Andreessen Horowitz’s Sarah Wang: The best performing companies are prioritizing partnerships
In this Supernode 2022 onstage interview, Crossbeam Co-Founder and CEO Bob Moore and Andreessen Horowitz Managing Partner Sarah Wang discussed how an investment in partnerships builds resiliency for companies amongst economic uncertainty.
According to Wang:
- “Partnerships are more important than ever. Specifically, because you are bringing in pipeline, shortening sales cycles, and increasing conversion rates.”
- “Partnerships are a ‘need to have’, not a ‘nice to have’, especially in this environment.”
- “Partnerships is the #1 hire that we hear our early companies making. Our best-performing companies are relying very heavily on partnerships.”
Highlights:
- 1:40 – An investors take on the current market.
- 2:20 – “Efficiency is back in vogue.”
- 3:20 – Why partnerships are “more important than ever”.
- 4:20 – Why a company with 50% partner-generated revenue is a safer investment than a company with 100% sales-generated revenue.
- 6:20 – The old-school misconception about partnerships (and what’s changed)
- 9:40 – “The most powerful partnership programs combine [tech partnerships and channel partnerships].”
- 12:00 – The rise of the partnership professional.
- 14:30 – “Partnerships is the number one hire we hear our early companies make and our best-performing companies are the ones prioritizing partnerships.”
- 19:00 – The great unbundling of tech and whether or not a re-bundling is in the future.
- 23:00 – The story of partner success can be tied to company success. Here’s how to tell that story to your CEO.
About Sarah Wang:
Sarah is a general partner on the Growth investing team focused on enterprise technology companies. Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, she was a Vice President at TA Associates, a global growth equity firm. There, she invested in and partnered with founders at growth-stage companies across technology, tech-enabled services, and financial services. Sarah also served on the board of DiscoverOrg/ZoomInfo, which scaled to over $350M of revenue in the enterprise sales and marketing intelligence sector. Sarah holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business where she was a Siebel Scholar and Arjay Miller Scholar. She holds a BA in Economics from Harvard and grew up in the midwest across North Dakota and Chicago.
About Bob Moore:
Bob Moore is Co-Founder and CEO of Crossbeam, a collaborative data platform that helps companies build more valuable partnerships by discovering which customers and leads they have in common. Moore previously co-founded Stitch (Acquired by Talend in 2018) and RJMetrics (acquired by Adobe by way of Magento Commerce in 2016). Moore’s writing about technology, startups, and data has appeared in The New York Times, Forbes, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and numerous other publications. Outside of his day job, Moore has served as Board Chair of Philly Startup Leaders, improv comedy performer at Philly Improv Theater, and Trustee of the Glassboro Education Foundation.
About Crossbeam:
Crossbeam is the world’s first and most powerful partner ecosystem platform trusted by more than 8,500 technology companies. We act as a data escrow service that finds overlapping accounts with your partners while keeping the rest of your data private and secure.
