Cristina Cordova (ex Head of Platform & Partnerships at Notion)

Hi everyone, this is Jackson Steger. I'm the producer for the show, and before we get started today, I wanted to let you know about On Deck's newest fellowship, and I think that this audience would find it particularly interesting. So, Execs on Deck is an 8-week fellowship for leaders with 12+ years experience looking for their next VP or C-suite level role at a high-growth startup. The program provides one-to-one executive coaching, Personalized introductions to top startups looking for talent, and a world-class peer community to help you find or create that perfect next role. So if you're thinking about what's next, you can learn more/apply at beyonddeck.com/execs. Space is limited and applications for the first cohort close on April 9th. Thanks. Hey everyone, this is Erik Torenberg and you're listening to Execs by On Deck. Execs is a show for founders, operators, and leaders who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. Our guests are tech execs in key roles at top tech companies who share their hard-won, earned secrets on how to scale faster. Christina Cordova was the 28th employee at Stripe and grew their partnerships arm from the ground up. Most recently, she led platform and partnerships at Notion, which included starting the growth product team. In this episode, we discuss how to build a partnerships team from scratch, what to look for in BD hires, and the ins and outs of successful dealmaking. Christina is an active angel and advisor. You can hear more from her by following @CJC on Twitter.

Hope you enjoy.

Christina, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining.

Thanks for having me.

Awesome. So I want to start with you kind of introducing your career a little bit. And the prompt is, imagine talking to someone out there who's interested in the career that you're having, but maybe 10 years younger. And I want you to sort of give an overview of what a career in partnerships or BD could look like. What is sort of the evolution of what that could look like? And maybe we start with you just detailing your rise.

Yeah, sure. So I graduated from college with a political science degree. Unfortunately, there's no partnerships or business development major. So, you know, ultimately you can start with any education that you think would be relevant. I also took some computer science classes primarily just because I felt like I wanted to be useful in conversations with engineers, knowing that I did want to go into tech at the tail end of my college experience. So from there, I basically applied for a bunch of like large tech jobs. Got one at Google. And then my TA from one of the computer science classes I was taking in the spring quarter, right at the end of the school year, had basically created this app called Pulse. It was a mobile news reading app. And he needed someone to help him with the business side. And I was kind of the annoying student in the class who would be like, hi, you haven't posted the homework yet. Can you post it? And he was like, oh, would you be interested in this? And I said yes. So instead of traveling or doing something fun in between that and my full-time job, I worked for him for free. And I loved the experience, just like everything that I would get to do as effectively this company's first employee with 2 co-founders. From there, I took my big tech company corporate job, realized that I hated it and that I was in something akin to operations and that wasn't really something that interested me, which was great. I figured that out quickly. And 7 weeks later, I went back to the startup that I was working at for free. And thankfully they decided to finally pay me. That was great. Yeah. I was, quote unquote, like VP of business development, fresh out of college, no experience, had never done anything before. Classic early-stage startups giving away titles too easily. And yeah, from there I did everything from sourcing literally hundreds of media partnerships to get content on to the app with, you know, folks like the BBC News or the Wall Street Journal. And then I led a number of our strategic distribution partnerships. So thinking about how could we get this app into the hands of more people, we focused on partnerships with the likes of Amazon, AT&T, Verizon, OEMs, carriers, that kind of a thing. So effectively everything I was doing, I was learning by doing. You know, the founders will say the same thing about their experience. Like nobody had done anything like this before. And after about 2 and a half years, I got introduced to some folks from Stripe and got to know them over the course of a couple of years— or sorry, a few months, actually. And from there, I ended up joining the company also to do partnerships and was the first hire to do that and had to figure out how to translate my experience in like media and doing some OEM carrier deals into doing the kinds of partnerships that made sense for Stripe. Which were everything from distribution to product partnerships to platform partnerships, and really kind of ran the full gamut. And I worked at the same time very closely with a number of engineers to build products. And that was, I think, a really great experience for me because I got to both be a business person and on the product side. And I like to be kind of in between those 2 parts of the company with the roles that I look at now. And so, from there, I basically built out a team from scratch. I was, you know, 24 going to 26, hiring a bunch of people who were far more experienced than I was, and really enjoyed that experience of, you know, going from, you know, a team of one and just working my butt off to a large team of people, and then eventually multiple teams that I was managing. And then from there, I went on to basically lead a business unit working on new financial services products. So that was a great way to say, you know, great, I've learned all of this in partnerships and business development. I now want to expand that to working on product, and I manage product managers, engineers, and a number of other functions to kind of basically get brand new products up and running from zero to one. And then I made a move after 7.5 years at Stripe to Notion, where I joined to lead our platform and partnerships efforts. So a number of APIs that we had to build out so that third parties could connect to Notion and build integrations. Then I managed the Partnerships on top of that. And I also managed our growth product team and got that off the ground. So thinking a lot about the onboarding experience, signup conversion from free to paid. So yeah, I look at my career and I like to think about it as someone who kind of is somewhere in between business and product and also likes to learn new things and work with great people.

Awesome. And so take yourself back to you're just graduating college and you have, like many people out there, they have They're good with people, they like working with people, and they can pursue something in partnerships, they can pursue something in sales, they can pursue other different types of careers. What is the framework they should think about to think about, is partnerships or BD the right career for them? Where the forks in the road are, where they could rise up within it. How do you think about that?

Yeah. I've seen a lot of people either maybe start out in this job or make a transition. I think it actually is pretty hard to start in this position because I think most companies will not hire anyone you know, straight out of college for it. But, you know, it does happen. And so when I think about the innate skill set versus like experiences that one should have had before, I would say one, communication is most critical. Like ultimately that, that is your job both internally and externally to communicate effectively about what your company needs and, you know, how that can work really well in partnership with another company. Second, I think you need to be persuasive and have some, you know, maybe innate innate negotiation skills. So starting with that, I think I did high school debate, you know, so I feel like there was like a little bit in me already, but I had never done any kind of like, you know, business or contract negotiation. But I think the great thing about debate is that it puts you on both sides. Like generally when you're debating a topic, you both have to prepare for the pro side and the con side. And so you're really putting yourself in the shoes of your competitor, right? And I think that's also true for partnerships, where you very much have to put yourself in the shoes of who you want to partner with. And I very much believe in, you know, win-win partnerships, and wanting to build relationships that can be really long-lasting, and not having to feel like, you know, I won in a given negotiation. So that would be one. And then last, I would just say collaboration. You know, I think this is a role where you can't go out there and have tons of conversations with other companies and not be able to come back into your company and get something done. Because then you'll just be that person who is great at talking, but not actually doing something. So a lot of that applies to actually working internally at the company and convincing product managers, engineers, et cetera, to build something. to change their mindset about a particular company in order for you to work with them. And again, it speaks to the other traits as well, but I think you have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of those individuals and figure out why the partnership is good for your own product team, for your own engineering team, those kinds of things.

Yeah. And I'm not a partnerships person by any means, but when I think about the principles that guide my negotiation philosophy, I think the 2 biggest ones are, Always know what you want before going in. And often that means talking internally. There's a lot to figure out before you enter a negotiation because precedents are everything. And if you end up switching it up, that ruins stuff. So always know what you want. And then 2, maybe ask for the one or 2 big things you want and be willing to give on a bunch of other stuff. How about you? What are negotiation frameworks or philosophy that you— Yeah.

I believe in some very similar approaches on that front. I think it's specifically not just like what you want going into a negotiation, but what is like, you know, an absolute no. Because I've found that when you're asked something and you're like, oh, hmm, that's one I haven't maybe thought of before. Let me go back to my team and I'll noodle on that. You know, you've now opened the door. And that, you know, if, you know, someone was asking for like some kind of egregious revenue share or something, like in that moment, you have to be like, no, that is insane.

Yeah.

And if you don't do that, then you have opened the door and like made a problem for yourself, right? So I think really understanding like what's off the table and what's on the table is really critical. Being upfront and honest about the things that you, the person on the other side of the of the table, like, can say yes to? And then, like, also, what are the other people that need to approve or be part of the discussion in order to say yes? You know, the biggest partnerships that I've ever done are never, like, one person's decision. You know, I'm convincing the BD person, a product leader, a CTO, you know, a number of people that we're the right partner to work with. So I very much believe in, like, mapping out the entire organization organization as soon as you possibly can. So you can understand who are the different people in this organization that we need to convince. And then ideally, like, you're not the only person that this company is interacting with. Like, you know, if we need to make sure that the CEO is on board, which if it's a big partnership, you probably should, I'm going to bring my CEO into the conversation and make sure that my CEO and the other CEO are best, best of buds. That way, I feel like we have touchpoints throughout different levels within the organization, which I think is particularly critical. So that's one thing I definitely like to do. Before getting into deep contract negotiations, I also love to just put together a very simple term sheet of like, hey, when we say we're going to do co-marketing, what exactly do we mean by that? Are we going to do a joint podcast together? Are we going to put up co-branded billboards, like, like, what are the things that we're really talking about? Or am I just like emailing my customers on your behalf? Like, like, what are the things that we mean? And getting specific about that and trying to understand, you know, before you start bringing the lawyers in, um, you know, what are the things that are really truly like business decisions, um, that we can come to an agreement on relatively quickly? And then, uh, lastly, I think another principle that I, I try to employ is just try to understand For the person on the other side of the table, like, you know, what is outside of this deal their broader mandate? So what kind of partnerships do they work on generally? What kind of areas of the business do they focus on? You know, what's going to get that person a promotion? And, you know, for me, like, I want to ensure that, especially if I'm representing like a startup, that them taking a chance on me and this company as a startup is something that They get praised for taking that risk. And so I really want to understand how they're motivated, how they're compensated, how that works, so that I can do my best to make them look good.

What answer would they give you that you'd be like, oh yes, you are motivated for taking this risk, or vice versa? Yeah.

I think it also gives you some insight as to where you might have to do a little more work or where you may not. So as an example, if someone was when I did a bunch of media deals, I would work with some people who did audience development. And so their primary objective was to just bring more traffic to the website or the properties that they were managing. So that would change my pitch and how I would talk about what I had to offer versus often I was talking to like business development partnerships person at a media company, like they were more revenue-focused. So I had to either change my pitch or try to talk to somebody else because like with the particular startup I was working for, like we had no, you know, revenue like sharing model or anything like that quite yet. We were very, very early on. You know, for me it was like, okay, if this person is really targeting revenue, like Maybe this isn't the right partnership for them. Maybe there's a different person in their org that I should be talking to. Or I really need to start thinking about whether we can actually make that revenue side of the equation happen sooner. So I think it's both helpful in terms of crafting your pitch and also trying to understand what's going to make that person say yes and also be really excited.

You invest in and advise companies as well. and people seek your counsel on this stuff. Where do you see companies make mistakes or partnerships go awry, or what misconceptions people have or something not obvious?

I would say a big one is around data and customer ownership. I think a lot of people don't really think about that upfront. And so conversations I'll have with founders who are discussing their very first partnership, I'll effectively say something like, well, do you want to own the, the customer? What if, uh, what if they don't want you to, like, like, maybe you're gonna get customers through this partner, but that partner isn't going to allow you to email those customers or use their email addresses, right? So you don't really have any opportunity to maybe expand on your relationship with this customer if you don't own contact information, um, or certain customer data, right? So I, I do really try to impress upon people like this idea that, you know, it may seem like a win-win, but when you really get into the nitty-gritty and like a term sheet, for example, saying like, we have the right to mark— like co-market to these customers or market to these customers, you know, within reason, or something to that effect. So really understanding like where the data is, who owns it, if you can both share it, I think is particularly critical for a lot of startups. And I think it's an easy one to miss until the end, when the lawyers come in and are like, oh no, no, no, no, this is all of our data. But really, it's more of a business discussion that should have been had more so than a legal discussion.

Yeah, it's interesting. There's this tension sometimes I notice where people will want to avoid being super explicit on certain things because they worry that they won't like the answer and they hope that maybe things change or if it's not super explicit, there'll be some leeway or something. They almost prefer the potential chaos of being implicit. Do you veer towards always being explicit? How do you think about that?

Some partnerships are a little softer and more nuanced than others. So there have been partnerships that I've done where I didn't feel a strong need to get a contract in place, for example. So there, everything's implicit and nothing is explicit. And I think that's primarily because, for example, the partner was using our openly available APIs. They agreed to like developer terms that were associated with those APIs. There was no explicit reason for why I need to do something grand on top of that. I knew that they wanted to co-market, and you know, at the end of the day, if the partnership isn't working, if the integration's not working, you know, of course they can they can pull out and and stop developing it. And I think you just have to be reasonable with those kinds of things and make it your job to to be a partner that they want to continue to develop with. I think when it comes to things like revenue sharing specifically, or you're talking about working with a very, very large partner that just like doesn't do anything if it's on paper, if it's not on paper, then I would say you kind of have to put those things in place. Yeah. My strategy for working with like smaller, nimble companies is to, you know, unless it does involve revenue, is to typically not paper things and make things a little bit more implicit than explicit. Yeah.

Yeah, makes sense. I want to zoom out a bit and the prompt is, imagine I'm a founder, I'm a technical founder. I have this product that's starting to work and it's starting to grow. Maybe I have 10 employees and now I'm starting to build the rest of my organization and I know nothing about partnerships and I'm seeking your counsel. Maybe first you can just outline what are the different types of partnerships? and then how to do them well, or what examples of companies you've seen do them well, or just like, let's outline the ecosystem and then we'll get to the composition of a team and that sort of stuff.

Sure. Yeah. So I'd say the different kinds of partnerships in my mind start with a foundational partnership, right? And so these are the partnerships that you might need because without them, your product couldn't exist. So in Stripe's world, that would be our partnership with Wells Fargo, which was, or is, not sure now, our banking partner for a very long time. And Stripe wouldn't be able to move money without a banking partner, and that's a critical function of the business. So that was a very early foundational partnership that we needed to have in place. And so second, you might have what I would define as product partnerships, which are kind of like foundational partnerships, but But maybe they're not so critical that your business could not operate without them. Again, using a Stripe example, we partnered with some companies to offer tax services to our customers. This was before Stripe had its own tax business. And that was primarily to say, hey, there's this feature that we don't provide ourselves. Maybe if we integrate with another partner, our customers can get that service through the partner.

Yeah.

And have a better experience as a result of it, because we're not able to spend 6 months, a year to actually build that feature out ourselves. And so we had, you know, very, very many of those, including with partners where, you know, it's not possible for us to build the ultimate partnership. So we partnered very closely with Apple Pay at Stripe, for example, where obviously we're not going to build phones and enable wallets on phones ourselves. But if a company is going to do that, we want that integration between Stripe and Apple to be very, very seamless. Third would be a partnership, like I would say a little bit more like platform-oriented. So I think companies that have done that particularly well, the probably first one that comes to mind would be a company like Slack. So for platform partnerships, it's effectively, you know, you have some typically SaaS offering, you're building a suite of APIs, and you want developers and businesses out in the world to integrate with those APIs so that your product and their product can work better together. So, this, in Slack's world, it was everything from, like, a polling app that, like, you know, some random person not part of a company built. And it became, like, the number one polling app on the entire service. And, you know, it was a really great product and offering that just a single developer created. And then you also have you know, companies like Google who are building Google Meet plus Slack type integrations. So basically, you know, think about it as like an open set of APIs that anyone can connect to and build an offering on top of. So that would be platform. And then lastly, you would have what I call distribution. So I think about that as kind of like following the customer's journey in a way and trying to understand Who are the customers that may not come directly to you, but may start using some other service offering first, and then can get introduced to your product later? These were the first kinds of partnerships that I worked on at Stripe, and I think Stripe did this particularly well, which was basically thinking about non-technical business owners, such as, you know, an e-commerce store owner who doesn't have a developer in-house, and maybe starts using Shopify or Squarespace or something to that effect to set up their online store. And in that process of setting up their online store, they need payments. And so, you know, we developed partnerships with those companies to enable Stripe to be the default payments provider on those platforms. And that way, any customer who would sign up for those services would kind of go through us by default in order to get payments. And that way, we were exposed to many, many, many more customers than we otherwise would have been if we waited for that e-commerce retailer to somehow find us some way. And it also reduced the spend that we had to do on marketing and a number of other things to target a market that was very different from the developer focus that Stripe had at its core.

Foundational, platform, distribution. What was the one I missed? Channel? What was the one I missed?

Product. Product.

And how should the composition of a team look like at scale, and how do you grow into that?

Yeah. I think it really depends on the company. I've worked with a lot of companies at this point, and I think it all looks a little bit something different depending on what the stage is and what your focus is. At Stripe, for example, we were very, very focused on distribution partnerships at first because when I joined the company, we didn't have as many customers as we wanted, and we also didn't want to start a sales team. And that was like the alternative. It's like, well, if you don't want to start a sales team, how are we going to get customers? And we also don't have a marketing team. So like, this is going to be pretty difficult. So we started off with partnerships as our way to scale quickly without having to grow the company to a massive size too early, especially with a lot of business functions that we, the team didn't have experience hiring for at that point. And so distribution partnerships was where we started. Um, and then we started getting enough customers where we started to be attractive from a product partnerships perspective. And so companies like Apple would come to us and say, hey, we're launching this thing called Apple Pay, are you interested in working with us on it? Um, and that became something that we then had to prioritize. But, you know, obviously had to start with foundational partnerships of like the banks and the card networks and all those things to like be able to function. Then distribution, then other product partnerships outside of that scope, and then platform. But I would say platform was generally the least appealing, even though it was something that I liked the most because you know it didn't necessarily drive tons of direct revenue. It wasn't a make it or break it must have like product integration. So you know we didn't necessarily devote as much in in terms of resources there. So the vast majority of the team, I would say, was focused on. Foundational, which ended up becoming a separate team focused on financial partnerships specifically. So banks, card networks, and we brought in people with like kind of more specific industry expertise in that area. We then developed a distribution partnerships team and then a product partnerships team. And so the combination of all of those worked out quite well. And eventually Stripe grew so much that we needed to start really focusing the product side of the house on specific areas of the product. So looking at it like, okay, we have this great business called Stripe Billing. We need to dedicate one person on partnerships to that particular line of products. And so I think the dedicated model with product started working over time once we had a product organization that was large enough. To support someone who needed to be full-time on it. But it wouldn't be something that I would do from the beginning. In Notion's world, in comparison, we had a really great top of funnel, tons of customers coming to use our product. So the first thing that I did when I came into the company was not focus on distribution. I actually started working on growth product because we were more focused on making sure that those users had a really good experience when they came on board and would stick with us for a long time. really thinking about how we could use partnerships to improve the product experience with other types of products that you would use in conjunction with Notion. And I think that was particularly strategically important because in workspace collaboration, we know that you're like, the only tool that you use isn't going to just be Notion. So you have to work well with all the other tools in the, in the broader suite. So thinking about that, we focused on a lot of partnerships at the beginning that could get us a lot of integrations at very quick scale. So we partnered with companies like Zapier and If This Then That and many of these like automation services so that if someone came to us and said, oh, I want this like, you know, totally long-tail integration with Notion, we could say, sorry, we're not gonna build that, but, you know, Zapier has a really great integration with that service and you could hook something up really quickly if you want that integration. So that lit up up thousands of integrations right at the time that we launched the API. And then of course we started working with companies directly to build integrations as well. So I think it really depends on like, where is the business? Where are you looking to grow versus like, where are you performing well? And then at the same time, what is strategically important for the business outside of the context context of just like talking to other companies and making things, making things work. You know, for Notion, it was making sure that you are working very, very well with the other tools and services that your businesses use. And for Stripe, it was much more, okay, how do we just scale this and grow really quickly and also start working outside of, you know, this developer bubble and start working with businesses, you know, outside of So I think for most startups these days, I would, I would advise to think about, one, their customer's journey and how they get to the product and how you can focus on, you know, blasting that out in various ways depending on what your business is and what your industry is. And then second, think about, you know, presumably, you know, if you have foundational partnerships that are relevant for your business. But, you know, outside of that, Really speaking to your customers and understanding, okay, you're using us, but what's the other stack of services below and above our product so that we can start to build really great relationships with those other companies?

Yeah. In partnerships, of course, there are times where you as a company have more or less leverage depending on how much you have to offer versus how much you need it, et cetera. And so maybe we can go one by one a little bit. On the foundational one, that's a situation where you need this partnership to exist, They probably know that or some version of that. I guess, what is the key into doing that well, or what's a mistake to avoid when setting up foundational partnership?

Yeah, I think they're really hard as a startup just because you're negotiating with a partner for the very first time. Typically, they know they're super critical to your workflow, and generally, they tend to be larger companies. And they know that they can push you around a little bit because you are a startup, right? So what I would say is to not worry too much about the economics of this first deal that you sign, but do not sign a long-term agreement. So the reason for that is if you, if you blow up as a business in a year, or 2, but you have a 5-year contract where you're working with this foundational partner and you're paying these like egregiously high rates, you're putting yourself in a position where you have no ability to get out of it. And it can really hurt the business in terms of what you're capable of doing, you know, reducing costs for your customers, those kinds of things. So broadly, I would say don't sign a long-term contract. Try to put tiers in place for whatever type of arrangement that you have so that as you scale, you get cheaper pricing. And of course, if you don't scale, then you have other problems. But if you do scale, you know what's going to come for the business. And hopefully they're partnering with you because they think that you can scale. If you stay small, it's not really worth their time. And then lastly, I would just, I would try to focus on what are the things that can make your product experience unique. And I think that was something that Stripe did at the time with its first partners, which was really focusing on how you can go from, I've signed up for an account and now I can accept a live transaction. And that was a big difference between Stripe and let's say PayPal at the time, where it's like, great, you've set up your account. We'll approve you in 2 to 3 days once we have an understanding that you're legitimate. And getting a partner to say yes to that was a big deal. So I think the economics didn't necessarily matter as much. We were able to renegotiate that deal after a certain period of time, but what we got was the big product win. So I would focus on the things that really differentiate your product and prove to the partner why you deserve it.

Yeah, that makes sense. Zooming out again, what's key to get right in terms of making the partnerships org or the BD org Work really well with sales and marketing and the rest of the revenue org?

Well, I think it depends on your org structure. Typically, start with where is BD in the organization? I've typically been in BD or partnerships organizations that are in product or their own separate organization outside of sales and marketing.

And how do you advise founders in terms of how they should think about the trade-offs in org chart? Or yeah, how should we think about that?

Yeah. Yeah. So I would focus on what are the kinds of partnerships you think this person, this first person in the role, will be doing. So, you know, for example, if you're a very, like, you know, revenue-focused organization and you're bringing someone on to do distribution and it looks a lot, you know, maybe it's like a little bit more channel-focused and a little bit more salesy, like those things, like if you expect that your person will be spending the vast majority of their time there to start, I might put that person in sales. And maybe I might give that person a quota, right? Because they are very revenue-oriented, right? The kinds of distribution partnerships that we did at Stripe were very deeply embedded into the partner's product. And so I was looking for people to bring onto my team who were very product-oriented and had a really strong product sense. And they tended to not be people who had ever been compensated on a quota basis. So it was, it just didn't make sense for the team at the time. Eventually, we shifted a lot of those distribution partnerships over to sales once they became, you know, once we kind of built the playbook and these became like much more straightforward standardized partnerships, it made sense to say, let's move those into, you know, the org where you can replicate those, um, uh, all the time. And that was very different from the kinds of partnerships that we wanted to do. So, um, and so broadly, I, I would say, you know, start with a, the thought around like, what is this person going to be doing? And like, what are the adjacencies in the current business, um, to that kind of function? So, you know, channel sales, definitely most adjacent to sales, or channel partnerships closer to sales. You know, something like platform At Slack, for example, was very much in the product side of the org and reported up into product. And I would say that in organizations where you feel like your deep product partnerships mean that you're, like, partnering very closely with engineering and product, like, that makes more sense in, in a product type of organization. But I think you have to ensure that whoever you're product leader is, um, you know, looks at a partnerships team and says, oh, that's something that like I'm interested in, I think actually, um, you know, expand a ton of value for the business on, then, um, I think you're much better positioned, um, to be reporting to that person. Sometimes a product leader will just say, I— this is not my bag. And, um, and then I think it makes sense for it to be more of a, you know, kind of separate standalone function. You also have like kind of this rise of like the chief business officer these days. And, you know, in Stripe's context, that's where we kind of put partnerships ultimately. And it ultimately ended up being its own standalone reporting to the founder. And when I was at Notion, I was reporting directly to the founder of the business. So I think where you view partnerships as particularly strategic and critical to the business, that is kind of what makes most sense to me. But I think it really depends on the organization.

Do you think that rise is only going to continue and that that makes sense for more companies than do it currently?

I don't think partnerships is universally strategic for every single business. So there are a lot of companies that I think are doing partnerships that don't necessarily feel like they can potentially transform the business in a new and interesting way. And as a result, like, I don't think it should rise to like the C-level in those kinds of organizations. So, so yeah, I mean, I think, you know, broadly, organizations have very different kinds of structures depending on their models. You know, like Coinbase, for example, doesn't have a sales org because it's a completely different kind of organization. From, um, from something like Stripe, right? Even though you would argue that they're like 2, you know, fintech companies roughly of the same size, you know. Um, so I think the models are just, are just very different these days. And, and when I think about, you know, what are the companies that I would like to join, it's companies where the function has the opportunity to rise to that level.

Yes.

Right? Versus a company where, you know, I'll talk to the founder and I'll say, tell me about the kinds of partnerships you want to do. And I'll say, you should just hire someone like this and like tuck them into sales. And I think you'll be better off than trying to hire someone who, you know, is looking to have a broader impact, but the organization and the product doesn't really merit that from a partnership standpoint.

Yeah. You know how in sports, you know, fans will be like, hey, if this team had this point guard or this center, Center or this quarterback or whatever, they'd be so much better. I wonder if as a student of partnerships, you look at other companies and you're like, wow, they have such a great product, but they're just underleveraged in so many ways because they don't have a partnerships org or they don't have a great partnerships org. Is there an example that comes to mind just to give listeners a visual of how partnerships orgs can transform companies?

I mean, I like to think about it. I mean, I feel like there's— it's hard for a visual, you know, it's hard for me to visualize. But what I would say is, like, when I think about the visual that stood out to me when I was at Stripe, and, you know, that was my longest, you know, I was doing partnerships there for 6 years and then moved on to a different role. But there, I think it started out with when I look at a dollar of revenue for the business, Like, where did that dollar come from? And then you're starting to talk about millions and billions of dollars over time. And if I can associate that dollar with a particular partnership, and then I look at the full pie and say, what percentage of our overall business came from a partnership, was made better by a partnership? To me, that feels very, very different. And something that feels really strategically valuable for me. And you can look at that and say, look at the impact this team has had. And, you know, for us, that was a combination of distribution and product partnerships for the most part. And, you know, for the foundational partnerships, it's really easy to see. It's just like every single dollar moves through one of these partners. It's pretty clear, you know, how much of an impact that can have. And what it can do for your product experience if you find the right partners. So I like to think about it both as like, how do I look at something that represents the business and feel like, hey, this team, this organization really accomplished a significant portion of the overall business?

Yeah, it's interesting. When we think about partnerships at On Deck, it's kind of There's a few different angles that we could look at it from because we have a few different products. We have a startup accelerator. We have a number of companies who sell to founders and so we partner with them and provide deals for the founders. We also did an accelerator with Flexport on logistics and we'll do a number of others as well. Kind of leaders in their different verticals. And then we have this professional development program for employees.

Okay.

And then we also have a hiring marketplace basically. And so when you take any specific company, there are so many ways that we could partner with them that it's almost hard to structure and organize. Like, oh, because we offer that. It's like you open a trench coat and here are the different ways that you can—

Yeah.

It's like, wait, you're going to help me recruit, but you're also going to help my employees develop? What about Are my employees going to leave? For companies that have different products and you have different stakeholders, what advice would you give to us or companies like us who are in a similar situation?

I feel like there have definitely been conversations that I've had, especially with larger companies, where they're like, let's meet and chat about all the things that we could do together. So I'm coming up with a list and polling a bunch of people about all the things. You know, but I really try to narrow it down to 2 or 3 that are most critical for the business with this particular partner and really start there and focus on the things that are more critical to you and potentially to them as well. And then figure out the things over time that you can, you can add into the partnership to continue to grow it. So, um, Yeah.

So that's been most useful to me because otherwise, to your point, it can be very, very confusing on the other side of the table about like where to even You mentioned at Stripe that you were the first partnership person, that you joined earlier in your career, and there's this tension as you're growing your team between hiring younger, somewhat generalists and somewhat older, more seasoned specialists. How do you think about composition of a team and when to hire for experience versus when to be able to take the risk on slope?

Yeah. Well, at the beginning of my time at Stripe, I feel like the first couple of hires I had were not necessarily traditional hires because I literally could not make those hires. There was no one in the world who was younger than I was and experienced in BD. As I mentioned, it's very rare for you to do this straight out of school. So I just couldn't. I couldn't recruit people who were very experienced at the beginning. And so I was focused on, what are the areas in which I am lacking and who are the people who can complement me in some way? And then also just like, where do I need more strength on the team outside of just core partnerships and try to find somebody who I can teach the partnership side to. So I started with someone who had a background in VC and finance and was just like, great. We have no finance people here. I need someone to help me run some models around these deals to make sure I don't, you know, give away too much money to a lot of these early partners. And then my second hire was someone who had a product management background, and they actually wanted a product management job at the company. And I was like, uh, like, we have no PMs, so maybe when we do one day, like, you can switch over to that role. Or if you really like what you're doing here, that's great too. And so, uh, we started with someone, um, that way they could just really blend nicely and easily into like the engineering side of the org at that time. And it was my focus to just like find people who could collaborate well with other teams. And I taught them the partnership stuff and, and they were great. And so it wasn't until my like 3rd or 4th hire where I found someone with previous, uh, direct partnerships experience. And by that time we had made enough progress as a team, and it was clear that we were doing things that were really good for the business, that it was easier for me to make the pitch to that person that like, hey, you're coming here and you're joining a team that's like already going really well. You don't have to like prove that, you know, you're really good at all this stuff. You know, like the, the team here is supporting you and And broadly going to get you into a place where we can even do more for the business than what we're doing now. So yeah, I mean, it was easier at that point to convince people, but frankly, the first 2 people I made offers to declined them. So it took a while for me personally to find my stride and how I could convince someone that I was a great people leader, even though I'd literally never managed anyone before in my life. That took a while to figure out and made me find some people who were a little bit outside of the obvious mold for the role.

Do you see partnerships leading to acquisitions much or just collaborating with corp dev in any specific way that's done well or not as much as one would think?

Yeah, for sure. There are a lot of companies that I've spoken to in the past where You know, at some point I say, we could partner, but like, you're probably small enough and interesting enough that we should acquire you. At the beginning, we had no corp dev team at Stripe. And so a lot of this was just working with other product and engineering leaders and saying, hey, is this enough for us to potentially move forward? But in my experience, having been through a lot of these things, basically acquisitions are very difficult to get done and very, very few of them actually go through. So I kind of like always looked at it as an option and then partnered very closely with the corporate development team, because I do think it's really important if it doesn't go through that you kind of keep those relationships separate. If corporate development ultimately says no on the acquisition, you'll continue to work with me on the partnership side. And there's like a nice wall up between those 2 things. Yeah.

Going back to a little bit of an earlier conversation, we were talking about as a startup, how do you work with a bigger company? One thing you mentioned is to be flexible in the economics. What are other things to avoid or make sure you do well in terms of— YC famously gives the advice of early on, don't spend that much time on it because they're going to waste your time or they can wait, you can't wait, etc. Is that advice directionally accurate? How do you make sure that it's worth your Yeah.

I generally agree with waiting, actually. A lot of people I talk to are like, let's do partnerships. And I'm like, ah, you're like a little early. Like, you know, again, put yourself in the shoes of the person on the other side of the table. Like, why would I want to partner with you? You have no customers. You have no, like, you don't yet have anything of value to offer to me, right?

Yeah.

And so I think you have to get to a point where you say, Okay, a reasonable person on the other side of the table would say yes to me. And that's when I think you can really start engaging on the partnerships front. Um, because yeah, I think it's very easy for you to say let's partner, and then you can fall quickly into the corp dev trap and like talk to someone from corp dev and like let's partner, and really like they're just trying to acquire you. And, and I— so I think YC is, is right to give that advice to most folks. Um, but yeah, once you have Once you have enough going in the core business and you have customers that love your product, you have product market fit. Those are 2 signals to me that you can start thinking about partnerships, but I don't think it's worth it to do it beforehand.

Yeah. And how about on the integration side? Like once you've already made the part, just making it all work internally, what have you seen as a framework to make sure that that it works really well or something to avoid in terms of here's where companies tend to get hung up?

This is just on the general partnerships front? Yeah. Yeah. I would say from the big company perspective, I would say a lot of things tend to get hung up around economics. I think as a larger company, you're just more sensitive to those kinds of things because you know your business metrics and models. Like, you know, we were flying blind for a lot of the deals that we were doing in the early days of Stripe and had to, like, renegotiate those deals later. From the startup's perspective, I think, to me, it's really about scale and distribution when you're thinking about partnerships. So that tends to push you into the direction of targeting larger companies. And, you know, I think Broadly, you know, I would think about it as like, how do you make sure that if this goes totally wrong and you, uh, signed an agreement for the wrong economics, just like, you know, I mentioned, that, that you can get out of it? And, um, and at the same time that you're proving to the partner that, you know, even though you messed up on, you know, your modeling, you can still provide a lot of strategic value to the, to the company. So, um, so yeah, like, like, I think a lot of it comes down to those things at the end of the day. And there were a lot of deals that I walked away from, both when Stripe was small and Stripe was large. A lot of it just came down to like, this partner wants to take us for a ride and, uh, wants a lot out of us. And, uh, in terms of like roadmap changes, economics, you know, a number of these things, and we just don't Like, it just doesn't make sense for us. And knowing, like, what that line is for you, you know, going into the conversation is really critical.

Christina, thanks for coming on the podcast. Is there any place that— any plug or any place you want people to send for people to learn more?

Yeah, sure. You can follow me on Twitter. I'm @CJC there, and that can take you to my website or other places. Yeah, that's all.

Awesome. Thanks for coming on.

This has been a great episode. All right. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to today's episode. Execs is produced by On Deck, where top talent goes to start companies, find their next roles, or invest in their careers. If you're looking to start a company, uplevel your career, or navigate a career transition, I encourage you to visit beyonddeck.com. See you next time. Bye.