Partnership & BD

"I was able to basically position and say, 'Look it, you want to work with us. Let me into your alpha, because I have five years of experience already buying mobile ads. I know the space. I know it'll work. And if you get us to work, we're a killer case study...'"

"Very often the way to make things happen is network-dependent, not necessarily about the merit of the thing itself. So it's just like, there's companies that exist because the founders know the CEO of every major payer in the country"

"McDonald's actually approached us and they said, 'We'd love to do food delivery with you.' And I said, 'No.'... I pushed them off for four or five months... I think it actually ended up being in net benefit because we got a great deal with them."

"The problem with channel partnerships and why I don't believe in them is there are a hundred of you on this list and you're expecting them to sell it on your behalf. Biggest no-no, they're not vision casters, they're not visionaries, they're consultants."

"Use that corp dev team to your advantage. It's their job to meet absolutely every company that could be potentially interested. So take that meeting, say you're not interested in an acquisition just yet, but push them to make an introduction to someone that could sponsor the deal. So usually that's someone in product or maybe a GM."

"Venture capital partners was a huge one because when you get money from a new VC, they ask, they're like, 'Okay, thank you for giving us this money, now we want to expand our team with the money you gave us. What are your other portfolio companies using? What is a platform that you trust that you would recommend?' So people go to their VCs for that kind of question."

"I just had a conversation on the internet. I have this whole thing where I do think a lot of people trying to get ahead in their career, especially in technology, should just write cold emails, cold DMs, notes, put out content, et cetera and that leads to good things."

"Go and meet every single peer that you have you don't directly meet with. Go get coffee with them and ask them, 'Hey.' Have no agenda. Just ask them what's going on in their life, who are they, what their life story is and then who are a couple of interesting people that you should meet with?"

"Why don't you figure out what the scalable solution is for this? We will build you a product. You won't need to come ask us every time to build something. And then you'll know the parameters in which you can negotiate."

"We should have gone out and tested this at one hotel with just some hacky operations and seen what the uptick was... before going and asking for the product resources."

"Being a good partner in business is like this corporate marshmallow test that companies tend to fail in a very funny way... If you're talking about long timeframes, like 100 years, there is no question. But clearly, the correct way to play iterated prisoner's dilemma is coordinate for both sides. It's way more valuable doing that over long periods of time than any momentary defection could possibly be convenient at a moment."