Wednesday, March 24, 2021 - 04:30 PM - 06:00 PM, PDT
As a founder, you may feel like strategic partnerships could be a huge help OR a huge distraction. Join us for a conversation on building relationships with strategics, moderated by Liz Wessel, CEO of WayUp. WayUp has entered strategic partnerships with relevant or even competitive companies that have helped their business tremendously, led to an investment, led to more channel partnerships, led to inbound M&A interest, been an utter waste of time, and more. They even heard of companies having their work/ideas stolen as a result. Often, it can be hard to evaluate whether to enter into a strategic partnership, what the best way to think about the time commitment should be, and so on. For this discussion, we will focus on strategic partnerships from a BD/Corp Dev sense rather than a sales sense. As such, we thought we would bring together Founders and CEOs to share stories/advice on how they’ve gone about strategic partnerships, what has or hasn’t worked, and so on.
Zendesk started the customer experience revolution in 2007 by enabling any business around the world to take their customer service online. Today, Zendesk is the champion of great service everywhere for everyone, and powers billions of conversations, connecting more than 100,000 logos with hundreds of millions of customers over telephony, chat, email, messaging, social channels, communities, review sites, and help centers. Zendesk products are built with love to be loved. Learn more at www.zendesk.com.
For more than 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has helped innovative companies and their investors move bold ideas forward, fast. SVB provides targeted financial services and expertise through its offices in innovation centers around the world. Learn more at svb.com.
Fenwick provides comprehensive legal services to leading technology and life sciences companies — at every stage of their lifecycle — and the investors that partner with them. For more than four decades, Fenwick has helped some of the world's most recognized companies become and remain market leaders. For more information, please visit fenwick.com/.
Crosslink Capital is a leading early-stage investor based in the San Francisco Bay Area investing in emerging growth companies since 1989. They are a proven team of early stage business builders investing out of their ninth fund ($350M). Crosslink partners with ambitious entrepreneurs who are reshaping massive markets with disruptive technology.
Burkland provides strategic financial services for venture-back startups to help them scale. They offer Fractional CFO, Startup Accounting & Bookkeeping, Tax Services, People Ops, and Financial Due Diligence.