process manually, across multiple cities, for a new event every few weeks, wasn't sustainable. The sourcing bottleneck was threatening to cap how far the event strategy could scale.
"Of everything in my stack, this is the thing I feel strongest about in its ability to book RSVPs to a dinner. Very repeatably."
The Solution
Oso brought Spear in to operationalize the event engine – turning what had been a labor-intensive, one-off process into a systematic outbound motion.
For each event on the calendar, Spear sourced a targeted list of security leaders and delivered personalized LinkedIn connection requests anchored to the specific event context. The outreach wasn't a product pitch. It was a concrete, relevant reason to respond: a dinner in San Francisco with ICP decision-makers, a virtual roundtable on LLM access control, and a breakfast briefing for security executives in New York. The event did the persuasive work. Spear made sure it reached exactly the right people.
Over 12 months, Oso ran a steady cadence of roughly one event per month – spanning virtual roundtables on authorization for LLMs, in-person dinners in San Francisco and Boston, an NYC breakfast for executives, and conference activations at re:Invent and RSA. Each one was staffed through a Spear campaign: targeted sourcing, personalized outreach, and connection requests tied to the specific event hook.
Beyond the event calendar, Spear also ran trigger-based campaigns around Oso's core product themes – LLM authorization, microservices security, and agent permissions – reaching prospects at the moment they were most likely to be thinking about the problems Oso solves.
The combination of event-led campaigns and trigger-based outreach gave Oso something it hadn't had before: a GTM motion that ran in the background without requiring the team to rebuild the sourcing and outreach operation from scratch every month.
"AI is making outbound worse. Everyone's inbox is full of 'personalized' noise. Spear flips that – a few well-timed messages to the right people beats a thousand generic ones."
The Impact
Over the course of 12 months, Oso ran more than 15 intimate events and booked 68 meetings directly attributable to Spear campaigns. Across 3,400 targeted LinkedIn connection requests, the team achieved a 28.7% connection rate – a strong signal that the outreach was landing with the right people, framed the right way.
The results weren't limited to meetings. Running campaigns through CEO Graham Neray's LinkedIn profile grew his network by more than 2,000 senior security leaders across the U.S. That network now functions as a distribution channel: every piece of thought leadership Oso publishes reaches a materially larger and more relevant audience than it did before.
What started as a high-effort, manually-sourced event strategy became a scalable pipeline motion. The Oso team shows up to each event ready to have the conversation – because the sourcing, the outreach, and the funnel tracking have already been handled.
Spear helps companies build GTM motions that book real meetings – through event campaigns, trigger-based outbound, and LinkedIn-native outreach designed for precision.
