Partnership Lessons from Scaling Stripe & Notion from Zero to billions with Cristina Cordova

You got to be willing to walk. I think a company that's not willing to walk away from a partnership is probably the kind of company that does bad deals.

I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

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The most effective forms of marketing, but one of the most difficult things to predict, scale and master. And today's speaker, she is the Boss of Partnerships Christina Cordova. She was most recently Notions Head of Platform and Partnerships. Prior to that she was employee 28 and the first partnerships hire at Stripe, where she built partnerships with companies like Shopify, Squarespace, Apple. She built out the BD Org and led their new corporate card effort. And after a decade of partnerships, she's backed big deals, honed her negotiation skills, built out teams, and made plenty of mistakes that she hopes we can all learn from. So awesome to have you here Christina. Thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me. Excited to be with you all virtually today.

You've had a fantastic career in partnerships, driving hundreds of millions in revenue and billions in valuation. Walk us through your journey. How did you get into all of this? How did you get to where you are today?

I think it really first started with the first startup I ever worked for full time, which was a company called Pulse. We made a mobile news reading app and this was in, like, 2010. The iPhone had come out. Not too far prior to that, the iPad had just come out. And that was like the impetus for starting this company. And so I joined as the very first employee and I was doing, like, March. I was doing operations and support and community and all these other kinds of things. And I was also doing partnerships because we needed content providers to give us their content to display in the app. So I look at that one of these kind of like foundational partnerships, the equivalent at Stripe would be like partnering with Wells Fargo to actually process payments. It's really required to actually offer your service. And so when I was at Pulse and I started working on these partnerships, I realized the power that partnerships can have for companies that are really reliant on partners to get their business started or make it grow. And I realized that I was also good at them as well. So I eventually stopped doing a lot of those other things with the company and really focused in on partnerships because I thought it was strategic and valuable to the company. And also I felt I was good at it. So did that for two and a half years and then made the hop to Stripe and then the rest is history. But, yeah, that was my. My foundational experience in startups and how I got started.

What took you to Notion from Stripe?

At the end of my time at Stripe, we were almost 3,000 employees, and when I joined the company, we were at 28, so there's a big jump. It felt like we had been through several different companies in my time just at Stripe over seven and a half years, and I wanted to get back to something that felt like truly like a startup again and felt a little bit more risky. And I actually invested in Notion before I joined full time. I met the founder. I thought he was really compelling. And someone I know from Pulse actually ended up joining the company as well and got to hear about his insights from having been part of the company. Ended up investing and then just following along with the company over time. And I think the thing that really did it was that the company was doing quite well on its own. And I happened to go to a holiday party maybe a few months before I ended up leaving Stripe and just seeing how warm and inviting it was and small, just a few people there having drinks, getting to know each other better. And I really wanted to be back in that small environment again. So it was combination of wanting to be back in a little bit more of a risky smaller environment and then at the same time knowing that Notion's business was like ripe for a really burgeoning platform. And so the signs for that were Notion had a bunch of like private internal APIs and developers found out about them, started using them even though they were like completely undocumented, not necessarily for public consumption. And so it was clear that if we built public APIs, there would be people who'd be really passionate about building integrations with Notion. And so it felt like we were coming from a place where you could really build this fantastic ecosystem around the product and that there was a lot being left on the table by not having that. And so I wanted to come in and be the person who got to capitalize on all the great work that had been done before me to find product market fit and really blow out that vision for the company. Getting connected to all the different services that you use to run your life and also run your business.

You are now investing, you've left Notion and what took you to the world of investing.

So I started investing in 2019, so not too long ago. And when I got started, I was mostly investing in people that I knew already for a number of years or got to know over a period of time, like Notion, for example, getting to know some of the founders for a little while before I invested. And while that was great, I really started to meet with people who were connected to me through, you know, someone, but I didn't really know them, I didn't know how talented they were. And I really needed to start thinking about investing in kind of a different way with a lot less data on who the people were behind the company. And I thought that was really interesting and really compelling. And one of the reasons I started investing was to be able to a support entrepreneurs. Stripe as a product is a product built for people who are entrepreneurial, who are building businesses and need to like transact to be able to survive. And that really came across in a lot of our products. Mentality for building things and investing is very similar. I would see all of these companies start using Stripe and then just take off rapidly like Shopify and Lyft. I remember going into Lyft's like office when there were just a few people and trying to Figure out how we could build a product just to support that kind of like marketplace style business. And I just loved that idea of being helpful in a very different way through money and advice ultimately and getting in touch with just like super early stage companies. And so that's why I started investing.

Let's get into partnerships. What are partnerships and why do they matter?

So partnerships are a way for your company to work with another company out in the broader ecosystem in a unique way that is not that person is a customer and buying your product, for example. So it's basically everything but a customer relationship. It can be a partnership in some shape or form. So in my day we had a lot of different kinds of partnerships. And in certain companies you'll have these, and in certain companies you won't, or they're not really relevant to what you do. So when I think about the kinds of partnerships that really mattered and were impactful to companies in my time, I start with maybe the like foundational or product partnerships. First. I mentioned earlier at Stripe we needed a banking partner to be able to move funds. Very critical for a business that is financial infrastructure at heart. So we partnered with a bank and that's a financial partner or a foundational partner for a lot of businesses. In financial technology you have these kinds of partners that you need to partnerships that you need to build. And then for other companies, like when I was at Pulse, for example, content was what you viewed when you were in our applications. If we didn't have any content, there would be no reason for you to download the app. That's a foundational partnership of a different kind. First and foremost, you need partnerships with some companies because otherwise your product wouldn't really exist and they're hypercritical. And then second, there are partnerships that you can build that maybe enhance the product experience. And so that would be more of a traditional product partnership where maybe you don't absolutely need partnerships, but they really do improve the user experience. So example of that would be at Stripe, we partnered with Apple to help launch Apple Pay and make Apple Pay available to every single merchant on Stripe without having to do a whole lot of work. So that made the process product experience much better and then eventually became something that like every merchant said, hey, I need this for my business. And that's something that I look at as a requirement. So you end up having these partnerships where they start out because you're trying to improve the product and then eventually they just become part of the product itself and you have to build and maintain that relationship over time. I think in a lot of companies you also have what you'll call like distribution partnerships. And sometimes that can be really easy, like referral based. Hey, this company has a lot of customers that are similar to my customers. So why don't they send their customers to me and maybe I can give them something in return, revenue share or something to that effect. Or in the case of Stripe, maybe there's like a technical integration of some kind. In the case of, let's say a Shopify or a Squarespace, you want to set up an online store and collect payments for your store. In that particular instance, you would have them integrate with Stripe, offer Stripe as a service to their users, and they would be referring net new businesses to us. And in a lot of cases they would get something in return, let's say a revenue share or kickback or something like that. And so those kinds of relationships really help drive the growth of the business. So in Stripe's case, we were very developer oriented at the beginning. All of our customers were engineers directly integrated to the API. Then Stripe became this company that started to work with a bunch of non technical customers. Sally's T shirt shop from Shopify, which has now become like Allbirds, which just went public right on Shopify, powered by, you know, Stripe under the hood. So those kinds of products I think really make a difference in terms of driving growth of the business when you're working with partners that have a lot of reach and maybe you don't have that reach right yet, and you can capitalize on their reach. And then lastly, I would say there's what I would call an ecosystem or platform partnerships. So we did a lot of these at Notion when we were thinking about what are all the different kinds of services that you want to integrate to make your experience. For example, we would partner with a company like Zapier, which has all these different connections to different products. And so if you want to, let's say automatically have a task in notion, populate a GitHub issue or something like that, you could do that through Zapier. So those kinds of integrations make for a better product experience to the end customer, but there's not necessarily direct money exchanged between two companies, for example. And so in a lot of those cases you're just optimizing for a better experience, like your customers want to work with someone else's product in conjunction with your own. And for some of those customers it'll be a deal breaker if that integration doesn't exist. So that can drive a lot of value to your Company as well. Yeah, that's how I look at the general types of partnerships that can exist for companies and what kind of value they can provide for both sides.

Product and financial partners, distribution partners, ecosystem partners. How does partnership differ from your standard referral programs or is referral program just a version of that?

Yeah, so a referral program can be a way to ultimately acquire customers through a partner, for example. But I would say it's more programmatic than it is like strategic. So a referral program could be open to anyone. So hey, if this particular business starts promoting my company and then every time that they refer someone my way, they get some kind of kickback or fee or something like that can work, but there's not really a close bond or like technical integration, product integration between any of those two companies. And maybe that gets one of the other company's customers and that can be valuable and you may want to maintain that relationship, but it's not necessarily like a deep product partnership of any kind. So for me, that requires what I would say is more of a repeatable sell process. Someone going out and saying, okay, like maybe we provide tax services or something. I'm going to go talk to a bunch of accountants and say, hey accountants, here's my referral link. And anytime you have a customer who needs tax services, send them my way with this referral link and you'll get some kind of kickback. Right. That to me is less of a deeper partnership between two companies and much more of something that is run in a programmatic way that someone probably a little bit more sales oriented in what they're doing is doing in a repeatable fashion with a pretty straightforward playbook. And I think a lot of the kinds of partnerships that I like to spend my time on personally, whether it's like in distribution or ecosystem or product, a lot of them start out as very bespoke. They're not necessarily something that you have a playbook for that you've done before. And eventually they might become like, once you've done like the 10th or the 50th of those kinds of deals, maybe you start to have a playbook, but you definitely don't start out with a playbook for those kinds of relationships. So I would say a lot of partnerships center around having some kind of like unique value prop between the two companies and a slightly different way of working with partners versus the more programmatic like referral program approach to things.

There's a lot of wisdom out there on the right timing for these partnerships. I was in a session with Drew Houston at Dropbox. And he said in the early days they had the opportunity to put Dropbox on every device and it was taking them down this rabbit hole. So they asked it. I think focus is really key. David Sacks, I think I saw a tweet from him that said do not do BD or partnerships. In the early days, when is the right time to do partnerships?

In the case of where partnerships go wrong, a lot of it can be somewhat predictable, right? So a lot of those partnerships Dropbox did, for example, in the early days to get off every Samsung and LG device and all that kind of stuff ultimately ended up bringing them a bunch of customers who would use the product because they got all this space for free through the deal. Because Samsung would say we're only going to do this if we can get 50 gigs of free space or something. And then if you're a customer, you're like, oh sweet. For 50 gigs of free space on Dropbox, it'll take me forever to fill up all this space and I'll never end up converting and paying. So in some of those cases there's like strange dynamics between the two partners where the Samsungs of the world, for example, want far more than a company like Dropbox should actually be giving up. And because Dropbox is at this time was like more of a startup early stage company, they're like, oh, we've got to get this deal, because what if Google gets it or somebody else gets it and then you end up realizing that it wasn't a good deal. So I would say a lot of it is in the details, right? On these kinds of relationships. And when you're an early stage company, the reality is that you can more easily get pushed around. And so I would avoid situations where you feel like you are getting into a relationship with a company that doesn't necessarily have the tenets of what you need to be successful. So for example, I would think about, in any partnership conversation I'm going into, what are all the things that I care most about? Is it logo rights, is it marketing, co marketing that we're doing with a partner? Is it like in the case of Dropbox, like how much space I might end up giving away, like those kinds of things. And really looking at that list before you engage too deeply with a partner and saying, okay, am I giving up on any of the things that I thought were core in doing this deal? So there's a whole like plethora of things I think you can do to avoid bad deals, number one. And then Two, I would say for a lot of companies, partnerships are foundational. So I don't think you can avoid partnerships and you have to do them right away. Stripe, at five employees, was negotiating its partnership with Wells Fargo and some other financial institution players in the space.

And Stripe clearly had product market fit. Because trying to do partnerships before you have product market fit could be hard, or maybe not.

Stripe didn't have product market fit of five people. There was no product. Right. You can't have a product in Stripe's pace space without necessarily having a relationship with the bank. And it would have. And the alternative to that is like becoming a bank yourself, which takes so many years and so much time that it's really not worth anyone's time to try and become a bank. And you can get blocked from like regulatory perspective from trying to do that. So you have to think about what are the alternatives. It's either I partner or I don't launch my product for five years. So we're going to partner. So in those cases, or at Pulse, where you had foundational partnerships, they're really critical to the business and you can't really get a product into market without having them. And I think you're going to have a lot of companies for whom that's really the case. But I would say there are a lot of companies where you don't need anyone to launch a product if you're doing like a B2B SaaS collaboration tool like Notion, like you don't need partnerships for a long time. And so I looked at like the opportunity for Notion very much being a post product market fit period for when you should bring on partnerships. Because the reality is that when we're doing all these ecosystem partnerships and all of these other things, no one's going to want to work with you unless you have a lot of users. So it really takes the business to be sufficiently far along for partnerships to really be able to go out there and make an impact. So I really think it depends on the company and where it can make a lot of sense. The distribution partnerships for Stripe made significant portion of our revenue for a very long period of time from when I was there. And I think that can really think can really be an opportunity for you to broaden your market, work with different kinds of customers than you're historically used to those kinds of things. But I think it's so dependent on the type of company. If you gave me like a standard B2B SaaS company, like, I would look at that company and probably be like, oh, you can probably do this, but merge for example a company I invested in which does kind of APIs as a service, right? Like you need someone to go out there and have lots of conversations with the top software players in the space and potentially get unique things from an API perspective delivered to you. And in those cases having someone on BD fairly early at post series a type of stage makes a lot of sense. Would I hire that person as my like fifth hire? No, you probably need to build the core product first and then hire a partnership stuff person. So I think all of that really depends on the company and what is the ecosystem? Where are you playing? Do you have a foundational partnership that's required for your business for you to grow and manage? Those are all factors that I would consider.

Two themes I pulled out of there is one, if your product needs a partner to launch or go to market, then absolutely you got to start day one, whether it's a banking or a core piece of technology and you so you need to embark on that. Two, if you have, if you are a product that is not reliant on a third party technology, then explore distribution partnerships, ecosystem partnerships and probably there if you're trying to distribute one to many then you need to be at product market fit or else no one's going to distribute you. You need a user base. Would love to hear more about how you reached out to potential partners to distribute you when you are early on.

Get ready to be good at cold emails. I would say number one, so when I started a Stripe, like no one had really heard about us and I would cold email people get them on the phone and they would think that we were square because it was like another payments company that started with an S. And I'd have to tell them like oh, we don't make those dongle things like we build APIs like we're a different company and they'd be like oh, interesting. So I would say like one, the ability to write like a really good cold email for sure can get you started. Keep it brief, keep it focused on what you're delivering to that company by building a partnership with them and just spend time to really sell the value and unique value proposition that you can bring to the table. And so when I would have conversations with people when I was at Stripe, a lot of it was focused on what I felt we did best, which was I definitely leaned in on product and I would compare like who else they were partnered with to that point and what that user experience was to something like Stripe and say hey, You're a reasonable person with a good product sense. I can compare what you have today with what we would bring to your customers, and I think that would be a much better experience. And, like, side by side, you can agree with that. And so really show off where you feel like you differentiate and focus on that. And if you don't feel like you have any differentiation between what's out there in the market and what's standard, then you probably have to go back to the table and start thinking, thinking about, you know, what else there is that you can offer. So for other companies, it might be they have a lot of reach. At that time, Stripe didn't have a lot of customers, so I couldn't really focus on the fact that, like, we had a lot of users. I was trying to get users out of other people. I would focus on where you have that unique value proposition. But, yeah, a lot of cold emails, really thinking about growing my network, asking for introductions where I could. I leaned on our investors a lot for introductions. I would really comb, like all of their portfolio companies, understand if there were any partnership opportunities there, any connections that those portfolio opportunities, portfolio companies might be able to make for me, those kinds of things. So I think you just really have to do that groundwork, that research. And, you know, when all else fails, write a cold email.

It's exactly like sales. You reach out to a bunch of people, you size up the relevant people and how you can add value to them and hopefully one hits, especially in the early days. But how do you size up a prospective partner and the impact they could have on your pipeline?

Yeah, so I would think a lot about who the customer is and what their journey is. So I like to start when I think about how to get more customers as, what is this customer that I don't have? What's their journey? So when I was at Stripe, I would think about it in the context of, I know if you're a developer, you're like, reading hacker news and you're in these forums with other developers and they're talking about Stripe. That's relatively easy to understand. We're trying to get a very different type of customer now. Like, the business is growing. We want to start talking to Sally's T shirt Shop. And if I'm Sally, I'm putting myself in Sally's shoes. I'm thinking a lot about, okay, like, how do I get my business started? Like, where do I incorporate? Like, how do I get a bank account? How do I get my store started if I don't have A developer. So I start thinking about, let's Google online store creators. What are the top search Results? Okay, Shopify, BigCommerce, Squarespace. I'll go on sites and pretend I'm Sally and trying to find reviews of what's good. What do people like? I'll try out these experiences myself again, like putting myself in Sally's shoes and saying, huh, what are the companies in this space provided really great value to their customers. And then once I understand those products really well and I understand that customer journey, then I can understand, okay, should I be spending my time with a Shopify which had an amazing, amazing product even early on, or should I spend it with Magento which felt like it was this like languishing product in a lot of ways from an E commerce perspective and like hard to use ultimately from a non technical person's perspective. So I would think about those two products and then really focus in on what's the customer experience and how can I put myself in their shoes. And then when I think about all the products that this customer is using, I want to go out and I want to speak to every single one of those customers and I prioritize based on what the experience is that's ideal for all of those customers. So when I think about spending time with companies, of course I'll reach out to a Magento, but I'm going to spend a lot of time with a Shopify because I think that's a really good product experience for my customer. So I think it's really about understanding that journey right for the customer and understanding how the customer makes their decisions and where you can insert yourself to create an opportunity to find a distribution partner that can actually offer you a lot of value. There are a lot of these sites that that'll tell you like, oh, X Shopify is used a ton or Big Commerce is used a ton and they'll give you like the pie of who uses what. But I think you have to care less where all your customers are and a lot more about where are all your customers going. There were a ton of customers that were leaving like languishing e commerce platforms and joining these really new and like interesting and powerful ones. And so it was really about focusing on like where is the customer going? Not where is the customer right now.

In the B2B space. Partnerships, the bigger companies want to get access to customers, right? If you try to partner with the Salesforce and the Oracle, they're like, show me what you can do for me and how many customers, how do we get around this issue. Or maybe it's like a phase of you kiss a hundred frogs, you work with people that are just at maybe one level above you and then just keep leveling up. How do you work around this issue?

Yeah, with a company like Salesforce, you're probably not going to be able to start up or small company, like, drive a bunch of customers to Salesforce. So I think you just have to realize that's just not where you're going to be able to differentiate yourself. So I would not focus on. I'm going to, you know, tell Salesforce I can give them a bunch of customers. We'll see through that in two seconds. Good luck getting a second meeting out of that one. I would really focus on, like, where do you offer value? So, for example, can you offer a customer who maybe is having a really hard time with Salesforce, not enjoying their Salesforce experience, thinking they might churn off of Salesforce into something else or not adopt other value or features and go to that company and say, hey, why don't you and I get together? Like Salesforce customer and new startup type company. Why don't we get together and approach Salesforce jointly and say, hey, we would really love it if Salesforce and the new product could work really closely together and have a deep integration and that would matter to this customer. And ideally that's a customer that Salesforce cares about. So I would focus less on saying, oh, like we have 10,000 users or something like that, when whatever number you have at a really small stage probably doesn't matter to Salesforce. And find that one customer who loves your product and is going to fight for you in the room with the partner that you're trying to acquire. I think that can really make a big difference. There were a ton of partnerships that we were able to get across the line at Stripe, not because we were going to bring a bunch of users to this platform or anything like that, but just because one customer really fought for us. And I really like to think about it as like, how does this company make decisions? Again, a lot of this is just putting yourself in the shoes of another person. So put myself in the shoes of the person at Salesforce and say, what matters to this person? And in a lot of conversations that I have with people, other people in BD roles at other companies I'm trying to partner with, in the first conversation, I'll say, like, what are the things that matter to you? What are the things that drive your business forward? What are the things your team really cares about? Like really make it about them and how I can understand them and how they make decisions. And then you take that data and you put that into the story that you're trying to tell. Because if you're not focusing back on what that person cares about, what's going to get that person promoted, then they're probably not going to care about whatever you have to say. So I think it's really about changing your pitch to suit who you're pitching to and really using whatever data you can to emphasize that.

Let's assume you're at this new startup. It's at product market Fit. You're trying to find a distribution partner. How do you find these people?

I have a very user friendly first mentality. So often I'll spend time with customers and with the sales team. So starting with, hey, like, who are our customers? What do they do? Let me fully understand them, spend some time with them. And then I ask questions. What are the products that you use in conjunction with our product? What are the products that got you here? Was there a product? Was there someone that like pushed you to use us? Like, how did you find out about us? And I would figure out what are those kinds of opportunities and figure out how to capitalize on them. And so sometimes this leads to like great marketing opportunities. So for example, we found out that a lot of people who started using Notion found out about Notion by watching like a YouTube video by someone who was just like, oh, I'm going to teach you how to use Notion. And so then we were like, okay, great, we'll go and sponsor a bunch of people to create more of those videos so that more people discover notion through YouTube and use the product. So you can think about partnerships in a very similar way, right? Like, how can I make this programmatic? Okay, great, I'll go out and spend time with customers and if they tell me that they discovered my product through another product, then I'm going to go out and say, hey, I'm going to go talk to that company and see if they could actually send more customers my way, whether it's through a referral partnership, a distribution partnership, a product partnership, whatever it might be. So I look at that as a really great signal to how people discover your product. And then maybe they, for example, in Stripes World, eventually a lot of customers decided to start using our product because of like finance integrations that we had. So we went out to every customer and we said, okay, what accounting platform do you use? Do you use QuickBooks? Do you use Xero? Do you use Netsuite? And then thinking about the entire space and building like a mind map of all the different products in that space and then go out and have conversations so that we could build better product partnerships and integrations there. And customers really loved when we had something that was integrated end to end and that helped a lot of people make decisions to use Stripe. So I think it really starts with the customer. Like your customers will tell you so much about who else you should be working with in the broader ecosystem.

What are the top three things to stop doing with partnership outreach?

Oh, I would say if what you're doing isn't working, stop sending it. I always look at like a cold email as like an opportunity to iterate. So no email that I'm sending. If I'm just getting started and trying to figure out what works, no email that I'm sending should be the same as the last one. So if I'm trying to get into this company, I might find five people who could be good ways into this company. It might be the VP of engineering, might be the cto, might be the head of bd. So one, I would stop just sending your emails to like the same person when you do a lot of outreach within each organization. And I would start varying it. Okay, great, I'll start with the partnerships person. But maybe the partnerships person doesn't care about this. Maybe they're not motivated by certain kinds of things that I'm saying. Maybe I should reach out to the head of product and then I should craft that email to be different. Because my pitch to someone who cares about revenue is going to be different from someone who cares, who cares about technology and product. So from that perspective, I think a lot about what are the things that are gonna that are going to change right about this reach out that I'm doing. So like just sending the same like spammy content. And you all know you all get these emails where it's insert company name, that kind of stuff. It feels like stock templated email. You want something that sounds like a real person wrote this and it is tailored to me and therefore or I feel bad if I don't respond. So I would say stop sending the same stuff over and over again. Stop like not tailoring what you're doing to the right people and really look at what you're doing as like constant iteration. And then when you find something that works. When I found the email that like worked for these kinds of distribution partnerships that I was trying to get, I just used that over and over again. And that takes a lot of time to get to that point. But like look at your response rates, look at what's resonating with people and then iterate on the things that are not resonating with people because you shouldn't just continue to stay in a place where things aren't working because nothing's going to change at that point.

Angela asked the majority of our 5,500 company customers are via integrated white label partnerships OEM. We are having trouble finding investors that understand the SaaS model. Any thoughts on.

I think in a lot of ways for these kinds of companies where there's like white labeling, I think a lot of people fear like disintermediation, this idea that if the customer doesn't have a direct relationship with me, the company that is white labeling, then that customer or that partner or that layer that has been white labeled could just rip me out and replace me with somebody else really quickly. And so in some respects that just might be a fear of these relationships not lasting. So in a lot of cases with white labeling I look at it as is there a way where I can say that hey, this integration is so deep, it's so ingrained, even though it's white labeled, that's going to be really difficult for this company to rip it out and focus on that. And you have some metrics to prove it. So that would be one tactic. And then second tactic I would say like why don't you want like a maybe a co branded relationship and like really focus on all the reasons why any other kind of relationship would be the wrong one. And I think that's more of like an internal practice for yourself, like why wouldn't you want co branded or why wouldn't you want this customer to have a direct relationship with you? What is negative about that experience to you? Because it might be a way to rethink how you have some of these relationships. I know that at Stripe for example, we really emphasized having a relationship with the end merchant and of course there were a couple of exceptions to this. Shopify has Shopify payments which is completely white labeled. But we really cared about the co branding in a lot of ways. So it was always Shopify payments for good reason. I would think about what are the things you truly care about and why go one way or the other and really try to emphasize that with investors and why the decisions you made really press the company forward, forward in the way that you're looking for.

You were the first hire at Stripe in the partnership side. Walk us through the playbook. What were the first actions you did to get the first partnership, what did success look like and who did you hire and when, roles, responsibilities, candidate profile, ramp time, et cetera.

So at the beginning it was hard. I had two people, I want to say reject my offers to join stripe. I was 24, 25, like really a first time manager, truly. And so I think a lot of people were not sure whether they wanted to take a bet on me and also on Stripe, still very early stage company. And so I really focused on finding people who were like willing to take that risk. And so the first person I hired was actually someone I went to college with. I didn't know her super well in college, but she had some relevant experience. Experience having worked at companies in the broader like E commerce space. And it was someone who I was just like, okay, it feels like this person doesn't have any like direct experience, but has done a lot of pitching, been in a lot of formal meetings, has been able to present with those kinds of things and they can probably adapt to this type of role. And then the person I hired after that was someone who was much more of a product person. They actually wanted to work at Stripe on product, but we didn't have any product managers. That's how early we still were. And I convinced that person that they should join in bd, work really closely with the product team as a peer, and eventually once we do have product roles, they can make that transition. And that person stayed on the team for two or three years and then eventually made that transition. It worked really well. I always looked for people at the beginning. I could not hire a lot of people with a ton of BD experience because I was just too young and they wouldn't work for me, frankly. So I had to focus on people who weren't like a direct fit for the role because they had a ton of experience in BD prior to that. And I tried to find people who were either really strong on some other skills that we needed, whether it was like finances for financially modeling some of these deals that we were doing in the early days, or whether it was product because I wanted someone to build some deep product partnerships and hopefully those people could learn the rest. So that's what I did for my first two or three hires. And then from then on I was, yeah, Stripe was doing well enough and we had built a good team. So I was able to hire people with more traditional backgrounds who had worked in BE and prior, like tech companies. Yeah. But I still maintain that a lot of my best hires didn't have A traditional background. So I would say be open to people who don't necessarily have a traditional background, especially when you're at a startup and it's really hard to recruit people with, like, super relevant experience to your company. And then I would say really focus on building a strong, like, collaborative team who can work really well across the organization. Because I think that was one of the things that made us really successful. Like, we built relationships with the product team with a lot of engineering leaders in the company. And I think BD to operate really well within a company has to ultimately build strong relationships internally before they ever start building strong relationships externally. Because you don't want to be that BD person comes back and it's like, I have this great deal, and then the team is. I don't know if you want to do it. Your job is as much convincing people internally to do something as it is externally. Yeah. Find great relationship builders. Find people who are good negotiators. Focus on the core skill sets. More so than we got to a point where I was personally doing a bunch of the BD work and we had closed a bunch of deals, and it was clear that the limiting factor for us closing more deals was my time working all the time. I, like, definitely like myself and got to a point where it's just like, oh, my God, we need to hire another person. So I went to my manager, who was our COO at the time, and I said, hey, I really think we need to hire another person to be able to do more of these distribution partnerships. What do you want to do here? Like, you could hire them and they could report to you, or I could hire them and they could report to me. And at that point, I'd been at the company for almost a year, and he was like, you've done a great job. It's your opportunity to manage and build a team if you want to take it. And so I did. I think it's really starting with, do you feel like you have a lot of unrealized opportunity, first and foremost, that you can take advantage of and purely requires more people like you or people with a slightly different skill set than you? So maybe I'm really good at distribution partnerships, but this other person would be better at product partnerships. So, like, also figuring out, can you find someone who's complimentary to your skill set? So that was really what prompted it. It was just like, lots of opportunity and not enough time to handle it on my own.

You can sign on hundreds of partners, but if it's not driving a Revenue outcome at certain point.

Yeah.

Then it's a waste.

So distribution partnerships are easy because that you should be driving users who actively use the product and whatever context that is. Or in the case of Stripe, it's like people who use the product and then process a payment, and then we get revenue off of that payment. So we were tracking at Stripe both users and revenue for distribution partnerships. And so it's very easy to say, okay, like, I closed that partner. They started referring all their users to Stripe. Those people signed up and then they started processing payments. And here's how much we got at the end of the day. So it's very easy to track that. So we had a very large book of business from those distribution partnerships. And then I think when you're talking about, let's say, product partnerships or platform partnerships that aren't directly tied to revenue in the same way, I would say there are a couple of things that you can do to basically look at metrics for those. One, if you're building a product partnership, hey, we work really well with this notion. It was like we built this partnership with Zapier. How many people are using this integration? Right. Number one. And how many people are actively using it? Not people who just signed up to use it. How many of those customers are managed accounts? Do they have Customer success manager or account manager, which signals that they're an important customer, because that means you're building something that customers really care about and that matters. And then another thing that we looked at when I was at Stripe and we were doing these, like, accounting partnerships, which similarly didn't have any direct revenue tied to them, was how long did you stay on the platform when you were directly integrated with some of these platform partners versus how long did you stay on the platform if you weren't integrated with them? And then how much revenue did you bring us if you were connected to these integration partners versus if you weren't? And there were big gaps there. Right. So you could tell that the people who were integrated with all of these other services were much more engaged customers and were much more valuable customers. So I would try to find any of those metrics that are relevant for your business and attach your team's goals to those.

How did your product org look at Stripe?

We didn't have product managers until we were like 200, 250 people, something like that. Weird way to go about it compared to most tech companies these days. So, yeah, there was no team to, like, work with at all. We eventually did have a partner engineering team which were A bunch of engineers who were partner facing. So they weren't building product necessarily, but they were helping our partners integrate with our product. So you would assign an engineer on this team to Shopify and they would help Shopify as they were doing their integrations or adopting some unique technology that we had built for them. Those kinds of things. We had a bunch of those, but they weren't necessarily building the actual product. So you still had to go and convince these other teams that they needed to build something because a partner needed it. So that's why a lot of those internal relationships were super important. And at Notion we had an API team. It was a little bit different from Stripe because Stripe is an API at its core. So all teams build APIs. Whereas at notion it was like we'll have an API team. And so that was a clear team to go to. Partner needed a certain API built so that they could perform a certain action on top of it. So there was a little bit more clarity there. And we also. One of the first hires I made when I was at Notion was a partner engineer to help partners build their integrations as well. So I do think that like external partner engineering component is really critical to make sure that people build great integrations and that those integrations actually work well for your customers.

What was driving the prioritization of that roadmap?

Yeah, I think at most companies you'll see that there are a lot of different things that prioritize or that drive the prioritization. Rather a company like Stripe, it might be customer needs X. So we're going to build it. It might be strategically we want to build X, Y and Z, so we're going to do that. And then partnerships would be another input into that. So what I would like to say is that like most teams at I think good companies have the equivalent of some kind of like Stack Rank. Right? Here are the 20 things that we're going to do this quarter. And at the end of the day the partnership, like what you need there, needs to beat out something else in that Stack Rank to be able to get done this quarter. And so you ultimately need to convince people that it's more important than something else in that Stack Rank. Ultimately everything's an opportunity cost, has an opportunity cost associated with it. So it's what is the thing that's going to drop? Does that thing like really need to happen this quarter? Can that happen next quarter? So it's like my job to convince the team that like that thing that they were going to do instead isn't really as important as this thing is, and you got to build some really strong relationships to be able to make those points. And two, you as the BD person should believe that your thing is more important than what else is on the roadmap for a certain customer, for strategic reasons, et cetera. And if you don't believe that what you're asking the team to do is more important. For example, when I was at Notion, like, our infrastructure was going crazy because the product was just going viral, and I couldn't tell the team, like, hey, we really need to focus on this API right now. When we had downtime associated with the product, Stripe had this as well, had a time period where this happened. And so if you don't think this is more important than, like, infrastructure, which is like the core thing keeping the company up and alive, and the product working for customers, which, like, nothing really comes before that, ultimately, then you pressing for your partnership is like, bad time. Make sure that you really think this is the right thing for the company to focus on. And I think you can make your point if you built the right relationships and the company understands the power that these partnerships can bring to the table.

How do you get partners to keep driving your agenda, keep distributing you and not pushing you around?

One, you got to be willing to walk. There are a lot of partnerships I won't talk about that I've walked from. And a lot of that honestly was because there's like a certain amount of pushing that happens at the beginning. And then when you're like, deep in negotiations, there's like, more pushing, and they're just trying to, like, squeeze every last ounce out of you. And I think you have to really say, take a step back and say, yes, we may have put three months into this work, but it's time to step back and say that this isn't the right deal for us. And I think if you threaten that with a partner, you have to mean it. But I do think you should really be willing to walk away. And I think a company that's not willing to walk away from a partnership is probably the kind of company that does bad deals. That would be first and foremost. And then second, I would just say that it's really critical that your organization and the other organization has really nice mapping across the organizations with different people. So, for example, VP engineering at my organization should have a really great relationship with the VP of engineering at this other organization. If we're building a really tight, deep partnership, CEO to CEO should be having conversations. There should be relationships all across the board. That way, if you end up dealing with a really annoying, like, not great person to work with on the other side, you can always escalate and there's a path to get around that person when that person is really pushing you in a direction which doesn't make sense. Yeah, that's what I would do in those situations.

Have a big pipeline of people that you can rely on versus relying on one or two partners. Partnerships is exactly like sales. You need a big pipeline of mutual benefit and be ready to walk. As Christina said. How do you predict what's going to turn out of a partnership? Was there some strategies you use there?

I think it's hard to predict it all, but I would say the number one thing you should do is talk to your partner about what they predict. Right. Because presumably these are like mutually beneficial relationships. So they're getting something out of it. You're getting something out of it. And basically saying, what are the things that you expect to get out of it? What are the things that I expect to get out of it? And let's write those things down and have a doc where we say, okay, three months after this launches, we're going to check in and see are we both getting what we wanted out of this? Because there's nothing worse than, like, a partner coming to me and saying, like, oh, we thought we were going to get X, Y and Z. And I was like, oh, I had no idea that was what you expected by this timeline. So just making sure that you have shared, like, mutual expectations. And then in terms of trying to predict it, if it's something like a distribution partnership, then I would definitely look at how many. If the idea is that, okay, great, every new customer, theirs will be referred to us, I would say, okay, great. How many new customers do you get every month? How many of them stick with you after a certain period of time? Just get as much data that you can from the partner to then use that to predict things on your side. Find whatever data that you can. Also talk to other people who've done similar partnerships with that company before and ask what really moved the needle in those cases. Yeah, that would be my advice on that front.

Some big deals that you worked out that you didn't expect, what were the learnings? And then some big deals that went south. What were the learnings?

In one particular case, there was a partner that was really, as I mentioned before, pushing us on every little bit along the way and had us take a lot of risk in the relationship. And I think if a partner is asking you to take a lot of risk, then I think that risk should be mutual. So figuring out where risk is being taken, and if you feel like you're taking a certain amount of risk, ask that partner to share that risk with you. If it's financial risk, in the case of stripe, share it 50, 50. If it's risk in some strategic sense, ask for a payout if this deal goes haywire or something to that effect. Right. What are the things that can cover you when things go wrong? And really emphasize that when you're working on partnerships where it feels like things are delving into a territory that is maybe unsafe for your business. And then second, we've definitely had a lot of partnerships that I've worked on where, from a strategic product perspective, a partner's asking for a lot on your roadmap. And these are like very large companies that can certainly drive a lot to you. But I'd really focus on the partner that is taking a lot from your roadmap. If it feels like the things that you're doing are things that can be reutilized with other partners relatively easily and made to be generalizable, then that's a risk that's probably worth taking. Or if there's like a roadmap item that partner wants you to move up by six months, but you were going to do it anyway, that feels like worth taking a risk on. What's not worth taking a risk on is the completely bespoke build where a partner wants you to do something that is, like, completely unique to them and it'll be very difficult to ever reutilize. I think that is something where you get into a hole. And that David Sacks quote you mentioned earlier, it can really suck the time out of everything else that you're trying to achieve for your business.

One thing I want to recommend to the audience from a product prioritization standpoint is how many people is going to reach our. What is the impact of that? What is your confidence? And then the last one is ease. The Rice Score. Reach, impact, confidence, and ease. Because you may have something that gets you tens of millions of dollars, but it's going to take you two years to build. And you may have five things in the pipeline that you can build in six months that'll get you to the same outcome. Any books that you highly recommend?

I think Thinking in Backstory by Annie Duke is a really great book in the sense that a lot of the things that we're doing here and as partnerships, people are like, placing bets on certain companies and hoping that they work. There were placing bets on Shopify at Stripe that worked out. There were a lot of bets that didn't work out. But you got to take chances to be able to do well in this business. So that would be one. And then I think a lot Gill's High Growth Handbook is like just a really great book and then there's also a section in it so specifically about hiring for business development people. So if you're looking to build a team, I think that's a really great section to read.

Christina, thank you so much. What a great pleasure.

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