On this episode of the Unlearn podcast, join hosts Kelly and Asher as they sit down with Nate, a dynamic partnerships leader, to unravel his fascinating journey from business process outsourcing to the world of financial services and banking partnerships. Discover how Fintech partnerships evolved amidst regulatory challenges and data sensitivity, and learn about his groundbreaking integration framework. Plus, Nate shares essential tips for aspiring partnership leaders.
00:00 - Introduction & background
03:56 - Nate's partnership journey
06:52 - Evolution of the technical side of Fintech partnership
14:20 - Working through an integration framework
16:58 - Discussing Nate's LinkedIn post - 12 points to make partnership deals more meaningful
19:12 - Understanding the complete lifecycle
23:25 - Unwinding partnerships
26:58 - No one company can serve everyone
30:52 - Reporting structure for partnership teams
37:10 - Understanding who your team is
38:55 - Building a network of trust
45:48 - Recommendations
"A partnership has to be terminated, so a new partnership is formed based on the new realities of the world. There are 8 billion people in the world and no one company can go and serve 8 billion people by themselves."
Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Unlearn Podcast. And, you know, today we have somebody that we caught off LinkedIn. It's interesting because normally Kelly and I just go to our networks, and why don't we talk a little bit about how you got to this podcast?
00:42
Yeah, I don't even know. I'm not sure how I got to this podcast.
00:46
Nate just shows up where he's at and he's like, 'What is this podcast about again? Hey, guys!’
00:55
The meeting showed up on my calendar, and I made it.
00:58
That's great.
01:00
I have thoughts, and I think there were a bunch of people tagging on my thoughts saying, 'Hey, it's probably Google people saying, 'Hey, let's get this guy a microphone or something to that effect.' And next thing you know, I'm here with you guys. So, I'm super excited to be with you, excited to chat and get to know you better.
Thanks for having me on.
01:25
Super. All right. So, I think I remember this. So, the way this happened was you put a post out that did the best job of articulating what a next-generation partnerships leader would look like, right?
And I represent a company called Partnership Leaders—literally the name. And what's interesting is when I joined full-time this year, I called up Frank Hans, who runs partnerships at A and he's a GM-level person.
And I was on the phone with him and I'm like, 'Hey, so what are some of the things that are top of mind for you?' Right. And he said, 'You know, why do you know what a good partnership leader looks like today?'
And, I paused and said, well, actually, I don't. So, we started this thread around what a good, or I would say, great partnership leader looks like.
We then realized that many of the current partnership leaders weren't looking at the complete customer journey, with a lot of focus on acquisition and pre-sales, but not enough on post-sales.
And so we started noodling on this thread. And I went to meet Basim, who runs partnerships, and he had his definition and thoughts about it. Then we put it in this conference called Catalyst, where this was a marquee theme.
And then, when you put this post out, I said, 'Whoa, wait! This looks like an amazing post. Let's have Nate on the podcast.' So, I believe that's how you got here.
03:00
I'm super happy to be here, and that's kind of you to say. It's funny when you pose that question there; I think most people make it to partnerships in a very roundabout way.
Like, I didn't even know I was doing partnerships the first 10 years of my job; it wasn't even called that, right? But that's what you're doing. So it's funny you kind of migrate into the thing, and then you fall in love with it. You never want to stop doing it, right?
That's the thing; you realize there's so much bidirectional value, it creates so much value.
That you can't, it's almost impossible to go somewhere else, right? Because you're touching every part of a business, right? You touch marketing, you touch sales, you get ops, you get the tech side, you get the product side, you touch every part of the business, finance, and why go silo yourself in some little part when you can influence the whole thing?
03:56
So, tell us: Well, I guess we'll start by asking you to tell us about your partnership journey, just so that folks have some context.
04:01
Yeah, so I started my career in business process outsourcing. At the time, you know, you were fighting, lifting, and shifting jobs, right? You were moving jobs offshore, and that was your entire role. And it was, you know, back in those days, it was just impossible to differentiate yourself, right?
It was like, 'Hey, what's the cost of this person?' Right? Because I was going to move this job to this country. What's your cost for that person in that country? And they were going to do all the work, right?
We started building technologies and we started thinking through what technology meant in that business, but we had to go find all these providers. Like, well, how are we gonna differentiate?
So, here, my title was 'Solution Architect', but really what I was doing was partnership work to go find and augment our capability. We said, 'Oh, we're gonna introduce tech here, we're gonna introduce tech here in this part of the process.' And so, we were forming these partnerships at that time.
But it was under the name of Product and Solution Engineering, and from there I went to Wells Fargo Bank and just started, and that's when, kind of, I mean, my whole career has been in financial services and banking and financial services partnerships.
That's how you win, right? I mean, no one realizes that your money and Venmo are sitting in a Wells Fargo account due to the partnership deal, right? So from there, it just continued to move into the Fintech motion. I was a founding member of the Fintech Partnership Team at Wells Fargo back in 2014 or maybe 2016.
Because banks don't know how to partner, right? Like, there's all these, we don't know what to do with them. Are they enemies? Are they not enemies? What are we gonna do with these guys? And let's go figure that out.
But, you know, we went and figured that out; you gotta figure out all sorts of frameworks, you know, how are we gonna assess them? How are we gonna move them through risk? And I think that's where this, like, aha moment for me was of, 'Oh my gosh, like this isn't about just selling, right? This is getting a deal done.'
This is about a long-term thing. I mean, when you're dealing with some of our customers who were 100 years old at Wells Fargo and Wells Fargo was like 150 years old, you have a very different perspective of what long-term means.
A long-term partnership and, and they're hard to unwind, you know, at a bank. And so, you have to think about these things scaling over time.
Um, and then it was just so fun. I jumped into the fintech side; I just saw them growing and had an awesome opportunity to build and jump on the innovation component of that. I wanted to be on the other end of creating the future, so yeah, that's how I got it.
06:52
Here, how would you say the sort of technical side of the Fintech partnerships has evolved because of all the regulation and sensitivity around the data? Right? If you look at something like martech, where you have so many APIs and it’s table stakes now that everybody's open to each other? And that's why we have over 9000 Martech systems, and they're all integrated.
But in Fintech, the journey's been very different, right? Like, to even get to the point of having open APIs was a struggle, and there's just sensitivity around the nature of the data.
And, I think, to your point, these old institutions had established ways of doing things, both culturally and from a technical perspective. So, I'd love to hear what you've seen in terms of how has that journey unfolded on the more technical side, and where are we today? And where do you see that going?
07:51
Yeah, I'll tell you a funny story. This is kind of behind the scenes. I'm gonna be super candid here, so there at Wells Fargo Bank. I don't even know if I'll get in trouble for this. We'll find out later...
08:08
Well, number thirteen on your list of twelve things that partnership leaders need to worry about is, like, not upsetting people.
08:18
I remember a meeting when I was at Wells Fargo Bank. There was this frantic conference call and a bunch of leaders jumped on and said, 'Hey, our servers - the computer on our servers - is going crazy. It was like our servers were getting hacked or something was going on. What was the problem?'
We've had it like this: all hands on deck for an emergency. When you trace the IP, you're gonna love this - it was Plaid.
08:53
That's exactly what I thought when you started this story. I mean, they ended up just having to settle a quite large lawsuit. I don't know if it was large for them, but it was, I think, tens of millions of dollars they ended up having to pay.
09:08
It was just...I mean, it was just demolishing the computer, and so coming out of that experience, it was like, 'Hey, there's gotta be a better way.'
I mean it was almost shocking, like, 'Wait a minute; people gave their credentials to log into their bank to this little Fintech?'
It sounds funny now, but at the time it was like, 'Hang on a minute; like somebody gave their banking credentials to this little Fintech? Why would anybody do that? Like, that's crazy.' You just gave them the keys to the kingdom to do whatever he wanted. Like, whoa, what is this? Right?
It was really funny, but coming out of that, I mean there's, there's now, 10 years later, regulation with Dodd-Frank on consumer data and what that means. And, I mean, I'll even go a little further into this story: some of the individuals in that meeting were like, 'Hey, we need a better API; we need to do this, right? We need to create access for this.'
And a certain individual in this company, who had a substantial budget, whose boss told him, 'No, we're not building APIs; we will not do that.' He just ignored him.
This is the real story behind the scenes of how the API (I'll call it the B2B API) got created: an individual told his boss and said, 'OK, that's fine. We're gonna work on these projects.' It was kind of like, 'Fix the online banking portal. Fix this, fix that.'
Really, what he did was he dumped all resources and built the API without his knowledge. That’s the true story.
10:43
This person is ballsy; I like it, as well.
10:50
Now he's doing the same thing, but he came later.
10:52
Back, he's probably retired.
10:55
Yeah, I mean, he just said, 'Look, this is what we did. It's now an award-winning API for a bank, right? I mean, that's one thing that's very different in fintech. But he took a serious leap of faith.
You saw the future, but, back to your question, I mean, there had to be consumer permission. We were terrified as a bank, you know, having our data go anywhere. And, in straight honesty, Venmo, who was a customer because that's who people were connecting to, got a dump of this data from Plaid that they didn't even know what it was.
Right? They're like, 'What's all this transactional data?' Like, 'We just wanted to see if there was money in the account, right? Why, why is there two years of transactions, like, what's all this stuff?' Right? We don't want that.
I mean, they were kind of calling the bank going, 'Hey, we got all this stuff we don't want; like, how do we just limit it?' Um, pretty interesting scenario, but I mean, you look at it today, it's being regulated; people have informed consent, they know that two years of transaction data, they're being informed.
There's still so much to do; there's just a huge runway ahead to fix this. I mean, I think the FDX standards are doing a really good job of creating and building standardization around this data because it is really meaningful for this data to get into the right hands and to empower people, right?
I mean, people can now see their data in a way that they've never seen before. The bank's going, 'You just robbed my treasure trove of data; this was mine, right?' Um, and kind of adversarial, but I think that's all freeing up right now, right?
I think that that relationship has changed; partnerships have changed; you see them deepening the relationships with these fintechs, and even acquiring them to some point. But like tech, it needs to feel like that, right? I mean, that's a really good model. Look at this stuff; it just intertwines, build your stack, take your Legos, create this stuff, and see what happens of value. It's going to start feeling like that more and more.
13:07
It's a super-interesting story too, because I think this is something common in platforms, right? Where it's like Plaid was responding to such a strong demand, a strong need? To have more interoperability, which is why they were able to get away with it. Because they did it, they later ended up having to pay out fines, but they were meeting such an important need.
And I think that, for platforms, right, there's a lesson there: if you don't open things up, there will be players in your space who will go through the back door to get people the data they need to meet their business objectives. And it's something to keep in mind, right? Because I think a lot of times, especially older companies, these established companies, may think, 'Hey, we could just continue business as usual.' And, 'We've been around forever, so why not?'
You will have people who will seek to do it with or without your sanctions, so it's probably better to get in front of it and have a way to sanction it and enable it in a way that you're comfortable with than to just completely lock down. Then, you get actors who are going to go and do it for their customers anyway.
14:20
Yeah, I wrote this morning and I'm gonna post it on LinkedIn. I mean, back to this question of integration, you know, what does that mean? And what does that look like? And data? I mean, there are very few. So when I was at Wells Fargo meeting with this fintech, I met with 100 fintech in the first year.
Zero of them had an integration framework with a bank, or an idea of what to do with the bank, right? So, I drafted today; I was sharing the framework that I've built and used and collaborated with others on how to work through an integration framework. Like, what does this mean?
What are the things that you've got to work through, right, to build a way to connect in a meaningful way that can last for a long time?
And you just don't see that many frameworks, or maybe people are hiding them. I, I don't know; it's just a little baffling to me. So, you know, you've got to have some sort of process. I mean, maybe not; I prefer a process and prefer at least rules, if you know, my company culture is trying to play pickleball, and your company culture is playing tennis, right?
Everything looks the same: there are baselines, a net, paddles, rackets, and a ball. But if you're not playing the same game and the same rules, and don't have a framework to guide what you can and can't do, the rules are very different. You need to identify that up front, especially in your integration plan, right?
So, hopefully, I'm gonna put it out there. I mean, it's very high-level; I'm happy to share the details of that later. But I want a standard of that to at least have a place to start from and say, 'Gosh, what does data look like? What's your architecture look like? Why were you architected the way you look? What problem were you guys solving? And what problem are you gonna solve together now, moving forward? And does this make sense?' And there are a lot of go/no-go decisions, and too many.
I don't know. Now, now I feel like I'm ranting, but there are too many upside values to individual partners for compensation and incentives where they don't want to go or a no-go decision, right? They just want to close a deal, and there are a lot of checkpoints in there where you want, especially when you're dealing with big companies and you're doing a deal with Visa or Google or Microsoft or Amazon or some of these companies.
Dude, there are a lot of dangerous places; you have to decide whether to go or not, and those integration frameworks help.
16:58
Yeah, no, I think you're right. And so, along the lines of that, I'm just gonna read the 12 things that you put out, which I thought was an awesome list of things that people who want to be at the highest levels of partnerships should understand. Right. And even people who are aspiring executives that then become executives.
Then they get fired, and then they learn--you know--so it's like...
17:24
That you got fired, exactly. We just went through that cycle before the high.
17:29
Like, it happens so much, right, right? And, and, uh, it's my core belief that, like, we're gonna crowdsource all this stuff. Like, and that's why partnership leaders, the company does not put out hard content on these things because it's an evolution, right? But the list they put out, right, first said that point number one was like the.
The leading partnership leaders should understand evaluating alignment structures. The second point was leading product integration sessions. The third point was building market analysis and landscape data. The fourth was a decision, sales, marketing, and distribution models. The fifth was designing effective pricing structures. The sixth was long-term IP and legal structures. The seventh was reviewing implementation best practices. The eighth was capturing onboarding and delivery requirements.
Number nine was architecting and communicating plans. Number 10 was developing robust client support models. Number 11 was extracting reporting and analytics insights. And number 12 was building a convincing business case and budget for approval.
I mean, if I look at this list, this is literally what C-level executives are supposed to do today. And almost I think 70% of them fail at this stuff because they only come from presales and they don't understand post-sales. They try to learn marketing first, but then it's easier if they just learn post-sales first and then learn marketing. But like there's more partner people.
That is, have, like, some sort of info about those 12 topics, more than most sales leaders, because they just rely on sales ops. Right? And partner people just don't have partner ops today. And, uh, and the folks that have risen themselves or elevated themselves to, uh, to operator status understand these things.
19:12
Yeah, it's, you know, it's interesting. It takes the entire life cycle, and a lot of that's like pain, right? I've been through the pain of each one of those steps of not doing that step. Right. I think about not doing the right IP step. We were right in the midst; I was working for a company called MX Technologies, which is a Plaid competitor, by the way.
So I went from Wells Fargo to the Plaid competitor because I saw a lot of opportunity there. But we were working on a cool deal; it was a three-party deal.
So it was MX Technologies, Google Cloud Financial Services, and then a large financial institution. And you're in this moment of, 'Hey, we're gonna take a part of us, a part of you, and then the data from your bank and do this thing together.'
Um, and you can imagine the number of attorneys and discussions around IP structure of, hey, what's gonna happen when we identify Xy and Z who owns that? Right? And you always hear this, like, 'Hey, we're gonna do this partner, one plus one equals three.' It's like, 'Yeah, OK. But who gets it?'
20:26
Who gets it very quickly?
20:29
And who gets 0.9 of the three, right? Or who gets 1.6 and who gets 1.4 of the three? And when you have three or four parties involved, you're dividing that equally among the three. Um, it is complex. There is a lot of slippery ice right there. That can cause long-term pain. So, you've got to solve that early. I mean, those things that you listed out, like if you take our pipeline today at Loan Pro, all of that stuff has got to be done before the proposal.
Right? So that's Stage Four for us. So, partner, like on our partnership team, we're trying to draft that stuff.
21:12
Before we did this, it was great. I mean, it's almost like it's a cool Google point because, after I talked with Frank, I got him on the phone with my good friend Arnie, right? And he's a CIO and the first thing he says is, Well, you know, Asher, there are a lot of shitty partner people out in the world. And I'm like, Well, this is gonna be a great podcast.
Right, and from there I realized that most people miss rigor, and it's exactly what you're talking about right now: you can't skip the steps. It's not cool to just go hang out at a bar, and stuff like that. I think that old stuff is necessary in itself. Right, but the rigor...
People who are already operating at that level want to work with you because now they're working with someone who understands how this thing operates and how to scale it, which makes the relationship much more enjoyable. So, rigor is not viewed as red tape; I think it brings top-quality people together.
22:21
Ah, no question. I mean, everyone, the kickback or I would say the pushback I've had in the past on doing some of this stuff. They're like, 'Nate, you're slowing the deal down.' Right. You're gonna slow this deal way down or you're creating too much chaos in the deal or there's too much conflict in the deal. So, and it's like, look when that comes out, that's where you find out who's who, right?
Like, that conflict is really important in the deal because you're gonna see how they react. So, let's say 10, I don't know, five years down the road they release a competitive thing, and all of a sudden they're taking some of your market share and you were supposed to do that.
And they learn, you're gonna get in this conversation about that, you're gonna know how they're gonna react or when, when you need them. Like, 'Hey, this is a real problem. We need you to step up, look at this data, we need your help.' They're like...
You know, Vacant, you're gonna know that, would you rather know that before you like to sign a deal? I would.
23:25
Like, so talk, talk a little bit about unwinding partnerships. I don't know if anybody's spent much time on this part, and I know you mentioned it, right? And I can see, because of the scale that you're operating, and for those people, listing bank systems are not like iPhone systems, right? They are very legacy; they were designed for security, speed, and things like that. So, when you have to unwind one of these things, it takes a lot of time.
23:53
So, think, think about this: at Wells Fargo, they had 1,600 core systems. So, in any other world, that would be like 1,600 P systems or 1,600...whatever that is. Right? That's the main operating system that you live in. Um, like you, you build to that thing. It's gonna stay there forever.
They're designed to be off the internet; they were designed to never be on the internet. Right? Because they didn't want anybody getting around that stuff. But when you talk about unwinding, I mean, you look at, I, I give a, I mean, the example that comes to my mind was a lawsuit that the USA had some cool IP technology about taking a picture of your check.
Right? And there's all this cross-operability between banks and, and also in a lawsuit, I think this is all, I'm, I'm sure this is all, you know, it's probably, you know, out in the world but they hit big banks with lawsuits, right?
Like saying, 'Hey, you've disrupted my IP.' Well, there's also this, like, operating agreement that we're gonna move money together and, and we're gonna like, help support you do stuff and you're gonna take the overflow. And so this lawsuit shows up for three or $400 million and some relationship manager is like, 'Well, I do the relationships with USA A, you know, what, how are you gonna operate and how are you gonna like unwind and untangle that stuff and negotiate some of that stuff?' Um, look, if you do these deals, right? You kind of have those trigger events in the contract to pull you together.
And say, Hey, when this stuff happens and we have conflict, we're gonna get back together and start having the discussion. If we can't figure that out, then we're gonna do this, and if we can't figure that out, then it's gonna get to attorneys, right? And that's where you don't wanna go. Nobody wants to go there.
25:45
But, are you talking about when you say unwind partnership? Are you talking about the end of a partnership, because that's inevitable, right? And I agree, we don't talk about it that much. And maybe part of the solution that you're saying, um, Nate, is to try to think it through at the beginning, right? Like, it's kind of like, I don't know if it was prenups the right word, but kind of like making sure that there's, you're foreseeing that there's gonna be a situation where the partnership may have to end and how do you do that in a peaceful, respectful manner?
26:16
I mean, there's some of that which is like part of the areas that, like, sometimes you have to isolate areas where they're not going to play and they decide to play. Right. That's a great example: you're not going to do this, we are going to do that, and all of a sudden you see them start doing this or the thing that they said they weren't going to do. Well, what are the trigger events?
Like, we came on to talk about building partnerships and now we're talking about, like, how do you kill these things?
26:41
I mean, sometimes they have to die, right? Like, for sure. I mean, it could just be that platforms change, technology changes, right? Like that. There's a whole spectrum of reasons why partnerships may have to end. Also,
26:58
Any day, we do this podcast where it's an art number; we just talk about death.
Friday the 13th, Friday the 23rd - you know, they're all in the same thing. No, uh, no; the reason I said this is because sometimes, due to macro changes, this is like a lesson we should all know about from the last 36 months.
A partnership has to be terminated, so a new partnership is formed based on the new realities of the world, right? And there's, like, 8 billion people in the world and...
No, no company can go and serve 8 billion people by themselves. Like, it doesn't exist, right? And so for most companies, it's interesting because I was in Denver and we were sitting down and having this conversation about how the US government makes it difficult for solo entrepreneurs or sole proprietorships to exist, right? Because we are all in venture land.
Like, we can raise money based on our networks and stuff like that. Solar printers have a really hard time even buying houses. So then the conversation became, 'Well, how many solar printers are out there?' I believe there are about 29 million businesses that are registered.
22 of them, or 23 of them, or maybe 24 of them, right? Like, are sole proprietors and then, and then, and then this is like, like this is, this is like people that are registered, right? And then, out of 7 million, there are only about 15,000 companies that are over a billion dollars in revenue, and that's who we all compete on, by the way, right?
Uh, but those, the scale of what, those, those 15,000 or 16,000 companies that are over a billion dollars, uh, uh, do and how much effort it takes to win all of their business, right? Like, Sheriff Wallet, if you talk about it, is a lot, and nobody can do this by themselves. Like, even Microsoft can't do it.
28:55
Yeah, no, I mean, we're in it, and it's just getting better. You know, I feel like the partnership role is finally getting some recognition; there's some clarity around it. You see, I love that you're posting, 'Hey, congratulations so-and-so, you're a Chief Partnership Officer, right?' There's a seat at the table in the executive suite for the partnership person to have a say, who's typically rolled up under a CRO or Head of Revenue or something to that effect.
29:22
Does he care or not care about it?
29:24
Yeah, but what I see now is that these people are hinged into the product in a new way like they're inventing the thing, they're helping build and create this new 0 to 1 or whatever you wanna call it.
And they have so much more influence on the strategy of the business. And then it's like, 'Hey, we're gonna go figure this thing out and then hand it to revenue and say, Here's repeatable, here's rent, you know, whatever rents in your platforms. But the real grit, rigor partnership people, right? Then, the like...'
I don't know the operators, and they're like with the product; they're with founders, they're in there, building, creating, and launching this stuff that then says, 'Hey, we've proved it's gonna be awesome. Here are another eight years of revenue for this business,' and then they're onto the next thing, saying, 'OK, I'm gonna go find another eight.' That's the fun part; that's where whoever's out there aspiring, growing, or trying to think about where they want to be.
I'll tell you right now: there are just gallons of satisfaction in that part of the business, getting to that part where you get to build and create with the product people or with the founders and set strategy.
OK, here's this thing that just brought so much revenue; it was going to bring so much revenue.
I mean, if I could spend all of my time doing that, that's what I'd do. I mean, it's just the funniest thing in the world. That's it.
30:52
Interesting that you say that, because Asher and I ran a survey last November of 650 partner people, and what we found is that most partner teams are still reporting to this CRO, but companies that were smaller than 2001 employees all said technology partnerships were the most significant partnerships for the organization.
Now, the enterprise said it was the second most important, behind channel partners, which is part of that model that has existed for decades. But I'd be curious about your thoughts on that, right?
Because, insofar as you're reporting to the CRO, there's gonna be some tension there for technology partnerships and how close you are to the product. I will say I work at HubSpot on the technology partnership team, and we do report to the Product; the Solutions Partner team reports to the Chief Customer Officer.
31:50
Because you don't have a Chief Partner Officer
31:52
We do not have a chief partner officer; however, what thoughts are you having?
31:57
That? And then this problem--I'm just kidding. Maybe I'm not actually with it.
32:02
So what I think about that is that you have to earn your place as a partnership person, right? So when I joined MX Partnerships, I would say I reported up to the CRO within, you know, kind of six months.
All of a sudden there was this huge shift of, like, 'Wait a minute, these guys are doing partnership deals with Visa, Google, and Microsoft now, they've never brought that before, right? What is that?' And it migrated out to the Chief Product Officer.
And it was like, No, no, no, no, no, no; I got this, and it just kind of pulled the partnerships into the product, right? To say, 'Hey, we're designing something very special here.' This needs what I call the 'Day Walker.' It's like the tech-savvy deal-maker, right? Someone who can read APIs can understand what the technical integration piece is, but they know how to do a deal and a deal at scale. .
It just kind of pulled it over, so we had to earn the right to do that, right? It's the same thing where I'm at Loan Pro today. It was a very different motion. It was kind of like product-led growth at Loan Pro, but now, like everything that partnerships do, goes right to the founder and the product team, right?
It informs and is basically like feeding back information to the CRO and the revenue side.
But they also have now shifted, and they love this. Right? They love, Oh my gosh, I get this voice of the customer because I'm on the front line listening every day. Take it to the partnership team and say, 'Hey, look at this gap, this gap, this gap. Do we fill it with partners? Where is it on the road map?' And they start playing this other role, right?
That's highly supportive, and I would say minimal contention. But if you're in high growth add more salespeople; you know, just add heads to grow at all costs because we have an 'easy button' of venture capital like what 2000 and whatever 20 was 21-19 like that; that's different.
It's just like all roads are, it's like 'grow revenue, grow revenue, grow revenue.' We'll figure out how to operate it and we'll hire a bunch of Ivy Leaguers once we do our thing and get our exit to operate the.
34:23
Business, hire an adult later.
34:30
We're paying the price for that right now; that stuff is being undone right now, right? And every day, you're like...
34:36
Layoffs, right? Because people are just.
34:39
20% of people, 75 people, are left and people are like, actually understanding how to take the demand that's organically existing and not actually manufacture deals, but just let them come to this, you know, which is technically how if you have an amazing value prop and an amazing product, or I would say you have an amazing value, a good product, and really good marketing, you're still gonna get there, right? It's not like you won't get there. Yeah, but...
35:04
Partnerships, I mean, in my mind, like partnerships, they're gonna accelerate that, right? They're gonna help that. They're gonna think differently, right? Those people think the very first thing in their mind is, 'Hey, what value am I gonna drive for this partner?' Right.
And it's very bidirectional in their thinking; they operate differently. They're like engineers; they want to solve problems. They think about stuff. It's not just like, 'How do I navigate this deal and get to the right person and influence this thing because I gotta get this contract signed for my quarterly thing or whatever that is.'
And I'm not saying all salespeople are like that; I'm not, I'm not, I don't wanna like Yeah, say that, but very rarely. And I've met with a lot of companies, right? Having worked at Wells at scale, like meeting with those teams, partnerships; people will think differently, like they are, they're altruistic oftentimes. Right.
They want to do good, and they, I mean, the really good ones think about, well, what's this impact? What is my action? What's the reaction, or how is this going to impact the other person I'm working with?
36:09
I want to double-take a little bit of what you said about earning the right. Right? And I want to play a scenario for our listeners. It's like, so you roll up to the CRO, and now you want to be a peer to the CRO, right? Or the CMO, right? Now, if you come up with wacky ideas all the time and the ideas are unformulated and they aren't ready for scale and stuff like that.
The COO and the CMO are already dealing with the individual called the CEO, so they're not gonna be like, Oh, let me just add another one to the list so I can go, like, completely do this, right?
And, we all know this happens, right? As CEOs go on fishing trips, boarding tours, F1 races, they come back and they're like, Oh dude, this is the answer to my problems. Let's go figure this thing out, and all of a sudden the executive...
Right? So, that's one piece.
37:00
And Asher is the CEO, and this is the feedback he's gotten from his team: Yeah.
37:10
You are correct. Even at a small company, like partnership leaders, correct? The way I was operating last year was like an Uber sales guy. I literally on December 31st, as I was going full-time, said, Guys, you're gonna see a remarkable difference.
It doesn't mean that I'm disconnected from the system. I have just seen four CEOs go through this transition of how they fired their sales every year and we hired them for the next role. It's very difficult, but you have to do it intentionally, right? But, anyways, that's like a sidebar. But I just wanted to share that like earning the right...
It requires intentionality. And this scenario does play out in COS, because I did go from a VP of Biz Dev to a CRO, similar to how Nate went from AC, uh, from a partnership leader to an innovation leader. It's just a very different role across the org, right? But then the second piece of this is understanding who your team is.
Because, like, when you fire yourself as a functional leader--let's call them a channel chief, right?--and then you go to an operator, your team is actually like everybody else on that C-suite table.
And at that point, they're not looking at you as the person who is only responsible for partnerships; you're responsible for the entire business, just like the CIO is also required.
Sponsor for the entire business, right? And then it's because the comp models are all aligned, as they all work off of bonus plans, right? And so, I wanted to double-pick on this because this is an amazing episode, by the way. After all, we talked about unwinding stuff and earning the right. We haven't talked about this even before, and it applies to a lot; it applies to every role, but specifically the partnership's role, because we're in a state of transition.
38:55
Yeah, let me know, it's funny. I was just thinking about the org you designed. I mean, I had relationships and deep relationships and trust from the ecosystem. So when I came to this crop, right?
I was coming with this army of, say, the Head of Financial Services for Google Cloud, like, 'Hey, here's this person. We both believe in this, right? And we need resources to do this.'
And for a little small fintech, it's just like, 'Oh my gosh, like we've had that person in an account map and we've been trying to figure out how to SDR into that guy or that girl for who knows how long,' and you just like brought this person in and said, 'You've been working with them for six months because you had this idea and you wanted to build this thing.'
So there are moments in a relationship, and these things matter over time. I mean, I look at the deals that I do now and I'm 23 years old; I mean, I've got five years, probably five good years left, and then I'll be forgotten.
40:01
That was a dark turn.
40:08
I Titled This
40:09
In the episode, I built relationships.
40:13
Back to all the time and they come to me. I mean, it is like, I mean, these people moved from Amazon to Stripe and from Stripe to Visa and they just bring you into stuff because you've built this network of trust that, hey, we're going to operate on a level that works and we're going, to be frank with each other.
But I'd say that because you're able to bring those people in, bring that partner, bring that executive, create this vision. I mean, you have to sell that, like them, exactly what you're saying. It's like the CEO has got all sorts of ideas. We were laughing.
I was just laughing so hard about that because we've all experienced it and experienced it every day. But you've got to, like, bring a plan and a point of view and say, 'This is why this matters,' and look at, 'Here are our top three things that we care about. Look how this applies to what that is and what we're trying to do long-term.'
And present that internal business case. I mean, the very last thing on my slide: like we're in stage four, you're presenting a business case to Ac Ro to your founder, and they're presenting it to their business. Like, in stage four of the deal, to say, 'Are we going to do this?' That's where you earn the right, in my opinion; that's how I've earned the right.
Is saying, 'Look, I've thought about this; it's not just fly-by-night. This is how it applies. And, by the way, here are all these milestones where we can say no. I gave escape routes and ejection buttons all over the place to say, 'Look, you're in control. Let's just see if that happens. This is your call; you're the leader, it's your job, but you can hit that button any time and eject, and no one's gonna be offended because we've already talked about it.' Yeah.
41:49
What's the story about the shoes?
41:55
So, this is going to be a little vulnerable now, right? There's probably some, there's some, like, I, as I was thinking about that.
42:03
Okay, Kelly says I've been all the time; I grew up.
42:07
So I grew up super poor, right? As a single, single mom. Like, she was a teacher and I had a job when I was 13 years old. I left my house as a junior in high school and kind of supported myself because it was just like a burden off my mom. But I lived in this little corner of this neighborhood that was the poor group. But everybody around me had these mansions, right? So their dads were like, Oh, I'm the chief legal officer at Huntsman Chemical, and this guy, you know, he's running Marriott hotels, and this guy owns this huge thing.
Um, but anyway, like that was when Jordan's had come out, right at that time. That was just an emerging thing in 1986 and I was right in the mix of all of that, but I couldn't afford a pair of Jordans. There was just no way I was ever going to do that. So some of that probably is just me going, 'Don't buy as many of these things as I want now. And I'm gonna feel good about doing it.'
Great! Oh, it's fun. My kids love it; it's really like a family thing where we're on the hunt. We only buy on the drop, right? So, we're not buying the secondary market. So, we're all on our phones on the day of the drop, hoping we get the $150 pair of Jordans. So, we only go for those. But it's been super fun; my kids love it, and I love it.
And it's been a great thing, like a great family thing, and probably a good emotional thing for me.
43:53
That was a good origin story, and also there's a partnership angle, right? Because I don't know if everybody's seen the documentary. Actually, no, it was a dramatic retelling of the story of how Michael Jordan made the deal with Nike.
Super interesting, right? It was a new model at the time and he took a share of the profits of the shoe, which was not the common model at the time. And obviously, that turned out well for him and his estate.
But it was an interesting story, how he kind of single-handedly, well, in the movie, they portrayed it as his mother pushing it. I don't know how accurate that was, but he and his family pushed this concept of, I'm gonna put my brand and my likeness on this and I'm gonna be motivated properly to do it and get the return behind it, which I think is a partnership story.
44:49
Kelly, I love that you brought that up. Um, it is such a cool point to be able to just kind of whitewash the existing one, on the partnership deal. And you don't have to look at your existing business and say, 'Hey, what's the art of the possible on this thing? How would we price this? How do we do this differently because it probably hasn't been done?' And you have to think creatively about that. 'What are the impacts? What's the downside? What's the upside? Is the upside worth it?' Like, I love that you brought that up. That is, to me...
For sure, the funniest part is to say, 'Hey, we're gonna create something that's never been done before, right? Like, this is gonna be something we go back to and love and talk about, and we'll tell our kids about it; it will be like a fun story for our grandkids, like, 'Hey, my dad was a part of that,' or 'My grandpa was a part of that.'
Um, I mean, that's what we should be striving for as partnership leaders, right? Like, build that thing that's meaningful, that has the real impact that lasts.
45:48
On that note, we're gonna bring you back on the podcast and all of our guests we've opened a conversation with and you're like, this podcast is called Unlearn. So we're unlearning all of the things of the past and, uh, that at least try to go to market, uh, that is just not working anymore and, or we believe that aren't gonna work anymore.
And so the conversations that we have on this podcast are not just our partnerships, even though, like, both Kelly and I love partnerships. Uh, that's why we're doing this. But, uh, but, but as we...
As we go on to hopefully have a great weekend, are there people in partnerships or not in partnerships that you would recommend we connect with and that our listeners would enjoy learning from?
46:39
Yeah, I mean, I have like this endless list of hidden heroes of partnerships, you know? Um, you know, oh man...
46:53
Take two, for example: Who are the top two?
46:56
Mean, I'm Imron, a hater who is now running; he just took a job at it to build, you know, a cool new API for it. I mean, this guy is a builder, but a true partnership maker and you're just not gonna hear from this guy. I mean, he's behind the scenes, he's in the product, he's doing his stuff.
You know, the strip people, Nate Star, is probably one of the single most talented partnership people I've ever worked with in my life and he doesn't have a partnership title. I mean, I think his title is probably like Corp or, you know, something in the M&A frame of things. But that individual...
Is reshaping my thinking entirely on how to think about deals, how to prepare for deals, and how to prepare to unwind deals. Like you've said, how do we just anticipate this? And Nate - he's just a super sharp dude; he knows how to do it. And Peggy Mango - I don't know if you know Peggy; she runs Fintech partnerships at Chase now.
She was very innovative. She was at PayPal Ventures for a while; she's just phenomenal. I love her to death. We worked on some cool stuff together when we were at Wells Fargo. Like her, she has a very different view; everybody has their own thing, right? There's not this silver bullet; one of my best mentors said there are no silver bullets, just a shit ton of lead ones, excuse me.
But she's kind of like that; she's got this relaxed vibe to it. Um, but yeah, those are the ones that come to mind.
48:43
That's great. Um, we would, I know you're in partnerships and we normally don't like to talk about stuff like this, but our Event Catalyst is in Denver. It's August 21st to 23rd. If you have time, we'd love to have you there because what we're doing is creating a full-blown conference, extremely high quality, only for partner people.
Others, everybody's invited, but it's time that partners got their own, like, really love.
49:08
Yeah, I'm in. Whatever I can do to support it, I love, I love that. Like, that sounds amazing. I would love to participate. I'll make time, put it on my calendar, and get out there for sure. It's great. Super!
49:19
All right, Nick. Thank you so much. Yeah.
49:22
So good to meet you, guys. Thanks for having me on.
49:27
Thank you for listening to Unlearn. Subscribe wherever you listen, and visit UnlearnedPodcasts.com for the transcripts
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