Ellen DaSilva (ex Head of Strategic Partnerships at hims & hers)

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. Ellen DaSilva is currently building her own company after almost 4 years of leading strategic partnerships and biz dev at Hims& Hers. In this episode, Ellen shares her golden rules for partnerships. She discusses how to get stakeholder buy-in at every level, how to identify excellent growth talent via good interview questions, and how to partner up when you're the less credible party in the negotiation. Lauren Hoffman, Head of Partnerships at On Deck, joined me in this episode as guest co-host. Ellen, I want to talk to you about building a Biz Ops team and building a BD team. You work with and advise and invest in founders. First, I want to start on the Biz Ops side. Talk about what a Biz Ops team solves and when you advise founders to start thinking about their first Biz Ops hire.

It has a lot of definitions and a lot of different meanings depending on the phase of the company and the the way companies make money, but in a nutshell— Part of the reason I know you're asking the question is I ran a biz ops team when I was at Twitter, which now feels like a lifetime ago, but was only 10 years ago. Business operations tends to mean, once a company has product market fit and understands how it makes money, how can we optimize the processes of the business? So that we can streamline how things work, make margins better and tighter, make more money, and get the most out of the talent who works at the company. So that's generally what a business operations team does. They're set out to be almost like internal consultants to help make companies operate more efficiently. For example, when I was at Twitter, one of the first things I did, and really we did as a team, was there was a sales team that had maybe 20 people or so at the time, and the account assignment was rather a free-for-all. So, they brought in the biz ops team to say, let's streamline how accounts are apportioned and how new accounts are assigned so that people are working within a vertical as opposed to across verticals, or people are working with the same size customers as opposed to different size customers. It can be relatively simple. simple analyses that take place that can make a team a lot more efficient. Eventually, that turns into more formal processes, often implementing software to align with those processes. To answer your question, Erik, about when do you bring a Biz Ops team in, there's always going to be a need for strategy, even at a 2-person company or a 5-person company or something, but this role tends to tends to make more sense and have more leverage when a company has product-market fit, has raised a couple rounds of funding, has established customers and understands what those customers want from the platform, and has a pretty dedicated go-to-market motion that then you can make more efficient.

How should that org be structured?

Again, if you're B2C or B2B or ads-based versus SaaS-based, it's kind of different, but generally speaking, you've got a central So, we had a centralized person. I guess, again, it depends on the size of the company. When I was at Twitter, we had one person who reported into the chief revenue officer, and then we had key figures who worked directly with the org leaders. So, we had one person who worked with the marketing organization, and one person who worked with the sales leadership, and one person who worked with the engineering leadership. And then those people were each nodes for biz ops professionals, usually 2 to 3 people on the team, who would then And then serve as these consultants for each of the divisions. So you've got one nexus where all of the, like the brain, where all the information is flowing, and then you've got the limbs that are actually doing the work. And usually it's delineated based on organization.

Did Hims& Hers have a Biz Ops team, or what did that look like?

We didn't. We didn't because our go-to-market motion was more marketing-based than sales-based. I tend to think Biz Ops is really good when your sales base because they're actually like things to optimize. The marketers themselves at Hims were just world-class at what they did. And we had, instead of a biz ops team, we had a great analytics team that then informed a lot of the marketing decisions. So biz ops can and often is a very data-intensive role. In the case of Hims, we had this analytics team that supplied the same level of of care and attention to those organizations. Honestly, the other reason Hims didn't really have a biz ops team is we had more of a telemedicine operations team that made our telemedicine arm work very efficiently, the same way a lot of companies have biz ops for their software. So we have this telemedicine ops team that made sure the doctors and their platforms were running efficiently, and they had the right tools and equipment to deliver really high-quality results to our patients.

I have a follow-up on the sort of structure of the internal consulting team. How would you sort of verify that you had the buy-in necessary from the team that you were sort of touching down on or consulting? And then like the resources from your own team and from that team to go execute on whatever you observed or discovered?

This question touches on a real nuance. of business operations that doesn't get talked about enough, so I'm really glad you brought it up. Biz Ops can tend to be siloed into either a data analytics type role, or rather is thought of as a data analytics type role, or a consulting PowerPoint monkey type role, but it's really a relationships role. There are a lot of synergies between business operations and business development for that reason. A lot of times what a Biz Ops leader has to do is establish a deep relationship with the leaders they're working with so that when it comes time to either deliver a tough message or get into the weeds of what that leader is actually dealing with, you can have an honest assessment in both directions of what's going on, how the organization can be optimized, or generally how things can be made better. I, as somebody who has now managed an organization at a company myself, I can understand why one would be reticent to hand over the keys to the kingdom to somebody in a Biz Ops team who they don't know. So a lot of it is about establishing a relationship upfront. How do you do that? It's a lot of, obviously, one-on-one time with that leader, but it's also taking the time to really do a listening tour within their organization of what's working, what needs improvement, what systems and tools they use, What think people, what systems and tools people are receptive to. So I often advise for Biz Ops leaders when they start a new role, or when they started a new company, to do about a month of a listening tour just to get that kind of rapport with the leader before diving in and giving all the recommendations, which tend to be unwanted if they don't know the leader.

I don't know, I want to transition to the BD function. Why don't we start with you telling a little bit of your story at Hims& Hers in terms of, I understand you were the first first BD hire there, of how you built that organization and how that organization grew and how other founders should be thinking about how these organizations work and grow?

I'm a sucker for business development, talking about business development, business development professionals, because I think BD is a real art and it can either get lost in the fray or often entrepreneurs don't necessarily know what to do with the function. So I like to shed light on it because it's a function that can and does add tremendous value to an organization. My own story is I was actually looking at starting a similar kind of company to Hims back in the fall of 2017. A guardian angel, this woman I know very well who is at a venture fund, said to me, you should really go meet this other company that's doing something similar, that was in stealth mode at the time. So I met our CEO, who we hit it off and very graciously hired me to help with all things partnerships. The company was about 7 people, 8 people at the time. I started in the winter, first thing in 2018, right when the company was getting off the ground. My scope, I mean, at the start was really everything and anything. I think when you're a business professional at a nascent company, you just show up to work every day wanting to say yes. You have to say yes. So, if that meant setting up our warehouse management system, sure, or our wholesale pricing, sure, even though that wasn't necessarily what I thought business development would mean at the company. I just said yes to a lot of things. And as a result, I got a good purview on what the various go-to-market motions would be for Hims. Specifically, after probably 6 months of the wishy-washy, like, do I do marketing? Do I do retail? Do I do all these other things? We settled on a couple different verticals to try. And I won't necessarily bore you with the details there. But over the course of my time there, BD was a small team by design. As I mentioned, our main go-to-market motion was marketing. We brought in people to own— business development at Hims meant anything that was not paid user acquisition or content marketing. So we had ancillary channels for revenue generation and for product distribution, and that included things like retail and wholesale. We also had big partnerships with health systems and hospital systems. We tried to do a lot in the actual telemedicine ecosystem, so players like GoodRx and other organizations that were also trying to penetrate the telehealth community, and we did product partnerships and the like. BD orgs, as I mentioned, tend to be pretty small. I think there should be a leader who is also not afraid to be a deal-doer. There should be a couple people on the team who generate the deals, kind of like an account executive in sales as a corollary. Those are people who don't necessarily have to have sales experience, but are not afraid to use their Rolodex to get a deal done, and who are extremely creative about the value that aligning 2 organizations can bring. And then finally are people who are really good at both Internal sales as well as external sales, because business development and partnerships are as much about convincing your own team that they should expend time and resources on this third-party thing as it is convincing this other organization. Then there are account managers. Once you've actually completed a deal, you'll want somebody to manage and maintain the account, provide opportunities for Upsell if that's something meaningful for the partnership, and make sure that both sides of the partners are happy.

Totally. Talk about how does at Hims& Hers, when you got in, what were the things that you focused on and where did you see the sort of highest bang for your buck?

At Hims, we concluded, at first we wanted to just get sales. Revenue was a top goal for partnerships. We looked at ways to distribute our— as I mentioned, we looked for ways to distribute our products and services beyond just direct-to-consumer marketing. And they were very generous. I had a lot of free rein in creative licensing. So I went through this user journey of, well, where does— at the time we were selling hair loss and ED medication. And I thought, where does a guy think about his hair loss medication? The barbershop. So I went out and forged a partnership with The largest owner of hair salons in the country called Regis Corporation. And actually, a funny story, we got this meeting and I said, actually, I'm going to be in Minneapolis this day. I'd love to meet you in person. And I literally just got on a plane and went the next day to go meet with them so that we could take the meeting in person because we really wanted to make sure that we— Set this thing up for success. So we looked at those kinds of arrangements and I thought a great opportunity to showcase both our over-the-counter products as well as talking about some of our prescription products and harnessing a community of folks who can actually speak knowledgeably about the benefits of some of these products and services we offered. So we ended up doing a really big partnership with them and then replicating a lot of times what partnerships do for a business is you do something that's kind of wacky and creative, and then if you can replicate it, you could turn it into a bit of a sales motion. And so we were able to do that with that kind of partnership. But in the super early days, it was a lot of just— the company was so small and nobody had really heard of us. It was a lot of reaching out to my own network to say, hey, would you ever think about adding this to your platform? Or would you ever think about selling these kinds of products through your channel? And as I always say, you don't really get what you don't ask for, so I would just make lots of crazy asks.

Can I ask, particularly in the beginning before you have that sort of credible name and you're doing some of that partnering up with a major company like Regus, how do you go in as that smaller player or less known entity and command the value or revenue that you need to see for it to be successful?

Yeah. This is a very tricky thing to do. And oftentimes when companies are early, they'll do a partnership not just because it brings in sales and revenue, but also because there's a name associated with it. And that tends to bring concessions with it. So you may pay for the privilege or you may do a revenue share where it's 25/75, not 50/50. But how do you command that kind of attention? For starters, you have to go into the pitch knowing that you bring a value that they can't provide. So, for example, a deal that didn't end up getting done, but there was a product partnership that we wanted to do with a company that offers hair dyes. And we thought— and we were really small and they were much bigger, and we thought, well, we offer products that they really don't have and they offer products that we really don't have. There's a real—

Opportunity.

complement here that they could not achieve without us. And so we knew our value and we knew our worth, even if we were the guppy and they were the big fish. There's also a lot around clarity of ask. So I started in the early days experimenting with what my cold reach out would look like. And I would start by saying, hey, I know we don't know each other, but just talk to me. Here's the business. And what I found worked 9 out of 10 times was, here's the very specific— in the cold reach out email, here's the very specific thing that I think we can do, and here's going to be the value to you. I will quantify it. And here's going to be the value to us. I will quantify it. Let's chat. And often that ended up turning more heads and setting us up for more success.

Going back to what you were sharing about the team structure when you were setting up the motion at Hims, if you were to do it now and sort of make your What are your first 3 partnerships hires as, let's say, the first partnerships or BD person at a company? What are the most critical hires and sort of in what order?

You've got to get somebody who is senior enough that they can represent your business effectively and tell the story effectively, but not so senior that they don't feel they can do the work. That would be my first hire is probably a senior manager, director-level individual who has a big Rolodex, who isn't afraid to use it. The second hire would be an account manager. There's no question that once that first person lands a couple deals, it gets a little tricky. And that account manager also should be responsible for helping with creating collateral and helping with the narrative, helping with some of the more fundamental tasks to actually getting the apparatus going. And then the third hire is a deal-doer in a slightly different vertical. Eventually, what you would want to do in strategic partnerships is have one person who is overarching and owning the strategy, and then a couple people who own different sectors. So at Hims, for example, it would be somebody owning health systems, somebody owning retail partnerships, someone owning telemedicine relationships, someone owning celebrity partnerships. There are a lot of different buckets. That you would want to own, and I would start filling out each of those different sector heads as a result.

And then, do you build— would you build a pair of a hunter and a farmer on each vertical? And how closely are they working together as maybe you double down and do new things and bigger things with each partner?

You can often get scale with the account managers, so maybe it's more of 2 BD professionals to 1 account manager is a pretty common ratio. Depending on how big it is, you can certainly increase that ratio, go 1-to-1 or 1-to-many if you need. They do tend to work together when there's a handoff. So when a deal gets signed, it then gets handed off pretty naturally and seamlessly to an account manager. And at that moment, they're working pretty closely together. But by and large, the account manager can really run with her accounts once it's up and running. That business development person doesn't necessarily need to micromanage the relationship.

Sure. Nosy question about comp. How would you build comp for a BD team, and is any component variable?

It's really hard to do variable comp in BD unless there's a bit more of a sales motion around the job, because they're very lumpy. You are at the behest of other organizations to get things done in a way that you're not in sales. And priorities tend to get shifted at early stage companies within your own company. So I've had situations where we get to the finish line, a deal signed, and then it doesn't actually get implemented or set up until 2 quarters later because we at Hims weren't ready to do the deal. And I was able to sell it a little ahead of our ability to commit. So, it's a little hard to do variable comp. I think you can do MBO, managed by objective style comp, where instead of compensating based on revenue, you can have a small fraction of your comp as variable around meeting certain goals, whether it's number of deals that you get done, or number of pitches you perform, number of— I don't know, there are probably a couple other key— For the account manager, it's kind of interesting because, again, for sales, there's usually an upsell component, but for business development, that's not necessarily the case. So, you could have variable comp around NPS and satisfaction scores. And in fact, we had a component at HIMSS for the account managers I worked with, we had a component of NPS as variable comp.

Do you find NPS or partner NPS to be a reliable metric, or have you found anything else qualitative or quantitative that's really worked for you?

NPS is surprisingly important because you're kind of extending your business into somebody else's and vice versa.

Mm-hmm.

So the partner has to be really happy. For example, we did a deal with a big hospital system where we would refer patients into their system that we couldn't treat. And then vice versa, if there was something that we could treat more effectively, we had like little leaflets in their physical locations. And so when you're combining brands that way, You really want the partner to be happy with the way you're treating their patients and the way they're treating your patients. So I did find that NPS was a pretty decent proxy.

Switching hats for a sec. What are questions that you like to ask during interviews for your partnerships hires?

The first thing is, what partnership can you bring me in 90 days? I find— I mean, this may not be as relevant for people who work at really large companies that work a little bit more slowly. But for anybody who's looking at what you would call a startup, which I think is like sub-Series C, speed to execution is going to be very important. And it's the thing that tends to be a backlog in business development is there may be urgency, but there isn't always the same level of urgencies on both sides. And so, what I'm trying to test by asking you that question is, How deep is your Rolodex and how much do people trust you? How persuasive are you? And how do you think in terms of what's going to be beneficial to our business? So, what deal can you bring me is also subtly asking the question, what value is that going to supply to my business?

There's something you said earlier about finding that sweet spot of someone who is senior and can represent the business, but is also willing to roll up their sleeves as an independent contributor, is like spot on for how we're thinking about growing our partnerships team, how do you sort of suss out that, I don't know, that kind of ego or that kind of collaborativeness in an interview, like, contrived environment?

I tend to ask them to pitch. I want to make sure that they actually have the chops. Usually when I do interviews, there's a first fit interview, and either the second or the third conversation is, here is everything that you know about my business. Pick a potential partner, put 2 to 3 slides together, and actually pitch me as if you were, in this case, Hims or something else, to convince me. Usually those kinds of actions and those kind of motions show me if they're reticent to do it or they're like, oh, well, I would just hire someone to do that. That's a really big red flag. But if they can roll up their sleeves and actually make the deck, put together the collateral, and give the pitch, they probably have too much of an ego to actually do this. And I also tend to ask a question about, well, how would you build a team? And the right answer is, well, I would do the work first, and then I would build a team.

Yeah, I like that a lot. What about when you're hiring for account managers? What are some of your favorite questions there?

I usually ask them what is— like, to tell me about some business relationships that they've forged and how they've grown that relationship over time. How they quantify the growth of that relationship. I actually find that great account managers don't often come from account management. They can be customer success people. They can be folks who have held a variety of other ops-type jobs at companies. They don't necessarily need to know how to upsell or how to do proper account management. Sometimes they're even analytics people. But the 2 things I want to know from them are, What kind of relationships have you grown and how do you quantify growth? Because that tends to be pretty important.

Yeah, that's interesting. I'm curious how you think about leadership as you're growing your team, how to think about what to look for in a VP of BD versus bringing someone up from within. I understand you kind of came up from within. How do you think about that trade-off and just In general, what makes a great VP of BD?

Well, a great VP of BD can— there's a certain threshold at which you need to actually be the strategic mind behind why the partnerships are what they are. And that necessarily involves working very closely with the other stakeholders of the business. So whether that's the chief marketing officer, or at Hims, the VP of medical affairs, or the chief medical officer, working with working with the various organizational leaders to understand, well, what are the overarching goals of the business? And then how can we set up a strategy that will enable all of those people to be successful, whether it's product partnerships, revenue-generating partnerships, or otherwise? Somebody who's more junior is probably not going to have an eye toward that. They might be really strategic in terms of with whom they are partnering, but they might not necessarily have an eye toward Why is this part of the broader overarching goal of the business? And that's what makes a great VP of business development. They can look at a business strategy and then make a determinant as to what kinds of deals the team should go out. A director or maybe even a senior manager level will have the wherewithal to know, okay, if these are the kinds of partnerships that we want to do, then these are the sorts of partners we'd go after because they're this size or they're this stage, or they've got this kind of customer, they will know that. And then a more junior person, like a manager or an associate analyst type person, who is a deal hunter, would have some marching orders and go after certain specific clients. Ditto on the account management. You wouldn't really have a VP of account management, so it might not be that relevant, but a more senior account manager could Really easily own the handoff process and the onboarding process from soup to nuts. In fact, that person would be responsible for developing a standardized onboarding process for partners that then gets used in repetition as partners get onboarded. So that would be something I would look for in a more senior account manager hire.

Wearing the strategy hat of a VP of BD, When you're thinking about building that creative new partnership and then doubling down on that and turning that into more of a sales motion and doing what works, what you know works for the revenue and top-line goals of the business versus launching new experiments and new verticals, what are your frameworks for allocating resources to those new experiments? Do you timebox? Do you do sprints? Do you set a mini goal?

It's more around how success— we do usually one flagship partnership in a vertical. Regus is a good example. We did the flagship partnership, then we had a couple other small— we said, okay, this seems to be working because it hit certain revenue metrics, it hit certain percent penetration metrics that we were looking for, and certain eyeballs goals and stuff like that. And then we said, okay, let's try to replicate this with a few others. And we would time-bound it to how many deals can you get in a quarter? Do that, see how successful that is, and then actually pass it off. We did the same thing with our retail channel. So we did this big partnership with Target. That was a flagship. We had done a couple smaller— in the Regis case, we went to the big guy first and then we did smaller ones after. In the case of Target, we actually did a few smaller ones first to test, and then we went after the big daddy. And then we— PIMMS has been a big one. Very nicely hired somebody now who does that stuff full-time. But it tends to be a combination of hitting certain thresholds and then seeing how many— how much demand there is before you hire against the demand. But I try to hire quickly. I mean, the goal here is to move as fast as possible. And so if it seems like something is working, try to hire ahead of that because the worst thing you can happen is have a lot of balls in the air and then they drop or go to your competitor because you can't hit the— You don't have enough bandwidth to hit that.

When you talk about handing something off to keep moving, is that handing off to a sales team, handing off to an account manager? Like, there is the sort of philosophy that BD and partnerships should only be new ventures, should only be the strategic creative, and then others who say BD and mean B2B sales.

Yeah, I'm more of the former. I think business development is best used, at least Again, I'm a consumer person, so I think business development is usually best applied for experimenting with new things. You've got creative license and free rein to get it wrong if it doesn't work. And there are plenty of times we tried things that either didn't get off the ground or didn't work or didn't consummate, even though they seemed like good ideas. So I tend to think it's pretty good to hand off partnership work to sales when it makes the most sense, as opposed to— Trying to empire build within BD. But again, it depends on what the product is.

Yeah. Beyond BD and sales, so something that we're encountering as we scale is that we now have more leaders than ever in a purchasing position and in a major sort of B2B relationship management position. And I'm trying to inculcate a sort of partnerships mentality across the entire team. So, everything is negotiable. And also, when we're talking to someone, That we'd want to be strategically aligned with. Let's not be a customer or have them be a customer, but let's really think about how to long-term strategically align our goals.

Yep.

What have you found works in sort of getting everyone to think like business development people and in training sort of a whole team to wear that hat?

It's an interesting one. Admittedly, I don't have a great answer because I think you I think you answered that really effectively. I like what you said about everything is negotiable, because one thing we haven't really talked about yet is deal structure. Part of the beauty of business development versus certain other structured go-to-market roles, whether it's sales or marketing, is there's no set structure.

Right.

And so what I tend to advise people who are either in this capacity or who work for me is, Come in with your own design of how you would buy this thing. Maybe it's not, I give you money and you give me a product, or, I give you money and you give me a service, but maybe there's a little bit more of a tit for tat, or maybe we're exchanging more of a service for a service as opposed to dollars for service. So thinking really— encouraging people to think very creatively about deal structure. Also, it doesn't necessarily have to be One for one, you can give up 2 things to receive one greater thing. So, for example, maybe you're combining your logo and some— you're negotiating and you'll say, well, you can put your logo on my site and you can also do some press and social media with us, and in return we get your product, as opposed to doing a rev share or solely a rev share.

And that tends to be pretty effective if you're trying to scale your mindset beyond a dollar for Tactically, how do you go about training people outside of your own team to think in that way without then spreading your BD team resources really thin? They don't need to be in every room, in every Zoom room, in every conversation to make that kind of thing happen. How do you do that training?

Well, it's definitely got to come from the top down, so you have to have a C-level executive who also ascribes to that mindset and wants to indoctrinate the rest of the team about it. But generally speaking, I think this actually is a holdover from my Biz Ops days. My goal at HIMSS was to spend lots of time with the org leaders and spend time with people on their team, trying to understand their pain points and their issues, and in turn, Give them the keys to that kingdom. So, explain to them, well, you're designing this kind of product, maybe you're having this clash with somebody, maybe you want to align in more of a way to partner than in a transactional kind of relationship. But a lot of it is just personal professional development type work.

Circling back to deal structure, obviously, it varies so much from company to company and product to product, but do you have sort of first principles or a method for writing first principles when you're coming into a new go-to-market motion for what deal structure needs to look like? Yeah.

I mean, I tend to try to look and see who has done this prior to me and how has it been successful. So I actually run a business development roundtable, which is a group of BD professionals Mostly in consumer, mostly in health and wellness. And I try to understand, well, you did this kind of deal. How did you structure it? How did it work? My first principles are try not to exchange money where money is not required. So try to evenly match the services that you are both doing, and maybe aligning those 2 things will drive increased value, exponentially increased value. So I try not to come to the table with any kind of I think that you have to try before you buy. And generally speaking, you had asked a question before about how do you deal if you're the small player with some of the larger players? If you lead with money, a lot of times they'll take you for a ride because they'll look at some of these startups and say, well, you're decently capitalized. You can pay us for this privilege. And oftentimes, The two sides are not actually aligned in their incentives to achieve the same outcome. And so I tend to find that incentive alignment is the most important thing as it pertains to these kinds of relationships, à la what we were just talking about. My first principle is, let's talk about what the value is to both of us before talking about any money actually exchanging hands.

I have another question as not a Twitter superuser. I know you've talked in other podcasts about how Twitter has been instrumental in your angel investing. Do you have commandments for Twitter usage as a partnerships or BD person?

Yeah, I think Twitter has been an amazing resource for just asking, like, ask and they will come kind of requests. And so I often found that I would make these crazy asks on Twitter and people would show up. I would say, hey, does anybody know someone? For a time, we were looking at doing COVID testing partnerships at the government level. We ended up not wanting to pursue those, but I would tweet like, hey, does somebody know a person who works in X state? And I would often get responses. So, I think there's a lot of a shoot-your-shot kind of energy that that I espouse on Twitter. But I also think that having a personal brand can be pretty important for partnerships. There were times when people would say, oh yeah, they would respond to my email because they would say, I know about you on Twitter. I've followed you on Twitter and I know what you stand for, or you yourself have this air of credibility, even if I don't know what the company you work for is. So I use Twitter as a personal branding tool.

That personal motto, the, like, you don't get what you don't ask for mantra. What is— this is actually a question that I ask in interviews often. What is, like, the craziest thing you've asked for and actually gotten? Or what is something, maybe wearing both a, like, partnerships hat and then just, like, a general life hat, what's something you asked for, did not expect to get, and then it just happened?

Yeah. I mean, probably the fundraise for my new company came about by me just shooting my shot. So that's probably the craziest thing that I have asked and also received. You know, maybe on a personal level, I was the one who asked my husband out for a coffee when I first— when we first met, because I thought he was attractive. So, you know, I shot my shot there for sure. But Generally speaking, you know, it's funny when I specifically for business development type deals, when people come in and they say, yeah, like we'll do this, but it's going to be a 20/80 split or something. And I'm like, no, it's not actually. It's going to be this other lopsided thing trying to anchor really high. And that kind of negotiation tends to be more effective than I had ever thought.

Speaking of your new company, I think of partnerships and BD as really good CEO training. Now that you are stepping into the founder CEO seat, would you agree?

Yeah, I'll tell you why I think partnerships is a great CEO, entrepreneurial CEO training ground. For starters, it's an externally facing role, and you're kind of on your own a lot of the time. You do as much work externally as you do internally. By being the— especially when you're early in a business, by being the face of a company, you get a lot of practice pitching, selling the story and the narrative, convincing other people to work with you in ways that seem like they defy gravity, and that's really exciting. But you have a lot of ownership in that. You also have a lot of ownership in the strategy. They tend to be pretty small teams. You have a lot of leadership visibility, so you understand how different parts of the business function. And a lot of times with partnerships, you're trying to cobble together It's a pretty interdisciplinary role, and so you're trying to cobble together lots of different functions to do what it is you want to accomplish. The other thing is that you tend to get a pretty good perch for what's out there in the market that's like your business. A lot of people are reaching out to you about your company and say, hey, we're similar for this reason or that reason, and so I tend to find that business development people have a really sturdy understanding of the market landscape as it pertains to their area or their domain expertise.

Is there anything that you wish you had emphasized for your own learning when you were in a BD leadership role now? Like, oh, I wish I'd added that to my toolkit when I was at Hims& Hers, and now I need to learn it now.

Yeah. I mean, definitely. There are definitely areas of Personal weakness that I just don't really know. Most of my relationships were revenue-driven and not product-driven, and I don't feel like I have a great grasp on product. So I guess I wish I had done some more product-level partnerships or gotten more in the weeds of understanding how certain product decisions got made, because I think that is important as a CEO. It's a motion that... you don't necessarily really get unless you have an opportunity to do so. But I really think, I mean, Hims was remarkable about being a training ground for entrepreneurship. And they were really supportive of me in this leap. I think there was a sentiment that this was a really natural next step. So I feel very grateful for the training that they provided to me.

That's awesome. I want to segue into asking you for some advice for how we should be thinking about BD at On Deck or even Just the questions that you think we should be asking ourselves. We're lucky to have you, of course, as an investor. But to sort of set the frame for the audience, BD is kind of interesting at On Deck because we work with companies in different ways, or we can. So we kind of, if you think of us as having 3 business lines in the context of working with potential companies, one of them is we have this startup accelerator. Many companies that are trying to sell to startups are trying to get in front of our fellows. That's one angle. The other angle is we do professional development for tech employees. And so, you know, we're the same companies that are trying to get in front of our founders, we're also trying to get in front of their employees and say, hey, become a better product manager or BD person or marketing person or whatever, marketer. And then the last way, of course, is hiring. We, you know, companies, we're trying to get in front of companies and saying, hey, we have all these great Employees are great people who are in between things and looking for their next thing. And so it's a little bit strange to say, hey, Hims or any company, here are the 3 ways we can work with you. One, if you want to sell to our founders, we can make that. 2, your employees might need some professional development. And then 3, also, you might want to hire people, but also we'll protect your employees and make sure they're happy at Hims. What is your kind of advice or high level?

How should we be thinking about Sounds to me like you could have a massive BD apparatus. I would probably start with one of those— I would either start with one of those areas and then land and expand, as they say. So build out, okay, now we've talked about the professional development, let's also talk about talent. You're probably hiring. Let's layer that in. I would probably start with one of those areas just to test. The other way you can approach it is by starting with a streamlined cohort of customers or partners you're going after and try to do everything with that subset and then expand. Because what you want to make sure you're doing is you're finding what works for these businesses and you may unearth additional ancillary revenue streams or partnership streams that you hadn't previously considered. So in the early days, getting a couple really key partners who will learn and grow with you will be just as valuable to you as it is to them. I would probably hire a VP of business development who understands the strategy and how all of these things coalesce and can help you get the first 5 partners in this capacity so that you can learn from those 5. And then after that, I would probably hire— you could either structure it by company size. So every single SMB is going to have these needs, every single mid-sized company is going to need these things, and every single enterprise is going to need those things. Or depending on how successful this is, you can have people who are really, really focused on the vertical of hiring or really focused on the vertical of professional development. There are nuggets in there that you would probably want to tease out from your first 5 partners, and then I would hire against those roles.

I have a follow-up here. So we're at a point where we have something like 50 to 60 deep partnerships, and what we've found thus far is that segmenting or verticalizing based on type of partner, and what, like, the type of organization and the various ways that we could wind up working together, has been most meaningful to them, to us, and to our fellows, who are really like the reason behind all of our partnerships. The other thing we found, though, is that this often puts a huge weight on the sort of partner success or account management function, because they're the ones in the weeds with the partner discovering all this, and then having the face time to pitch or find new opportunities to work together. So, like, to what extent does that Change the way we should be hiring account managers, or change the relationship between, like, the account managers and, you know, the dealmakers, so that it's more of a continuous cycle or relationship?

Here's how I'd probably think about it. The account executive, or the business development professional, who's actually having the relationship with the partner, should assess early on, what does this partner really need right now? And then what will this partner need in 6 months or a year that we can offer to them. It should probably then get passed down to certain account management specialists who specialize in each of the different segments that you described. So, you have an account manager whose sole job is the professional development skills. And so, having this symbiosis with businesses who want to send their employees through On Deck for some of your specialty fellowships, like the finance fellowship, or the healthcare fellowship, or whatever. Then you can have an account manager who specializes in the hiring aspect of these relationships, or some of the other things that you're trying to accomplish. And by specializing that person, then the account executive can hand it off to an account manager who who can uniquely address the customer's problems, while also maintaining a relationship so that if they then need to move into a different part of the funnel, they can.

Yeah. We are finding ourselves with this sort of new opportunity around the ODX Accelerator to build partnerships with major late-stage or public now startups that are co-investing with us in startups of— early-stage startups of a particular vertical and who have a large R&D or dry powder motion. And this is now a much more sophisticated and high-stakes partnership than ever. It looks like you already have gears turning or thoughts on that. I guess, high level, what are your first thoughts? Any advice?

Yeah. So the venture level, the venture-scale partnerships that I am familiar with, what you're building, require a very different level of accountability. I mean, you're taking tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars from these businesses, and the expectation is there will be a lot of visibility between these 2 organizations. There will be a lot of passing things back and forth between these 2, and then there will be a lot of day-to-day interaction between these 2 organizations. So, on balance, you probably need more than one account manager for that relationship. You probably want a few people. who are dedicated and they will probably have a few people who are equally dedicated and maybe those people sit together or have weekly syncs or whatever. I think that's pretty critical. It also depends on how many of these you want to do. My thinking is you probably want to do a bunch of these, but not thousands of them. I have no idea. That might just be unruly for you to manage. And so thinking about what's Who are going to be the most high-leverage partners and staffing accordingly so that these people feel really taken care of. But having a dedicated business development professional to each of these who's at a manager-director level, who's not an account manager, may also be pretty beneficial because you may want to raise a second fund with these people. do additional kinds of investing with them.

One of our other current expansion opportunities is international. So our fellows and founders are coming from all over the world. The bench of partners we have supporting our US or North America-based fellows now needs to be replicated in every geo where we have a meaningful presence. And we are finding just a completely different landscape in every new market or new geography we're entering. How do you sort of think about getting quickly up to speed on the partnerships or BD dynamics in a new geography, assuming you have the resources, as we do, of like a local regional GM?

Yeah, I was going to say, I think having someone with boots on the ground is critical because there are always nuances in markets that you don't understand. I actually spent a lot of time doing international market expansion at Twitter, and we found that having a local person who was the general manager or who was like the primary resource could then farm out those kinds of relationships and really own them. So I'm a big fan of hiring in-country, in-market, making sure that there's visibility and roll-up into wherever the headquarters is, but having boots on the ground is really critical. You'll also find, I mean, some of the partnerships that you guys have are like access to for founders to certain resources that help them scale their business, like Stripe Atlas credits and the like. And sometimes that scales, sometimes you could take the US-based business and just say, hey, now we're going to turn this on internationally, but oftentimes it doesn't. And so having someone locally who understands the nuances, which is why you also have to be a little careful about how many markets you open at any given time.

Cool.

I don't know, this has been a great episode. Thanks so much for joining us.

Yeah, I hope this was— I hope this answered all your questions. And if people have partnerships questions, they're welcome to reach out to me on Twitter @ellenjaydesilva.

Awesome.

Perfect.

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.