I get a lot of emails almost I'd say one every 2-3 days from someone that basically says something like, "Hey, I love what you're doing. We should partner. Let's get on the phone to explore." Right? I [00:01:00] never ... it's hard to respond to those, right?

At the very beginning when we were new and just wanted to talk to anyone to get feedback and learn about how other people saw us in the space. I would get on some of these calls and be like, "Okay, what ... how do you want to partner?" They'd say like, "I'm open to anything." Really? You're open to anything? So I [00:02:00] have to come up with the partnership idea. So you want to partner with me and now like I need to pitch you on the ... on what a partnership might look like? So now I just say to folks like, "Okay, cool. I'm open to it. Send me a one-page proposal with as many concretes as possible outlining what you would get, what we would get. Concretely what the exchange of value would be. Is it money? Is it traffic? Is [00:02:30] it visibility? If it is traffic or something like that, what would the form of that take?" 

And almost nobody writes back with a one-page proposal. Even a one paragraph concrete proposal. I don't get this whole like, "Hey, we should do something. Let's hop on the phone." Like who has that much phone time? Who has [00:03:00] that much bandwidth for connections in real time? Probably people who aren't ... who don't have customers. I don't know. I used to have this theory that the Biz Dev career or industry, like basically the main role of folks in Biz Dev, was to tie up time with other people who are in Biz Dev. Like, "Hey, Biz Dev person A at company A is going to Biz Dev person [00:03:30] B at company B and they're just gonna eat up a bunch of each other's time so they can justify their roles."

When you're exchanging money, something fungible or bitcoin or equity or something, when you're trading these things it's very clear how value is exchanged. But when there's a partnership it's like, "All right, what are the specifics? [00:05:00] How long is it gonna last? Is there confidentiality? Is there exclusivity?" Usually you need to get ... you have to have some kind of contract involved, right? So you need to pay, if you're gonna do it right, you have to pay a pretty good commercial contracts attorney and that takes time. 

Usually [00:05:30] it takes hours of meetings, tens of hours and meetings in some cases. And then once it's done, you have to execute it, which means you need to get other people on your team involved and they have to be in alignment. There's so much involved in a really solid partnership. I think even Fortune 500 companies can count on two hands the number of really [00:06:00] important partners that exist for them. So yeah, I think it's just something that most people can consider ... I sent out a Tweet about this the other day and it got a lot of likes. 

Thank you for everyone who liked it. And someone responded to the Tweet, who I used to work with, Kevin Raheja, who runs partnerships or ... [00:06:30] I don't know what his official title ... I think it's maybe director of partnerships at HubSpot. And he responded with a really clear directive, which was 1. Know the partner's business. 2. Have a plan. 3. Be short and clear. 4. Exchange value. And 5. Don't waste time.

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