This season will feature conversations with key decision-makers who have to support the journey to a platform or any ecosystem. We will talk to C-suite executives, board members, investors, and others who must be bought into the platform journey. 

In this episode, Avanish and Dave discuss: 

• Dave's background and what led him to start Tidemark
• Tidemark's VSKP framework on how a Vertical SaaS company can win their category, expand their offerings, and then, for a select few, extend through the value chain
• What it really means to be a control point and why it matters
• The mindset (and perhaps mindset shift) that is required to build a strong ecosystem
• The wedges you need to be mindful of and the problems they can cause on your journey
• Thinking about the varying horizons of your product roadmap and how to synthesize them in actionable paths forward
• How to determine if your team is ready for the platform journey

And much more! 

Host: Avanish Sahai

Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and has served as a Board Member of Hubspot since April 2018 and of Birdie.ai since April 2022. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow.  From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase.  Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early-to-mid stage startups in Silicon Valley.

About Tidemark

Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale.  Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years.  Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.

Links

• Follow our guest, Dave Yuan
• Follow our host, Avanish Sahai
• Learn more about Tidemark