Athlete to Entrepreneur: PartnerStack Founder's Winning Mindset | Bryan Jones CEO PartnerStack

Everybody goes in thinking, you know, they need to go in and work with Deloitte. They need to go partner with Accenture. That's going to be the thing that unlocks everything. They have like all the biggest customers. And this is the trap that exists inside of partnerships today. If you have a low ACV, you know, the partner types that you need to work with are very different than if you have a high ACV. And I like to say we're in the business of saving time because so many of those relationships, like everyone puts months worth of work into it. There's, there's legal, there's cost, like It's so challenging to set up. You go into the board meeting, everyone throws high fives, and it's the last you ever hear about it. And what matters more is that you're really deliberate in determining who wants to work with you. And that starts with collecting data.

Welcome to the Startup CEO Show. I'm your host, Mark MacLeod. In this episode, I sit down with Bryn Jones, co-founder and CEO of Partnerstack. Bryn's company is about to celebrate their 10th anniversary. They help companies like yours succeed and grow revenue through the partner channel. Bryn's a former competitive athlete. He was a competitive swimmer. And so we talk about that background and how it set him up for success as an entrepreneur. His company began in YC, and we talked about that kind of important foundation. Chances are every single person listening or watching this episode grows through partners. And so we spend a bunch of time going through best practices on what they've learned there. Bryn's also creating his own category. Many of you might be doing the same thing. So we talk about that and you're gonna wanna listen to the end 'cause we end actually ended up with a really important discussion around how to stay on top of success, you know, keeping up with massive growth and, and the importance of following your intuition, which was a hard one lesson for Bryn. So I really hope you tune in and I hope you subscribe for future episodes. Thank you. Bryn, welcome to the Startup CEO Show. It's a true pleasure to have you here. How are you doing today?

Good, Mark. Thank you for having me. Uh, thanks. I really appreciate you inviting me in.

Yeah, no, it's a real pleasure. Bryn and I are up in the frozen north, AKA Canada. We're recording this in mid-April, and for anyone who's watching, I just had the heater on in my room. I've got like a fricking thick sweater. I'm wearing a scarf. I've got a dog on my lap to keep me warm, like It's ridiculous. Canada has many great strengths, but its weather at the moment is, uh, is not one of them. Anyway, that's not why we're here.

You're not Canadian without that, uh, without that April snowfall.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Um, hey Bryn, for, for those who don't know, just maybe just take a second and tell folks what PartnerStack does.

Yeah, so PartnerStack, we enable B2B companies to go to market through partnerships. We think partnerships is one of the most efficient go-to-market channels that are out there. And if you look at the biggest and best companies, whether they be Shopify or HubSpot, they all have an incredible partner channel and it's core to their strategy and it's core to their strategy early days. And so what PartnerSec does is we enable go-to-market teams to go to market more efficiently in a more scalable way. We say that we're ultimately changing the way the world sells software and we're, we're pretty excited about our progress in achieving that mission.

So I definitely, I wanna spend a bunch of time unpacking kind of the space that you're in and how, what you've learned about best practices for to go, going to market and kind of working with partners. But let's take a step back and, and talk about you. You know, I often tell my CEOs that, you know, you're mental athletes. You have, I use that athlete analogy all the time, right? You know, especially those who've raised lots of capital, like your expectations on your shoulders are the same as on professional athletes. And you look at an athlete and You know, they surround themselves with whatever they need to be at their peak. Now, you literally were a competitive athlete before becoming an entrepreneur, so I'd love it if you could tell folks about that and how that background kind of set you up for success in this, in this kind of new world.

I always say that I'm an athlete turned entrepreneur. I still think everything that I learned in athletics, I apply in everyday life and in business and in my personal life. I was a member of Canada's national swim team and I thought my future was going to the Olympics. Everything I was doing was pointed at going to the Olympics and I had a real shot at it. And then I got sick, I got injured. And when I got injured, I was forced to deal with retirement. And you're not supposed to retire when you're in your early 20s. It's a very weird thing to go through. And I realized my coach had always talked to me about how, you know, being an athlete was about learning, you know, the learning to fall in love with the process. And if you learn how to fall in love with the process, you could apply it in so many different areas of life. And so my retirement in my early 20s, I leaned into that as much as possible and realized that when I was in graduate school, subsequent to retiring, I fell in love with technology. Everything that I got in sport, the competition, the, you know, ability to work with incredibly capable people that push you was available and made available to me in building a business and specifically inside of technology. So I fell in love with building because I thought that building something in many ways as athletes, what you do, especially in swimming, is you build a race. You have this like foundation of training that you create. You surround yourself with support staff that help you optimize what's there. You leverage technology to figure out how to, you know, break this very complex problem down, you know, inch by inch and perfect it. And I realized that same opportunity existed in building a business. And the most important part of all that beyond like the falling in love with the process was understanding that you needed to apply the same resilience you had in your athletic career to, you know, business. Because the only thing that I knew to be true was that there were challenges to be ahead. And I think that, you know, the lessons I took from sport I've applied them and I've been fortunate to find people around me who also embrace that type of methodology and it's really unlocked a lot of opportunity for me.

It's amazing. Did you, I'm guessing your 20s were some time ago, so you didn't overlap with like the Michael Phelps of the world, did you?

I did actually. Yeah, it was, swimming was really exciting. So when I was on the national team, it was, in 2008 to 2010, and Michael Phelps set all of his records in 2008. And at the time, I was going to meets with Michael Phelps, and I got to watch him and learn about what it— what was required to be an athlete. Now, I was nowhere near as good as Michael Phelps, and he is way better, I will say, than any medal could possibly— anybody could imagine outside of the sport of swimming. But to see that level of excellence and to see him come back year after year and try to improve on it, even after the fact, after he had set all of his records, was a really special moment. And I'm happy I was able to witness some of it.

I was never a competitive athlete. In fact, I was a fat fuck as a kid. You can believe that. In a way, what I do now when I I weigh the same now as I did when I was 11. But in my teens, I studied karate for 6 years and what I got out of that was just discipline, right? And like now I'm a yoga teacher, not quitting coaching, obviously this is just a passion on the side, but like every day I practice, like I live that, like it's not I don't just teach people how to do it. I live it. And I can only imagine to get to the level that you did, that you just must have a tremendous amount of self-discipline. Did that go away or do you feel like that's just beat into you now? It's just part of your DNA.

I feel like the most disciplined people believe that they don't have discipline. And because that's how you are most critical. And it's really challenging to find that balance. Um, um, but it doesn't go away. Uh, and if you can embrace it and apply it and learn how to apply that to, to so many things, whether it be work, you know, your, your career, um, uh, your craft, uh, or, you know, your personal life, whether it be as a, as a partner or as a parent or as a friend, um, you know, you you learn so much there. And, you know, you realize how much of it is just about being deliberate. I remember my father asking me when I was 13 years old, you know, we would swim 9 times a week. We would do between 5 to 6 kilometers every single session. And he asked, what do you think about when you're swimming?

That's all.

That's like so many strokes roughly in one lap. You're taking anywhere between 12 to 14 strokes. You know, you're doing more than 200 laps every single session. And I remember telling him, because it didn't seem weird to me, I said, I just think about every single stroke.

So you're just so present, literally stroke by stroke by stroke. Yeah. Wow.

And so you can apply that to whatever you go in and do. You can actually find the joy in it. And that's the important piece is getting curious and that being an exciting thing. And if you can get curious and you can fall in love with the process versus the result, you know, you can do a lot.

I love that so much. So I'm a CrossFit— we call ourselves athletes now, but I've been doing CrossFit, it was my 5th year. And that's literally the motto of CrossFit, trust the process, right? It's like, show up, put the reps in, like follow, don't be attached to the outcome, just like keep perfecting technique. Like we were doing cleans today and it's not about having the biggest biceps. It's actually about generating the most power in the most efficient way and magically the barbell's up, you know? So it's, it's pretty cool.

Exactly. It's very satisfying. And I mean, you're far more of an athlete than I am today. That's for sure.

Do you, so, uh, we're gonna move on from, from this, but like, I do tell all of my CEOs that health and fitness is actually the foundation of your performance as a CEO, right? Like today's productivity began last night when you went to sleep. And so I'm curious, like what role health and fit— now you're a father of a young child, as we were talking about before, and like that can throw everything out the window, but like, do you prioritize health and fitness today? Do you think about it? Just tell us about that.

Yeah, I absolutely prioritize health and fitness. What I've also realized is that health and fitness can be different for different stages and moments of your life. You know, sometimes if you're a new parent, it is quite literally like maybe that walk to work is, is, is, is good as it's going to get. But what matters is, can you get back to that centered balance place where you are at your best? And can you not beat yourself up when you miss it? And I find that that's where there's a lot of drop-off. But I've been fortunate that I've always been able to get back to what makes me feel right. Because when I am active and I am living a healthy lifestyle, I can deal with the ups and downs. And honestly, the ups can be more challenging than the downs.

I've had a couple of founders from Y Combinator on here, and I'm always fascinated by YC because, well, of its track record of producing unicorns and how it makes all investors suspend disbelief and abandon all of their pre-money valuation disciplines and give these like, I don't know, 12-week-old companies what I consider to be bonkers valuations. I'd love to know, yeah, what, tell us about your experience with YC and then in particular your decision, like I've had Michael Litt from Vidyard on here and like you, he also moved back to Canada to build. So I'm just curious about that decision as well.

Yeah, so, you know, I did not graduate way back in 2011 when I graduated with a degree in technology and the Canadian ecosystem, because we were in London at the time, moved to trial shortly thereafter. Was still emerging, right? You know, Shopify didn't go public until after 2015, and that's when we founded Partnerstack. And so the decision to go to YC was actually a necessity. And the reason it was a necessity is we had applied to every single business incubator up and down all of— up and down the East Coast and across all North America. And YC was the only one that accepted us.

Wow. I would argue like they have the highest bar and the most inbounds. Yeah.

We, we, we thought it was a good, I mean, everybody has their YC story about being accepted. Um, our, our YC story was we didn't get the call until midnight on that day. Uh, and when they, when, when Kevin Hale, uh, picked up the phone call to, to let us know, uh, my first reaction was what took you so long? Um, uh, and, and, uh, but it just, it just came out. We were getting ready to leave for, uh, on our, on our plane the next morning. And then the second reaction was, why? And Kevin said, we only invest in companies we believe can be those unicorn companies. And it's this balance of super ambitious, a little bit of, you know, being naive and having a unique insight on a market. And the combination of those three things plus a great team, you know, we want to, we want to take that bet. Um, and, and that was our, our welcome to the program. Um, the, the best part about YC was the unstructured nature of YC, right? What YC is, and it's a lot of things, um, but at its core, it's a network. Uh, it's a network of ambitious people that are thinking about the world differently and believe they can shape it. Um, those ambitious people aren't They're not waiting on anybody. They're not waiting on anything. They're not dependent on what's there. They are operating on their own. And YC supports that approach. So it's a very unstructured program, but the things that they are structured on, they are incredibly structured on. And so even the interview process, it's 10 minutes. They make a decision. Are you serious?

10 minutes?

Yeah, it's 10 minutes. It's, and I'm sure it's changed since 2015, But you apply, once you apply, they invite you down, they actually pay for you to fly down, which is, you know, can be prohibitive for many, many entrepreneurs. You meet with them and approximately, there's no measures, but they let in about 1 in 3 that they interviewed. But the interview is 10 minutes and it's pretty much restating exactly what was in your application and being tested in a few areas. And then that evening they call and inform you that you've been accepted and they would like to to invest in you. That's the process we went through. And then we just met every 2 weeks with a group of entrepreneurs who are trying to build, and we learned through them. We saw people that had built and sold companies for hundreds of millions of dollars that were in our group that had started something new. And we realized that, you know, there's no secret to any of this stuff. There's just a lot of quite frankly, pain that is tied to it and unknowns and an ability to operate and move forward and build through those unknowns. And then the last thing that YC does is they create a market. That's Demo Day. And by creating a market, they give you an opportunity to fundraise very efficiently. We made the decision to come back to Toronto because after a conversation we had with one of the partners there, we realized that in order to build a very meaningful company, it was going to take a minimum of 10 years. And, you know, a lot of people go places for short periods of time with the thought of, oh, you know, we, we could build something quick, sexy, and flip it. We realized that we wanted to build something meaningful and that was going to take a minimum of 10 years. And for us, in order to be successful on that journey, we wanted to be close to our families. That was an important thing for us. And so returning to Canada, as much as I would love to say that it was all Canadian pride, it was much more to do with our families were here and we did like our community and we've been so fortunate to connect with entrepreneurs and operators in the space that, and seen the whole community evolve. But as soon as we realized that and accepted that a company was going to take 10 years to build if it was going to be meaningful. We— it was— became very important for us to be near our families.

Yeah, I mean, if you read TechCrunch too much, you think you can build and flip, and it happens, but it's rare. And those big outcomes are even rarer, right?

Exactly. It was— it was— that was the best piece of advice that YC provided to us. When we came back to Canada, at the time we had term sheets, um, in the US, and then we made the decision to, to walk away from millions of dollars worth of investment because part of the requirement was to be in the US. And so it was unique then. It's not as unique now, right? Like the Canadian market has evolved so much. Capital not as restricted in borders. The pandemic really changed that, but we're very happy that we're Canadian-based.

And so this 10-year thing, not very good with numbers, but my understanding is you're about to finish your 10th year, or maybe you just have. Is that true?

That's correct.

Yeah.

In the next couple months, we'll celebrate 10 years since being incorporated. Uh, and, um, yeah, it's been, it's been a crazy journey.

Wild. Can you see the next 10?

Yeah, the truth is when we started, like, I didn't think I'd be working on partnerships 10 years later. Um, anybody that does say that, uh, especially their first go around, um, is naive. And we were certainly naive, which is a superpower, right? Because when you don't know, it makes you do things that no one else otherwise would have. And we always told, you know, investors way back in the day, they'd always ask, well, what happens if, you know, so-and-so comes along and tries to buy you early? Like, why aren't you going to sell? And the answer we provided then, it was true. I just didn't know how true it was, which is, you know, I think partnerships is an incredibly complex problem. And if I can fall in love with the problem, you know, the same way as I fell in love with the process tied to athletics, It's a problem I can continue to solve forever because it's so complicated. It applies to more than just, you know, B2B SaaS companies. There's, it's a dynamic that exists in markets and this is something we could build forever. It used to be something I said, it's now something that I absolutely believe.

Are you still taking your own meeting notes? Let me tell you about an AI tool that I'm using to to take meeting notes for me. It's called Fellow. It's an AI meeting assistant. It takes human-level AI notes, it tracks my action items and decisions, and keeps everything in one place. Built with security and privacy at its core, Fellow is the only AI meeting assistant that leaders trust to capture meeting notes and recordings while keeping your data safe. Thousands of organizations are consolidating tools and relying on Fellow to capture their meetings. The team at Fellow is so confident that you'll love it They're offering an insane deal to Startup CEO listeners: 90 days of unlimited AI-powered note-taking and recording completely free. Visit fellow.app/CEO to sign up today and experience the AI meeting assistant trusted by leaders everywhere. I think falling in love with the problem is actually the only enduring source of motivation, right? If you fall in love with the market, it's a big market. Well, money is just not an enduring source of motivation. Maybe you've taken some secondary along the way. I don't need to know, it's none of my business, but like if you did, you probably felt happier for 10 minutes and then got onto the rest of your life, right? So money isn't the thing. You could fall in love with your problem, but then you end up just having a, I'm sorry, with your product, like your solution, but then you just end up having this closed mind. You're just evangelizing, look at my widget, it's so amazing. Why don't you buy my widget? It's falling in love with the problem that keeps you going. And so the CEOs that you admire the most, many of whom have gone through YC, are in love with the problem.

Yeah. And, and, and then if you fall in love with the culture and team that you have, that is like the cherry on top because then you have a group of people that are on a journey with you that are solving that problem, that provide that different perspective. And, and, and that's one of the things that I am You know, most proud about at PartnerStack is not only on the founder side, but some of our earliest employees are still here solving this problem that are so committed to it. And it's really inspiring. Um, and it's inspiring to see the impact of that because it's not just navel gazing like it is in the early days of starting a company. Uh, it's, it's seeing the, the actual impact of, of, of the change.

So let's move on and talk about partnering. It's fair to say every CEO who's listening needs to partner. And, uh, you know, I've run biz dev a couple of times back in my operating days. Last time was at FreshBooks where I ran finance, biz dev, and corp dev. And my observation about partnering is we all do it. Almost every individual partnership. Fails to meet its on-paper potential, but kind of, you still need to do them. And any company that has kind of gone all the way has not done that strictly on a direct basis. They've had to build partnerships and channels. What's your take? Like, yeah, what's the state of the union, the good, the bad, and the ugly of partnering?

I think that partnerships often work in spite of themselves. Um, uh, uh, right? Like the, the, the likelihood of doing something for the first time, uh, and it being successful is, is very, very challenging. The likelihood of now two parties trying to be aligned to a single goal and for there to be success, like, I think that there's a lot of credit taken in partnerships. Um, when the reality is like the partnership led to a really great success in spite of itself. I've heard stories of some very large founder CEOs at some of the most successful technology companies we know of who champion partnerships, who, if you go back to the people that were building that partnership team in the early days, I know one specific case where the CEO came in and told the partnership team that they wanted to fire them for 4 straight years. Uh, um, and, and, um, and, and then on, on the 5th year, they said it was the biggest mistake they ever made. I can say that because, you know, PartnerStack enables growth through partnerships. We underinvested in our own partner program. Uh, and our, and our team did the exact same thing to me, like exact same type of conversations. So what I've learned though in partnerships is in order to build a successful partnership, one, it takes time, two, it takes alignment, and three, it requires you to put your partner first. Because if two partners put each other first and you have the alignment and know what the timeline's going to be, it is far more likely things will be successful. And we got that first principle, from, from the VP of partnerships at Shopify way back in 2015. We said like, what, what, what made Shopify's partner program so successful? The time I think was being managed by like 65 people and it was all manual. And he said, we just put our partners first. And it was like a passing comment. Um, and, and it turns out it was like very true. Uh, most people treat partnerships very transactional. And they cannot be. Of course, commerce, the ability to grow, make money, provide value is the core to all partnerships. But that's not how they start. They start with a simple question of like, what can I do to help you? And what can you do to help me? And if there's alignment on that, it's not about driving revenue. It's about, you know, providing value. And so in technology, if you think of, you know, two technology companies trying to work together, Can it be as simple as, you know, let me tell you about what exists in my pipeline. Let's compare what exists in your pipeline. You know, do we have the same type of ACV? You have to bring a level of transparency and curiosity to a partnership to make it successful. And you have to know it is very unlikely that you're going to flip a switch and things are going to drive revenue like crazy. CEOs are, you know, no CRO would ever say a new sales team that they're going to bring on is going to perform at 100%, 90%, or 180 days in, right? Like go-to-market motions take years to build and perfect. For some reason, we as executives and boards are very naive as it comes to partnerships. We think it's a lot like ad spend. Uh, and you're not buying media, right? Um, you're developing relationships with people and more often than not, those people have no financial incentive to work with you. And so you have to overcome that. And so if that, that's why going back to the, the, the, the first principle of like, in order to build a successful partnership, you need to put your partner first. That's what it comes down to. And it, it, it sounds very, you know, airy-fairy hand-wavy, but it is core to making something like this successful.

I love it. I mean, I think that recipe, I forgot you had like 3 steps, the last of which was put your partner first, is probably like the key to building an enduring marriage or any important relationship, right? So not just a business partnership and knowing Shopify reasonably well, I feel like that pithy little insight was the result of some rigorous first principles debate, just like, let's just reduce down to like the core insight, you know?

Yeah, it was the, the, the stories that we heard from that VP of partnerships of how that program was built and, and the first principle thinking that that executive team took after it was not working after 12 months. And, and to see where it is today and that, you know, partnerships means so, so much more. It's really an ecosystem now at, at, at Shopify. But very impressive and, you know, in many ways like, you know, Partnerstack exists because of Shopify, because of those lessons and because of, you know, how they were great partners in the community for us.

I remember Harley saying years ago, and I'm sure it's still true, that the GMV of the ecosystem was bigger than Shopify's GMV.

Yeah. Yeah.

Which is pretty wild to think of.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, I think that, um, at, at HubSpot, it's, uh, for every $1 that HubSpot earns, the ecosystem earns 5 or 3 or, or something like that. And I know that's true inside of Salesforce and Shopify as well.

Sure. So without, uh, turning this into an infomercial, what does Partnerstack actually do in this case? Like where do you fit in and yeah, what's the kind of the specific value or impact that you provide?

We're a SaaS-enabled network, so we sell to marketers or partnership leaders and we give them a source of truth, a portal. They install that portal on their landing page and effectively they hang a sign on their landing page that says we're open to business, for business with partners. We give them all the marketing automation, sales enablement, tool and technology that, that, that sits behind there. And they charge, we, we charge a monthly fee for that. But in addition to that, we connect them to an ecosystem of partners. What's unique about PartnerStack is our business model is more like that of LinkedIn than it is like Salesforce. We really believe, you know, that putting partners first means not forcing partners to log into 8 different portals instead of standardizing the way they have the opportunity to work with, with B2B companies. And in so in standardizing that workflow on both the B2B vendor side as well as on the partner side, it gives you the capacity to not only give the software to power these partner programs, but it enables you to connect them to a broader network of partners. Um, and, and, and that's really, really powerful. Um, and, and that network has taken a long time to foster. Networks are, you know, so complicated., in, in how you balance the supply and demand of what's there. And when we were back in YC in summer 2015, we had the opportunity to meet with Sam Altman, and Sam said, it's going to take you a long time. Um, uh, he's like, you know, it took LinkedIn a long time. It's going to take you a long time.

Sure did. I remember the graph. It was flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, and then boom, just like—

yeah. And Well, I didn't believe him. And he was right. And it's taken us a while for that network to move from vision to reality, but that reality started to come into play a couple years ago. And I'm really proud that we never deviated from the vision of making it a network. Very easy for us in the early days just to chase revenue. But we were fortunate enough to work with great investors and board members like Janet Bannister, who really challenged us to stay on the path that we were on and to complete the vision. So it's been a lot of fun.

You know, I remember back in my operating days, and of course we're trying to partner with big companies. I remember the frustration all the time. Like, if I could just get access to their sales reps, if I could just comp their sales reps., but like that partner CEO wants the sales rep selling their stuff, not selling your stuff. And then it's like hard enough to sell your own stuff. Uh, so like, have you been able to figure out a set of best practices or just how companies can leverage these partnerships to accelerate revenue?

It comes down to building what we call like an ideal partner profile.

Mm-hmm.

So every customer, every company is unique, right? If you have a low ACV, you know, the partner types that you need to work with are very different than if you have a high ACV. And this is the trap that exists inside of partnerships today. Everybody goes in thinking, you know, they need to go in and work with, you know, Deloitte, they need to go partner with Accenture. That's going to be the thing that unlocks everything. They have like all the biggest customers. And I like to say we're in the business of saving time, um, because so many of those relationships, like, everyone puts months worth of work into it. There's, there's legal, there's cost, like, it, it's, it's so challenging to set up. You go into the board meeting, everyone throws high fives, and it's the last you ever hear about it. Uh, and what matters more is that you're really deliberate in determining who wants to work with you. And that starts with collecting data, right? Hang that sign on your landing page. That says like, we're open to partner. Tell us a little bit about you. Tell us how you want to partner with us. That's the way you would do, you know, media buying. It's a way that you would do customer discovery and you refine who that ideal partner persona is. And what we found is that they are often not the person the CEO wants them to be. If the CEO is dictating who the partner is, it is very likely they will fail. If the CEO listens to who wants to partner with them, and if the partner managers are able to make that case, hey, you know, instead of working with Accenture, there's this single shop in Singapore, um, one person running it, and they're going to drive a lot more revenue for us right now. Um, that might not be what people want to hear, but if you're open to listening, and that's the, the same intent that people bring to listening to their customers, if you, if you bring that intent to listen to your partners, you will learn who you should work with. And so how do you do that? Um, you figure out, you know, how big is the partnership firm that you're working with? Um, uh, how many employees are there? Who do they service as customers? Um, and do they partner with anybody today in a successful way? Um, getting down to that, like you can kind of build everything off of that. Um, if, if you know who their customers are, you know, if they're, you know, selling or recommending, doesn't matter whether it's software or insurance products for that matter. Um, you can kind of like layer your pipeline with their pipeline and figure out unique opportunities. The second step to that is putting the right types of incentives in place. Um, you know, there's a period of time, uh, in, in the early days of PartnerStack where people thought you could really incentivize people just with t-shirts and Amazon gift cards. It turns out you can't pay Amazon Amazon gift cards. There needs to actually be a commercial relationship that's established for it to scale. And then the last thing is, is enablement. Are you going to talk to this partner and provide them the same level of support as you provide to your sales and support team when they— when someone joins your company? And so a combination of those factors will lead to the right partnership. But partnerships are guaranteed not successful if the CEO says this is who we need to partner with. And the second version is, you know, we expect partnerships to drive X, Y, and Z in revenue in 90 days. You would never expect a sales rep to go in and do that. And the last thing is there needs to be open lines of communication. You know, when we were first doing customer discovery back in 2015 at YC, I was talking to a partner who was putting— who was doing— who drove more new business than the top enterprise sales rep by 4x for a very well-known technology company. And he had told me that he had to submit support tickets. Now he had backchanneled directly to the CEO. It's a public company. In fact, the CEO, when this person's daughter was born, sent a package to him. That's how meaningful the relationship was. But they just hadn't prioritized treating the partner like a human and communicating and treating, you know, your partners as though they're employees because like that's the level of dedication that's required to make partnerships successful.

I'm curious, AI is not new, but of course it's everywhere now. And like, I'm imagining a world where everyone's got this open for business, you know, capability on their website. Like you have full coverage. And then I'm imagining a world where AI is just automagically lining up based on those insights. Hey, here's the right folks for you to partner with. And almost like eliminating BD reps. Because it's just like the matching is, is just right there. Or that, or just tapping into insights from support tickets and people are asking for this complementary capability, or do you integrate with so-and-so? Like all the insights could be there and then you just have the relationships and you just feed them. So I don't want to give away your roadmap. I'm just curious, like, uh, and obviously it would take a very long time to have full coverage, but yeah, how are you thinking about AI and is there a world where things can just become even more automated than they are today?

We believe that in, in, you know, the time no one was talking about AI, but back in 2015, the idea was like, hey, if you standardize the workflows, you can pair the right partner with the right vendor at the right time. The challenge today is without the unique insights, without actually doing like the integration work required and and having a trusted source that's not going to leak data because, like, let's face it, like, you know, there's a lot of information that can be learned about someone's business by integrating into their Salesforce. And it is important to have a trusted platform that does that. So our vision with AI is to pair partners with vendors at the right time for the right customer. And we can do that by because at Partnerstack, what's unique about us is both the, the, the B2B vendor as well as the partner, they're both our users. And so like LinkedIn, we can aggregate data and make recommendations in a smart way. And the more data the partner shares with us, the more data the vendor shares with us, the better we can become at it. So it's, it's actually about providing the right types of incentives and building that, uh, that, that trust between those two groups and, and us, um, that has enabled us to unlock some of this, uh, and, um, it's, it's, it's really, really exciting, um, what, what could, what could be there. AI will be different in partnerships though than, than other, other groups and platforms because it is, you have to share something to, to benefit from it, uh, and, and to have the rails, and, and we believe, you know, we have the capacity to be the rails that supports that. That's how everything's gonna get unlocked.

I remember trying to just choose partners, like I had led an initiative to choose alternative lending partners for FreshBooks, and it was, I feel like it was a 6-month exercise. You're going out, you're mapping the market, you're meeting with folks, you're trying to assess fit, you're doing, asking product managers to go and like, maybe let's talk to a handful of our best customers and see, like, like try and do a little sample. Maybe you're doing a test integration. Like it was a really long process. So there's like tons of friction that could be removed.

It's a data and people process. Um, because it's not just about like the perfect blend of pipeline, but it's also, you know, do people pick up the phone or answer the email when something comes through? And you can, and we have scored that, um, uh, because you can score both the data sharing side as well as like the way that another group works together. Um, and you can quantify that relationship and how much they're investing or have things in fact changed., and, you know, that matters. Um, but it is absolutely still a people, people, people business. It'll be interesting to see though how AI will impact that. Um, and, you know, can you have two separate agents working together, um, and, and, and standardize what's there? Uh, and, and I think that if we're to look forward in 10 years, that's what partnerships will be. It will be more automated, um, so people can spend time not just trying to find the one that works, but really honing in on the ones that are working and figuring out everything they can do to, to make it grow.

Like, first, do you think you're creating your own category? Are there— do you have competition?

I think that we're creating our own category. There is competition in, in the space. You know, a lot of the competition They're called distributors and/or disties. And these are 100-year companies. Like one of the disties that is a public company, you know, with billions of dollars, they were founded way back in 1928. Like that company has started as a, you know, small shop servicing radios. And just kept leaning into partnerships over and over. The challenges they worked through, at one point their whole building burned down in the middle of a board meeting, though the board like passed. And because of the power of this network that they had built, it's still growing today. Now they are very different. They're not technology companies. It is a, you know, an older way of working. And so ultimately we think we're competing against distribution and not just disties, but, you know, whether it be like distribution through paid media or whatever, we think we are in the distribution business. But there are, you know, half dozen of these businesses that effectively do the same thing without technology. And we think we're competing there. Now we blend that with some technology companies in the space would be like affiliate marketing and something called PRM, which is partner relationship management. And we sit in between the three of those because we've said that, you know, one, technology needs to service distribution and two, distribution needs to be a technology company. And, and landing in the midst of, of, of that Venn diagram is, is where we sit. So oddly enough, we compete against all three categories and in doing so, um, have, have built our, our own category.

So how does that play with the Gartner mafia? Do you have to convince them to create a, your own quadrant or how does that work?

There have been, I think, I think every go-to-market leader would tell you that you will disagree with the analysts. And my inbox would suggest that has been the case with us. We, in 2019, I remember talking to an analyst and really being like shut down. And told, uh, that that's not going to work, that's not possible, and you have no experience inside of technology, how would you possibly know?

Wow.

And, uh, arrogant, very, uh, very, very opinionated is, is, is, is, is what I will say. You know, naively, like, I kind of went to war with them. Um, I, uh, Remember 2 years later, uh, uh, Quadrant and report being published and having to reach out to them and inform them that I was gonna have to respond to the Quadrant report, uh, uh, um, formally, uh, and disagree with it. Um, and the reason being is, and I actually was going to have to do this, is our customers were saying Well, you know, X, Y, and Z analyst is saying this, you don't fit that bucket, da da da da da. And you just have to be willing to lean in, in those types of moments and own what you are. You can't be defined. No company that's actually made significant impact has allowed an analyst to shape their business. You have to be willing to say, no, this is who we are. Um, you should probably play a little nicer than I did. Um, um, but, um, I think anybody, any great go-to-market leader, founder, executive operator that's built something of significance has fought that. I know very fortunately, um, G2 has come around and really leveraged the power of what the customer voice is to make that core to, to, to everything., and that changed our trajectory because it wasn't just the opinion of one. It was the voice of, of customers and partners, uh, to say, hey, you know, no, this is what Partner Stack is. So we sit on, you know, a version of a quadrant, and, and it's a little bit different everywhere, um, but increasingly over the last 10 years, we've been able to shape some of it, not all of it, um, Um, and we haven't done it intentionally. Uh, we've just done it by deciding who we were and who we weren't.

So coming up on 10 years, you got a lot of ISVs of different shapes and sizes that you work with, and presumably everything was up and to the right in 2021 and then a little less so afterwards. So like, what's your retro for folks who sell to other startups? Is that very volatile? Like, do you recommend not doing that? Like, did you, were your, did you have like, yeah, a lot of volatility in your revenue in that period?

Yeah. Tech winter wasn't too much fun for us. And tech winter being when interest rates started climbing, you know, we're a platform that sells to go-to-market teams and go-to-market teams were scaled back significantly because demand decreased. And we worked through that. So we went from, you know, Tech summer being post-COVID when liquidity was being pumped into the market and everyone was experimenting with everything to, to tech winter. We were fortunate because the value of value we provided actually enabled us to grow, you know, no matter kind of the season. And the growth rates certainly were impacted, but it's kind of like you pick your poison. You know, you, you, you, you benefit in good times and you have to manage in, in, in challenging moments. The trick, I think, the retro is to know, you know, at, at the end of the day, you have to be there for your customers. And if your customers need you more, you need to be there. And if your customers need you less, You need to adapt and figure out how you can lean in and provide more value. Because if you do provide the value you say you do, doesn't really matter the market conditions. It all, all that is impacted is the growth rate. And so, you know, if you do provide that value, you'll grow through anything. But it'd be by adapting to the market. You know, you'll, you'll be there no matter the season. So selling to early-stage startups is tough. I don't recommend it. If, if startups, especially technology companies, are incredibly demanding, they are very tech-centered. Now, if, if you can do it, you will likely build the best platform. But it's far easier to go in and service, you know, traditional industries that don't have any expectations where you're automating some small, small workflow. But if you can meet the challenge of a demanding user in a demanding role, you know, you'll build a leading platform. And so, you know, I kind of give the same type of advice to entrepreneurs, which is like, don't do it. And because if you're not going to do it, I just saved you a whole button because I told you to, because I told you to not do it. Like, I just saved you a whole bunch of time. And so if you're willing to take on the challenge of working with early-stage companies and trying to separate, you know, real feedback from noise— and what I mean by that is you can never fix someone's business, right? Like, it's up to them. Partnerstack, We're fuel to a fire. We can't solve someone's go-to-market problems. We can only add fuel to the fire that they create. And so you have to know, are you getting feedback because their business is struggling and you might— like, there's no tool that can save them except for what they built. Or are you getting genuine feedback because you've screwed something up, haven't met the mark, or are missing something?, and you have to be able to navigate that. Uh, you have to be able to navigate both to, to, to, to, to learn what's there. So great. They're great customers. You know, we're so happy that we, we started there. Um, and both things can be true. They're incredibly challenging. Um, and, and so, uh, don't be scared of the opportunity. Just know what you're getting into.

Love it. That's very wise advice. A final question, Bryn. Let's end on a high note. And it's a big question. You know, you said something in passing that I consider to be very important, you know, like, which is like basic— I forget your exact words, but basically like the high— like success can bring even more challenges perhaps than the challenging times. And my understanding is, you know, we talked about like, like LinkedIn growth, right? It's gestating, it's gestating, it's slow, slow, slow, and then boom. And my understanding is PartnerStack went through like 4 successive years of 100% growth, I think leading up to that 2021 time period. So like many folks would love to have that champagne problem, which is like, oh my God, I can't keep up with success. But like, tell us about that and how you navigated that and stayed on top and also how you grew as a CEO to always be kind of a step ahead of a fast-growing business.

Very, very challenging. Growth, you know, the saying is growth solves everything because growth does solve everything. This is to solve everything except, you know, it solves everything because it lets you ignore problems.

Oh, such a good insight. Yes.

And you can only pave over so many problems and do have to go back in and fix the problems. You can't just pave over everything. And that's what happened to us, is growth was solving everything and we were making trade-offs all the time to accelerate growth. And we accumulated— every company accumulates debt, whether it's technical debt or like whatever it is. We accumulated debt that we just had not dealt with. Now, interestingly, The mistake I made is I knew we needed to address it and I didn't listen to that instinct. Instead, I just leaned into growth.

Did you feel you were forced to? Was like, oh, my investors are pushing me? Like, what drove that?

I drove it. I drove the just, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Go crazy, like lean in, do what's here, ignore your instinct on, on, on the issues that need to go in and be fixed. And I own it. Certainly that's the, the, the culture, the ethos and everything that exists inside of the startup world. But as founders and as CEO, you have to own all the decisions that exist. And the interesting thing for me is that that moment was probably the least fulfilling point of my career when we leaned into growth as much as we possibly could. It just became a graph. It became a number. You, you were chasing like data points versus solving the problem. Like I got involved with this and I'm in love with this because I love the problem and I love to solve problems. And ignoring the problems I wanted to solve because we could pursue growth was a big lesson for me in, in my, my personal growth. Is, you know, trust your gut and your instinct and know how to make the trade-offs when growth is the right call and when fixing the problem is the right call. And the most fulfilling part of, of my career has actually come since Tech Winter, um, was going back and solving those problems, um, that I created, um, and ignored. And it is the thing I am most proud of. To be specific, like the work at specific points in time, we've had to, you know, scale back and do riffs. And I remember going through that process and talking with our executive team and saying, You know, not all of you will be here at the end of this, but this should be the work that we're most proud of. Um, uh, uh, and that wasn't easy and it impacted so many people and not everybody was there after. Um, but it was absolutely, you know, the work that I was most proud of because where it's, where it's led us and the problems that it forced me to address.

Fascinating. Final bonus question. You know, you said there, you kind of, I ignored my instinct. If you look back, has your instinct ever been wrong?

Yes, there have been times that my instinct has been wrong, but I believe I would have been more fulfilled to have listened to my instinct because I probably didn't learn the lesson the way I should have if I would have instead trusted my instinct, because there's no better feedback than failure. And when you fail on your terms, you learn very quickly.

I ask that question because I find most hard-charging, you know, data-driven entrepreneurs push their instinct down. But in my experience, our intuitive mind is far more powerful than our rational mind. That's why we have these aha moments in the shower or on a hike or in the middle of the night, because this capability that we don't tap into has had space to go to work. So, uh, um, I'm surprised actually that it's, it's been wrong for you. I mean, it's not, it's not perfect, but in my experience, it's, it's more powerful than the rational logical Vulcan brain.

It is. I have a similar experience around the edges. It's, it's been wrong. Um, um, and I always beat up around the edges when, when failure happens. Um, but it is a superpower and you have to know how to harness it, uh, uh, because it's telling you something.

Yep. Yeah, it sure is. Well, Bryn, this has been a fascinating conversation. Congrats in advance on your 10 years. Uh, we'll have you back on for the 20th year retrospective. Maybe your beard will be the color of my beard then. But I, uh, thank you so much for sharing that. Like, you have a giant TAM and like, I know everybody listening can take away actionable insights here. So, uh, I'm really excited for you.

Well, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Amazing. Hey, thanks for listening to The Startup CEO Show. If you'd like to connect with me, be sure to visit my website at markmacleod.me. Or follow me on LinkedIn @TheMarkMacLeod or Twitter @MarkMacLeod_. And if you wanna tune in again next week, be sure to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you next time.