The Platform Journey

In this episode, Avanish and Rob discuss:

Show Description

This season features conversations with key decision-makers who have shaped the evolution of today's leading technology platforms and ecosystems. We talk to C-suite executives, board members, investors, and others who must be brought into the platform journey.

In this episode, Avanish and Rob discuss how Canva is scaling from a beloved consumer product to a global enterprise platform—and the frameworks, partner strategies, and customer-first principles guiding that evolution.

About Rob Giglio:

Rob Giglio is Chief Customer Officer at Canva, where he leads the company's go-to-market, enterprise, and ecosystem strategy as Canva scales from a beloved consumer product to a global business platform. Rob brings a rare cross-industry perspective to platform building, having spent the early part of his career at world-class consumer brands including Procter & Gamble, Clorox, Gap, and Williams-Sonoma before moving into tech. He served in senior leadership roles at Adobe, DocuSign, and HubSpot before joining Canva. That consumer-first lens—centered on brand clarity, customer orientation, and ease of use—shapes how he thinks about product, partnerships, and growth. At Canva, Rob is focused on helping businesses of all sizes realize the value of design and communication as a platform capability, while building an ecosystem that is, in his team's words, "as easy to integrate with as Canva is to use."

About Canva

Canva is a global visual communication platform used by more than 260 million people every month. Founded in Australia, Canva makes design accessible to everyone—from students and solo creators to the world's largest enterprises. The company recently crossed $4 billion in ARR and gives away over $1 billion in software annually through its education programs, serving more than 100 million students worldwide. Canva's platform includes AI-powered design tools, an open API ecosystem, and integrations with leading platforms including OpenAI and Anthropic. Learn more at canva.com.

Host Avanish Sahai

Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and served as a Board Member of Hubspot from 2018 to 2023; he currently serves on the boards of Birdie.ai, Flywl.com and Meta.com.br as well as a few non-profits and educational boards. 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.

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With a career spanning the US Navy, executive leadership positions at PetSmart and Banfield Pet Hospital, and pioneering online training, Don brings unique insights into building and scaling businesses across industries. Throughout the conversation, Avanish and Don discuss OpenSesame's evolution from an online learning marketplace to an AI-powered platform that serves enterprises, learning management systems, and content publishers. They explore the "Intel Inside" ecosystem strategy, the Simon AI tool that democratizes course creation and enables instant translation into 70 languages, and how organizations can successfully navigate workforce reinvention in the AI era while meeting customers where they are.

In this episode, Avanish and Don discuss:

• OpenSesame's dual-sided platform strategy: Partnering with 200+ LMS/HRIS systems on the delivery side while aggregating 50,000 courses from 200+ publishers, providing distribution for small publishers to reach enterprise customers and enabling large publishers like Harvard Business Publishing to access mid-market and SMB segments.
• The Simon AI course creation tool: Democratizing content development by enabling subject matter experts to create high-quality courses without instructional designers, with built-in translation capabilities across 70 languages for voiceover and text—expanding global reach for multinational organizations.
• Workforce reinvention as strategic imperative: Positioning OpenSesame at the center of organizational AI transformation by providing not just technology but comprehensive change management roadmaps, helping HR and learning leaders guide their teams through adoption with curated content and use cases.
• The "meet them where they are" philosophy: Balancing long-term product vision with practical customer adoption paths, especially during transformational periods like AI implementation, by understanding customer needs deeply before prescribing solutions and allowing products to flex without compromising the ultimate vision.
• The 1% better daily improvement mindset: Embracing continuous learning and incremental progress as the foundation for breakthrough innovation, recognizing that overnight successes are built on consistent dedication and discipline over time.

About Don Spear:

Don Spear is CEO of OpenSesame. Before his current role, he founded BlueVolt.com, held executive leadership positions at Banfield Pet Hospital and PetSmart, and served as a submarine officer aboard the USS Tunny (SSN 682).

About OpenSesame

OpenSesame, the leading provider of online business training, is the choice for L&D professionals wanting to drive learning initiatives forward with innovation, agility, and care. We offer the world's most comprehensive digital learning catalog, with regularly updated content from expert publishers in a variety of formats and languages. By providing comprehensive learning resources and innovative tools like Simon, OpenSesame empowers L&D professionals to exceed their goals and champion learning across their entire organization.

Host Avanish Sahai

Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and served as a Board Member of Hubspot from 2018 to 2023; he currently serves on the boards of Birdie.ai, Flywl.com and Meta.com.br as well as a few non-profits and educational boards. 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.

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In this episode, Avanish and Drew discuss:

• Drew’s early journey from systems integrator to one of Salesforce’s first top sales leaders
• How Salesforce’s “connect the dots” sales motion enabled enterprise expansion beyond PLG
• Why relationship visibility—not lack of relationships—is the real bottleneck in enterprise sales
• The concept of “social capital” and why misused intros burn trust instead of creating it
• CTD’s hybrid model for individuals and enterprises—and why both matter
• Drew’s vision for CTD as a trust layer and emerging relationship platform

Host Avanish Sahai

Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and served as a Board Member of Hubspot from 2018 to 2023; he currently serves on the boards of Birdie.ai, Flywl.com and Meta.com.br as well as a few non-profits and educational boards. 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 Drew Sechrist

Drew Sechrist is a Salesforce veteran who helped grow the company from $0 to over $1B in revenue. As the #1 global sales manager and account executive, Drew mastered the art of leveraging relationships for warm introductions to close deals faster and bigger.

With co-founder Ian Swinson, another Salesforce alum with deep expertise in CRM and social networks, they’ve built Connect The Dots™ to empower professionals and companies to harness the power of their networks. The vision? A free, intuitive way for individuals to carry their relationships with them, while helping companies replace expensive, ineffective cold outreach with strategic network intelligence.

About Connect The Dots (CTD)

CTD is the Relationship Activation Platform that helps go-to-market teams instantly find and request introductions to key decision-makers using real relationships from across their company, board, investors, advisors, customer champions, and more.

Whether it’s a warm path through your CEO, a trusted investor, a strategic partner, or even a personal connection, CTD reveals who actually knows your target buyers and makes it easy to request and track trusted intros at scale. We turn hidden networks into a repeatable, high-impact channel for modern sales teams. Learn more at www.ctd.ai

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.

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In this episode, Avanish and Antonio discuss:

• BBVA's data transformation journey, including the strategic decision in 2017 to create a global data function at the executive committee level reporting to the CEO and Chairman
• Building hybrid data architecture combining centralized lake house (AWS) with data mesh approaches to balance agility and control across global operations in regulated environments
• The "eight robots" framework—a top-down AI transformation agenda targeting the most critical parts of BBVA's value chain, from digital client relationships to banker productivity to risk underwriting
• How BBVA defines data democratization as "responsible access" not "open access," implementing strict governance while enabling self-service analytics in a highly regulated industry
• Real-world AI impact: solutions reducing tasks from 11 minutes to less than 1 minute, generative assistant "Blue" serving 20+ million clients in Spain and Mexico, and IVR improvements saving minutes to seconds
• The partnership and ecosystem strategy leveraging enterprise-focused innovation through AWS, OpenAI, Google Gemini, and vertical solution providers to increase speed of learning and innovation
• Why the "mode in this cycle is learning—how fast you can learn, how fast you can test hypotheses"—embracing experimentation and continuous improvement as models rapidly evolve
• Antonio's vision for the future: using AI and data to expand bankarization globally, serving underserved populations and fueling economic growth for families and businesses

About the host:

Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and served as a Board Member of Hubspot from 2018 to 2023; he currently serves on the boards of Birdie.ai, Flywl.com and Meta.com.br as well as a few non-profits and educational boards. 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 Antonio Bravo, Global Head of Data at BBVA

Antonio started his career in 2009 as a consultant focused in Technology, Media and Telecom. There he had the opportunity to learn how (mobile) internet growth blurs barriers between different industries and makes them converge. One of those industries is finance. He joined BBVA in 2011 to be part of its transformation strategy, and since then he has had different jobs. Started working in the Strategy & M&A area, with focus on the BBVA Ventures team (today Propel) investing in fintech startups, continued with a role in Digital Banking Strategy team, and later in 2015 assumed the responsibility of Business Development in South America (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Perú, Venezuela, Uruguay and Paraguay).

He also held the responsibility of Agile Organization until July 2019, focused in scaling the Agile methodology through-out the entire organization, more than 33.000 people including holding and countries, to improve quality, time to market, productivity and team engagement.

From July 2019 until September 2021 he held the responsibility of IT Strategy & Control within BBVA, a function that manages some of the core IT functions at a global level, such as IT strategy, finance, vendor management, PMO, first line of defense and IT spin-offs.

Since September 2021 he holds the position of Head of Sustainability Strategy & Business Development, where he contributes to the design of the strategic plan for all segments and manages investment in descarbonization funds. In January 2024 he was also appointed as Head of Corporate and Investment Banking Strategy, Industrial client coverage and cross border business.

In January 2025 was appointed Global Head of Data at BBVA. Antonio is responsible of leading the transformation of the Group towards a data-driven company.

About BBVA:

BBVA is a global financial services group founded in 1857. The bank is present in more than 25 countries, has a strong leadership position in the Spanish market, is the largest financial institution in Mexico and it has leading franchises in South America and Turkey. In the United States, BBVA also has a significant investment, transactional, and capital markets banking business.

BBVA contributes with its activity to the progress and welfare of all its stakeholders: shareholders, clients, employees, providers and society in general. In this regard, BBVA supports families, entrepreneurs and companies in their plans, and helps them to take advantage of the opportunities provided by innovation and technology. Likewise, BBVA offers its customers a unique value proposition, leveraged on technology and data, helping them improve their financial health with personalized information on financial decision-making.

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.

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In this episode, Avanish and Umesh discuss:

• Uniphore's founding story in 2008 and evolution from conversational AI applications to an end-to-end Business AI Cloud platform serving 2,000+ customers including Fortune 500 enterprises
• The pivotal moment when two of Uniphore's largest customers (10% of revenue) warned their contracts might expire unless Uniphore opened up their platform for customer-built AI agents
• How platform necessity emerged from scale—running out of data scientists to manually fine-tune models for each customer led to building automated platform tooling
• The "open-heart surgery" transformation: shifting from selling business outcomes to line-of-business buyers to serving CIOs and developers, requiring wholesale DNA changes across engineering, product, sales, and marketing
• Why platform and ecosystem strategies are inseparable: "A platform is really not a platform until other people are building things on it"
• The M&A strategy for platform companies: narrower aperture requiring 100% architectural alignment, but instant unlocks when acquisitions fit the single-codebase platform architecture
• Three frameworks for platform success: maintain paranoia about whether you're a feature/product/company, surround yourself with "system thinkers," and stay intensely close to customers
• The "five-by-five" metric for measuring platform adoption: five large enterprises and five GSIs using the platform as their weekly "factory" for fine-tuning models and building agents, requiring simplified user experience for non-technical business users

About the host

Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and served as a Board Member of Hubspot from 2018 to 2023; he currently serves on the boards of Birdie.ai, Flywl.com and Meta.com.br as well as a few non-profits and educational boards. 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 Umesh Sachdev
Umesh Sachdev is the CEO and Co-founder of Uniphore, one of the largest AI-native, multimodal enterprise-class SaaS companies in the world.  Sparked by his vision and focus to use AI technology to bridge the gap between humans and machines, today Umesh is recognized as an enterprise AI pioneer, bringing knowledge AI, generative AI and emotion AI into a single platform, allowing customers to harness AI’s powerful capabilities across voice, video and text-based applications.  Known for his grit as a leader, his passion for customers and his deep understanding of technology, he is called upon to guide some of the world’s largest brands through their digital transformation. Umesh’s strong portfolio of patents serves as a testament to his innovative thinking and commitment to advancing AI technology.

As an international business leader, Umesh has been recognized with many awards including ‘40 under 40’ Bright Young Business Leaders in the Economic Times, ‘Next Generation Leader’ by Time Magazine, and previously, as an ‘Innovator Under 35’ by MIT Tech Review.  Umesh is an alumnus of Jaypee Institute of Information Technology and an accomplished speaker and highly sought-after presenter.

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.

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This season features conversations with key decision-makers who have shaped the evolution of today's leading technology platforms and ecosystems. We talk to C-suite executives, board members, investors, and others who must be bought into the platform journey.

In this episode, Avanish and Greg discuss:

• Greg's journey at the intersection of technology and professional services, including his role building EY's global partnerships practice into a substantial business driver
• Why most companies remain confused about partnerships, platforms, and ecosystems, and how successful companies are "built from the ground up" to orchestrate ecosystems
• Microsoft's transformation under Satya Nadella as the gold standard for ecosystem strategy - shifting from competing against everyone to becoming a platform that orchestrates the capital of hundreds of thousands of companies
• Why the future belongs to companies that shift from linear value chains to orchestrated ecosystems where they either orbit around or become the center of mass for other participants
• The urgency for C-suites to think beyond operational AI improvements and envision what their industry will look like in five years

Host: Avanish Sahai

Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and served as a Board Member of Hubspot from 2018 to 2023; he currently serves on the boards of Birdie.ai, Flywl.com and Meta.com.br as well as a few non-profits end educational boards. 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 Greg
Greg is the Founder of Sarafin Advisory which he launched in 2024 to provide companies with actionable advice and insights to help them grow Enterprise Value in an era of immense change and opportunity. Previously, Greg spent over 9 years at EY where he was most recently the Global Vice Chair - Alliances and Ecosystems. Prior to joining EY in 2015, he spent seven years as an executive at IMB, running one of the top five accounts at the firm and then managing the professional services P&L for Banking and Financial Markets in North America. He also held significant leadership positions in financial service technology and digital disruption across industries. In addition, he helped found a health payments dot-com and, prior to that, ran his own software development company.

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.

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In this episode, Avanish and Andrew discuss:

• Andrew's journey as an "operational CFO" from Sun Microsystems through ServiceNow, WalkMe, Lacework, and now Amplitude, being part of the team that built ServiceNow from $400M to $4.5B ARR
• Why CFOs must "play chess, not checkers" - thinking several moves ahead about decision implications and making strategic investment pivots for anticipated future growth
• The critical difference between multi-product and platform strategies: true platforms have definite customer adoption journeys where products aren't sold independently
• Recognizing platform readiness signals: when customers organically create their own workflows and use cases you never conceived, like hospitals using Amplitude for emergency room optimization
• Building effective teams by mixing "veterans with rookies" to solve problems rather than just "admire problems," and driving focused execution around single key investments
• The "fair exchange of value" approach to pricing and partnerships that emphasizes customer adoption, transparency, and simplicity over complexity

About Avanish Sahai:

Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and served as a Board Member of Hubspot from 2018 to 2023; he currently serves on the boards of Birdie.ai, Flywl.com and Meta.com.br as well as a few non-profits end educational boards. 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 Andrew Casey: 

Andrew Casey is Chief Financial Officer at Amplitude, where he leads Amplitude's General & Administrative organization, which includes finance, accounting, and legal. With more than 25 years of enterprise software experience, Casey brings deep financial expertise combined with extensive go-to-market strategy and business operations experience.

Casey joined Amplitude from Lacework, where he served as CFO and oversaw its successful acquisition by Fortinet. Prior to that, he was the CFO of WalkMe, where he led its Initial Public Offering (IPO) and transformed its enterprise sales motion. Casey’s career also includes senior finance roles with ServiceNow, Hewlett-Packard, NortonLifeLock Inc. (formerly Symantec), Oracle, and Sun Microsystems.

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.

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In this episode, Avanish and Mike discuss:

• Mike's journey from his early tech roots in Silicon Valley to his role as CRO at Zscaler, including his transformative work growing ServiceNow from $500M to $6B in the Americas region
• The importance of always viewing platform strategy through the customer's lens - helping them achieve outcomes rather than managing multiple point solutions
• How a successful platform requires breaking down silos not just within your own organization, but often within your customer's organization
• The "one team" concept of the three-legged stool: customer, vendor, and partner, all working together toward shared success
• Why ecosystem partners are mission-critical, providing industry expertise and customer insights that vendors can't replicate
• The role of security in enabling productive AI adoption, with Zscaler helping customers leverage generative AI safely at scale
• How to develop meaningful metrics with partners beyond just pipeline generation, focusing on mutual success plans and regular reviews
• The importance of playing the long game with partners - "It's not how you behave when things are going great, it's how you behave when things hit the fan"

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 Mike Rich
Mike Rich is a highly accomplished technology sales professional with a career spanning more than 30 years.

During his tenure as President, Americas at ServiceNow from 2011–2023, Mike played a pivotal role in the company's success. Under his leadership, the AMS region experienced unprecedented revenue growth, catapulting from $500 million to $6 billion+.

Mike focused on initiatives like vertical industries that enabled customer-facing teams to partner closely with customers. During his time, the company's overall growth skyrocketed from $80 million to $8 billion. Throughout his career, Mike has kept customer satisfaction as the north star, ensuring that every business decision aligns with the goal of providing unparalleled value to clients and career advancement for employees.

Before ServiceNow, Mike held leadership roles at enterprise software companies Borland, Rational Software, and Kana.

Mike's leadership philosophy revolves around building diverse teams that prioritize achieving desired mutual outcomes. His passion is fostering environments where collaboration, mutual respect, and teamwork are paramount.

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.

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In this episode, Avanish and Dennis discuss:

• How Freshworks evolved from a single help desk product to a multi-product platform serving 74,000 customers globally, from small businesses to enterprises like Airbus and Nucor Steel
• The importance of being "pulled" by customers into new markets rather than pushing—recognizing when customers you didn't expect are adopting your products
• The challenges of building and scaling a multi-product company where products are at different maturity levels and target slightly different ICPs
• Why ecosystem strategy is critical at Freshworks, including both technology integrations with thousands of partners and a services ecosystem to source and implement solutions
• Freshworks' differentiated approach of building "uncomplicated" solutions in a market dominated by complexity—particularly for mid-market and low-enterprise customers (up to 20,000 employees)
• Dennis's philosophy of customer-centricity: "When in doubt, go talk to a customer"
• Building an ecosystem strategy that includes both technology integrations with thousands of partners and a global services network, with direct sales in nine countries and partner-led expansion everywhere else

About the Host

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 Dennis Woodside

Dennis Woodside is the CEO and President of Freshworks. He joined Freshworks as President in 2022. Dennis has spent more than two decades at innovative companies in Silicon Valley. Previous roles include Chief Operating Officer of Dropbox and sales and strategy leadership roles at Google for more than 10 years, including CEO of Motorola Mobility after Google acquired the company.

Dennis serves on the board of the Boys & Girls Club of the Peninsula in California and previously served on the boards of the American Red Cross and ServiceNow. Dennis holds a B.S. in Industrial Relations from Cornell University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

About Freshworks

Freshworks Inc. (NASDAQ: FRSH) provides people-first AI service software that organizations use to deliver exceptional customer and employee experiences. More than 72,000 companies, including American Express, Bridgestone, Databricks, Fila, Nucor, and Sony choose Freshworks’ uncomplicated solutions to increase efficiency and loyalty. For the latest company news and customer stories, visit www.freshworks.com and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X.

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.

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In this episode, Avanish and Lara discuss:

• The four distinct phases of software company growth and what each requires - from finding product-market fit ($0-100M) to demonstrating platform vision ($100M-1B) to scaling enterprise deals ($1B-5B)
• The critical importance of not neglecting your core business while scaling - how ServiceNow used tiered pricing models to continue monetizing their core products
• Why platform and ecosystem strategies are "two sides of the coin" but must be tailored to each company's specific situation - there is no one-size-fits-all approach
• The "win-win-win equation" that must exist for successful partnerships - creating value for customers, partners, and your company
• Creating cultural alignment around ecosystem strategy - including Dave Schneider's innovative approach of inviting partners to ServiceNow's sales kickoff
• How to avoid "throwing money against the wall" with partnerships that lack strategic foundation
• Building unfair advantages at scale through customer relationships, installed base data, and continuous innovation to stay ahead of imitators

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 Lara Caimi

Lara Caimi is the President of Worldwide Field Operations at Samsara. Lara brings nearly 25 years of experience to Samsara, where she is responsible for leading Sales and Customer Outcomes. Before Samsara, Lara was Chief Customer and Partner Officer for ServiceNow, overseeing nearly 2,500 global employees across organizations including customer success, professional services, and channel ecosystem. Previously, she served as ServiceNow’s Chief Strategy Officer. Before joining ServiceNow, Lara was a partner at Bain & Company, where she advised technology companies on growth and go-to-market strategy.

Lara holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and English Literature from St. Olaf College, a MIB from the University of Sydney as a Fulbright Scholar, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

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.

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