Asher Mathew: Elevating the Partnership Profession Worldwide

[00:00:25] Asher Mathew: Hey everyone, Chip Rodgers host and founder of, Inside Partnering, which is just kicking off. congrats to you, Chip. You know, I know you've been wanting to do this for a very long time, and, the day is finally here. It is here. I'm very excited. And and we've got some great partner leaders lined up for as as guests.

[00:00:45] Asher Mathew: And so excited to be joined by Asher Mathew. Asher - good friend and and longtime amazing, partner, leader and Yeah. CEO and founder of partnership leaders. Yeah, yeah. it's been, [00:01:00] quite the run Chip, we've definitely toured the world and I'm glad to be doing this with you.

[00:01:03] Asher Mathew: Yeah. Yeah. it's been fun. We've gosh, we, Australia, yeah. Couple years ago, Australia and Europe. We had the European tour. Yeah, the first APAC tour, and then we did the Europe tour. Yeah. And then I think we've traveled around the country already too. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. So it's exciting to be, to have you here, Asher.

[00:01:24] Asher Mathew: We've had, we've recorded a lot of videos, but we've never, I've never really sat down and just explored, your background, what's happening with with PL and with the industry. I love to have that conversation, today. Totally, By the way, folks, this is the background is from Chip's House.

[00:01:43] Asher Mathew: I finally got an invite to get to his house, which is fantastic, but this view is amazing, so no. Yeah, I think we've toured the world. We've done a bunch of promo videos, but we've never actually sat down and I would say. Shoot the breeze about partnerships and everything else. But, I can talk a little bit about, [00:02:00] how partnership leaders started.

[00:02:01] Asher Mathew: It was basically, Chris and I were sitting at Dreamforce where he had invited me to an extremely cheap lunch, which is, and I'll never let him live that down. But, obviously we're friends. and we were sitting down and what we were talking about was, Just this explosion of SaaS had taken place.

[00:02:22] Asher Mathew: This was like 2018, right? Yeah. and the need for integrations had exploded because company customers wanted their products integrated so that they could live, the value proposition that these tools had and see, the value. and, and then there was no place for these technology partnership professionals to go and learn about the profession, discuss best practices, share their wins, and celebrate their wins, and share their lessons learned.

[00:02:53] Asher Mathew: and there's just no platform. For these technology partner professionals, just like there [00:03:00] is for sales professionals and marketing professionals and there's a number of platforms for. Even like channel sales and channel marketing professionals, but this persona called the technology partner professional, which today you would also technically call them like app partner managers if you wanted to call them, right?

[00:03:16] Asher Mathew: 'cause there's a number of different names, for this group. there's just wasn't anything else. And and then Chris, who I believe would be if there was like a track record of who actually really started this, like Chris actually sent out this email and, And I think there were like 11 or 13 people on that email, and a number of us competed against each other by the way.

[00:03:37] Asher Mathew: So, it was just the spirit of comradery, the spirit of supporting each other, to elevate ourselves and the profession this desire to see things through and. really, create, take the art out of partnerships and try to get it to a science as much as we possibly could. that's what actually brought us all together.

[00:03:59] Asher Mathew: And then we [00:04:00] had this group and we said, let's, start sharing things with each other. And and we ended up like sharing a bunch of emails with each other, and then we ended up in Slack. Yeah. And and then once we got to Slack, there was a rule that we had created that, people would just invite other partnership professionals and leaders that we knew in our networks.

[00:04:26] Asher Mathew: and this was a little bit like fight club, like you couldn't necessarily get in by just applying 'cause there was no landing page or anything like that. we just started inviting our friends and, all of a sudden I think we had 900 people in this thing. Yeah, that was amazing.

[00:04:39] Asher Mathew: Yeah. Yeah. then we were like. There's something here. Yeah. Yeah. So, that was, I, would say is the, origin story of how this thing started. And, and then, today you're, it's it about 2000 members. Yeah. We're 2200. Yeah. Paid members. Yeah. And I called that out because when we started, [00:05:00] we were free.

[00:05:00] Asher Mathew: And then we said, for us to elevate this industry, we need some resources. Yeah. And given that like. All of three of us were actually working in other full-time jobs. This was really like our I don't wanna say like a hobby project, but this is like our passion project, right? especially for me, it was for sure because I wanted to make sure that there was a group that, or platform for modern partnership professionals.

[00:05:26] Asher Mathew: and, and so today we are 2200, members in, I wanna say 70 plus countries. like the countries is like a, interesting number. To keep a track of. But, there's definitely like 2200 members from 1800 companies and this is like, some of the hottest, high growth companies like, OpenAI and like philanthropic and, then some of the, largest of the largest companies [00:06:00] like, AWS and Microsoft.

[00:06:03] Asher Mathew: Microsoft and Nvidia. And we name it like, like we've got it. even like the other day I was just sitting there thinking, who else is here? And I met someone at the Salt Lake City Summit. And therefore Visa. And they were like, I'm in the community too. And I'm like, wait, Visa's in the community.

[00:06:20] Asher Mathew: And so, it's, it is like the, this thing has actually become, I would say a really special network of professionals that care about elevating our industry and the types of people that we have in the network today are very connected. Yeah. Yeah. and it's, I think it's, partnership leaders is.

[00:06:43] Asher Mathew: Is, it's a community, but it's more than a community. Yeah. I mean it's really a network of people that are connected. Yeah. That care about the profession. Yes. Care about the industry, care about each other. Yeah. And are helping each other. Yeah. you can call it a community, you can call it a private network.

[00:06:59] Asher Mathew: You can call it like [00:07:00] LinkedIn for partnerships. Like you can call it all these names, but at the heart of it, it's people that are serious about the profession, want to elevate it and want to see themselves elevated by virtue of that. is essentially what we're building. Yeah, So as a partner leader or as a new partner leader Yeah.

[00:07:21] Asher Mathew: What, what, are, what's some advice that you would have for a new partner leader for, Hey, I'm just getting into it. I, maybe I had a different role and my company is really trying to create a partner strategy. what's the, Where should they start? Yeah. in the beginning I was, other than partnership leaders, right?

[00:07:42] Asher Mathew: That would be the first place. Totally. No, I like, in the beginning I would've just said, go be a part of the community because we just did not have enough resources to even have this guided conversation. Yeah. And so what we've done over the last, I wanna say seven years now, right? is, [00:08:00] created these guides and these playbooks and these certification paths.

[00:08:05] Asher Mathew: And today I would say, partnership leaders. One is a network, right? And then two is an events company because we've been able to get people together. through conferences, through summits that we're doing right now. And then we've also created an expert services group, which allowed us to do research and provide some advisory services and provide some enablement services for talent.

[00:08:32] Asher Mathew: The reason I'm sharing all these things is because what started off as a community is essentially a research advisory and events company, basically. So it's like research advisory events, community, if you wanna call it that. and through this journey, we've realized the things that work and the things that don't work given the times that we've gone through, right?

[00:08:55] Asher Mathew: So we went through cloud, right? We went through, zer, now [00:09:00] we're going through ai, right? And each one of those moments taught us something different about what a partnership leader should be doing, if they were to start in a company. Now, one other important thing that happened in the, in this.

[00:09:16] Asher Mathew: The evolution of our space is, SAP and Microsoft creating this chief partner officer role. And bringing together all the different functions of partnerships under one unified leader. And today there's 1,048 of them. And I think two years ago, I think there was like 832 of them when we all started talking about this role there, there was like eight and set down the challenge.

[00:09:40] Asher Mathew: Totally Yeah, And then Ahmed and I, obviously our company has basically said, Hey, we're gonna invest and grow this to the point that there's gonna be 2000 chief partner officers taking inspiration from the 5,000 chief customer officers that Gainsight helped create, right?

[00:09:56] Asher Mathew: Yeah. and so this new [00:10:00] identity, this new, that actually shows up on org chart. That has budget and that has authority, that is recognized by the executive teams and boards. this was created, but more importantly, it was created by very large companies. So it has some longevity and durability to it because Microsoft, SAPR just gonna create a role and then, kill it.

[00:10:22] Asher Mathew: The, next year they're like, Hey, we are gonna bring these teams together, the programs together. There are the policies and governance together, the resourcing together. and and now we're going to. Enable a holistic view of the program. And we were very fortunate to have Nicole at our, who's the CPO of Microsoft at our event, where she talked about the pieces that she's put in place and also.

[00:10:47] Asher Mathew: Like what Herp own journey was to get to this point. Yeah. So, if you take all of this stuff that we've done, actually, like the other thing that we did is you and I were, we were curious about how partnerships takes [00:11:00] place in APAC and how partnerships takes place in your Europe.

[00:11:03] Asher Mathew: And what are the current challenges of people outside of the things that we were reading on LinkedIn and we went to these, regions and we learned about the challenges and the successes those people are having. Yeah. We built a lot of very similar challenges. Totally, very similar challenges, different ways to go about solving them.

[00:11:25] Asher Mathew: but I'm sharing this story with the audience because there's a lot of like research and that we've done a lot of content that we've created a lot of people that we've had conversations to. We've navigated a lot of very tough situations in the marketplace. And so to come back to your original question about If a partnership leader enters an organization, what should be they be doing? And I think when a partnership leader enters an organization, my point of view today is they should first observe and assess. [00:12:00] The readiness of that organization to embark on this partnership journey. Today we have a executive maturity model that partnership leaders, after tons and tons of conversations have created, which takes them from like the nascent view of partnerships, which is just Hey, I have an idea.

[00:12:21] Asher Mathew: The CEO comes and says, I have an idea. I want to do some partnering. My board is talking about it. I was on an exec retreat with some CEOs. let's go figure this, partnering thing out, similar to the AI conversation, right? CEOs are like, Hey, my board is asking me about what's our AI strategy?

[00:12:36] Asher Mathew: let's go run some pilots, right? and so, we have this executive maturity model which allows leaders to assess like, where is my organization? Is it at the stage of, of just an idea that partnerships is cool, we should go try it out. Is it, at the transactional level, or is it at the strategic level?

[00:12:59] Asher Mathew: Again, there's [00:13:00] four different steps in this. It's a great place to start. Yeah. Really just to figure out, just where, just observe where are you? Yeah. Don't, say anything. Don't make any bold statements. Just observe and have conversations. But in the back of your mind, or I would say definitely somewhere where you would document.

[00:13:17] Asher Mathew: Document the learnings and map them to a maturity framework. Or a maturity model. Yeah. and, I'm not saying that we have the best maturity model, I'm just saying we have the most real maturity model based on the learnings from our members and the conversations that we've had. 2200 partner leaders Yeah.

[00:13:34] Asher Mathew: mean, it's, sizable, right? and, and you remember like this, the hero of our story is one persona, right? Yeah. It's like the partnership leader. It could be the partnership leader, the partner marketing leader, the partner success leader, the partner engineering leader, the partner ops leader.

[00:13:48] Asher Mathew: It doesn't really matter, as long as you identify as a partnership leader, you could also be a CEO that identifies as a partnership leader or A CMO or CRO. But if you are. Someone who cares about partnerships, like that's [00:14:00] the hero of our story. This entire company's built on that. and so for that person then to go and an organization and say, I am gonna start my journey here, it's important to observe and assess and then map the capabilities of the company.

[00:14:17] Asher Mathew: Yeah. And then start getting stakeholder alignment by putting together a value of partnerships deck. And then once you put the value of partnerships deck together, it'll map out the strengths and weaknesses of the organization and the capabilities needed to be successful at partnerships. And one good outcome of this, of the value of partnerships, deck or process, is that you would get some resources to go and experiment to understand which types of partners should be prioritized.

[00:14:52] Asher Mathew: Yeah, because today you have cloud partners, you have technology partners, you have services partners, you have, [00:15:00] VCPE banking partners, you have MSPs, var. there's, the, partnerships world, I would say is equally comp as complicated as the marketing world or the sales world. Yeah. and so, you really have to decide very logically what, which partners are you gonna invest in first?

[00:15:21] Asher Mathew: So that you can go from this thing called the pilot of partnerships to a program of partnerships, and you do have to drive the company to, take this one partner type and make them successful. Yeah. Similar to when you started, don't just don't do this. Yeah. There's no spray and pray, right?

[00:15:44] Asher Mathew: Yeah. Like similar to when you go to a a, startup. You would understand, Hey, am I gonna go work with SMB customers? Am I gonna work with mid-market customers? Am I gonna work with enterprise customers? Icp, you have to. Exactly. You have to figure out your ideal partner profile and said, so [00:16:00] once you go through this experimentation, you would ultimately land on the ideal partner profile In that partner type, right? Yeah. And then, you can start learning from your customers and figuring out the value chain of your customers. and then understanding Hey, what other partner capability does my company need to be successful with these customers? And then as the customer types and the geography types and the industry types grow inside of a company, so do the partner types grow and then you can bring different capabilities.

[00:16:40] Asher Mathew: Inside. And then you go from one partner program or one partner type supported through a partner program, and then multiple partners supported through the program. And you ultimately end up with a very large program. and and I would say that it's very important for leaders to understand that programs drive budget.

[00:16:59] Asher Mathew: They [00:17:00] drive resources. otherwise you're just running pilots and you can start with some small number of resources. To, or maybe you have to borrow some resources from other parts of the company to, because then it's formalized. Yes, totally formalized. And you put some goals out and then you measure the goals and, totally, Yeah. So this is also another really good point. Yeah. If you've started your journey in a company, I would say curb the urge to put a number out there without having some sort of empirical evidence. Yeah. There's no glory in. Signing up for a number, even though the entire infrastructure may be wanting you to do that.

[00:17:42] Asher Mathew: And this is where stakeholder management comes into place and say, Hey, if you have no history of building or supporting, partner capability, then we're just, we can just pick any number. it's gonna be wrong. And of course, executive buy-in and things like that. [00:18:00] Support from the, leadership and leadership team and, all that.

[00:18:04] Asher Mathew: same thing by the way, is true. If the company was already Yeah. Had a partner. Had a partner program. Yeah. And they had paper partner capability. When you go and you, again, you have to observe, you have to assess, yeah. See where things are on this executive maturity model and then start to think about capabilities that you need to, to again transform this company from wherever they are to wherever they need to be.

[00:18:29] Asher Mathew: Yeah. the one piece of advice that I'll share that I have now learned. By hanging out with a number of very senior partner leaders, which I'm extremely grateful for, is you do also need to make it a point to make sure the company realizes that you are there to advance the company's goals.

[00:18:54] Asher Mathew: Yeah. So it can't always be about. Hey, my partner, is this, my partner that this, [00:19:00] that it can't be very, it, definitely should be externally focused, but it can't be all about external focus. It also has to be about, hey, we're building this partner capability because it will help us get to the company's goals so that we can build the bigger company so that we can serve more customers.

[00:19:18] Asher Mathew: Right? Absolutely. So this is a very key thing and and you are gonna, and you need to understand the, partner's goals. Yeah. And, align, yeah. The goals, but you always have to remember who's paying your paycheck. Totally, totally. and there's like this thing about internal advocacy that has actually come up quite a bit now in the last few months, where if you're a senior leader, you're, you should be thinking about how do I programatize internal advocacy?

[00:19:48] Asher Mathew: Similar to how you would programatize external advocacy, right? announcing partnerships on LinkedIn and stuff like that I think is great. doing videos with them, going [00:20:00] to, amazing a class events with them, like all this stuff is great, right? Because it will help, you recognize your partners, which I think is important, to do, but.

[00:20:14] Asher Mathew: You also have to think about program izing, internal advocacy, which again, is something new that I've picked up over the last few months. I'm sure people are doing it, but calling it out I think is important for the partnership leader so that they can build it into their plan. Yeah, and, so that there's internal recogni.

[00:20:34] Asher Mathew: that's how resources are allocated to all them. Yes. Oh, these guys are doing amazing job. Yeah. we talk about it as Hey, A QBR is taking place and, a company, town Hall is taking place and let's make sure that partners are highlighted. And, I think that does the job, but to me that's still a very ad hoc way of doing this.

[00:20:55] Asher Mathew: you need to programatize, like wind wires need to go out. press releases [00:21:00] need to include partners. you need to create a quarterly, or even a monthly, email that goes out to executives explaining to them. What, it's almost like marketing will share internally. Yeah. Yeah. It's, general marketing, but like marketing will share stats about their stuff all the time, right?

[00:21:20] Asher Mathew: interestingly, executives have dashboards and, senior executives definitely do, right? and you can put your partner metrics on that, but the context, the management summary of what's actually happening in the field. I think it's important to like, summarize on a monthly basis and send it to all the senior executives.

[00:21:39] Asher Mathew: that was one question and just a catalyst for a whole bunch to me. Great. Great. I know, I'm like, we're gonna have to do more of these. That's right. Asher, you're just so plugged into the partnership community and, hearing and connected with everyone all the time.

[00:21:57] Asher Mathew: Yeah. What are some of the, maybe the top. Yeah. [00:22:00] Two or three. AI of course is I'm sure a challenge. Yeah. What are some of the top challenges that partner leaders are seeing today that you're hearing about? Yeah, so I would say, when we put out this value of partnerships.com resource, I honestly thought in another quarter, everybody's gonna use it.

[00:22:18] Asher Mathew: It's gonna be great. We're gonna, we're gonna be done, with it. And that's actually not true. And what I've found is. explaining and re-explaining and reaffirming the value of partnerships to the organization is very important. So I would say from what I've learned over the next, last, few months is do not think that's automatically happening.

[00:22:41] Asher Mathew: This is absolutely a priority for, and it should be a priority for you. Then the, next piece is, Making sure that the right people are in the right seats because your program is evolving and the partners that need more [00:23:00] love are probably evolving. And if you don't have the right talent on the team, you probably need to do something about that asap.

[00:23:10] Asher Mathew: But you also need to rethink those seats. Because if you have a 20% team, let's say for example, or if you have a 40% team, right? And you're going to go invest in cloud partnerships, which is happening quite a bit, right? Yep. and even though, we all know that cloud partnerships existed for 10 years, but people are still, In investing in them or learning how to invest in them. don't reuse one partner manager who was doing great with VARs in this cloud partnerships world because even though 80% of partnerships is the same, the last 20%, which is domain experience and domain connections may not be the same. And that partner manager may be able to stretch and get you there, but it's similar to.

[00:23:59] Asher Mathew: I [00:24:00] would say sales reps, right? There's some sales reps that are really good getting to use from zero to one. There's some sales reps really good to get into from one to a hundred, right? so you need to costly assess. The people in your teams, but really assess the roles, like what do you have? And when we did this, executive round table at Catalyst this year where we had a number of, again, a very senior leaders and super grateful for, them to be there.

[00:24:25] Asher Mathew: one of the thing, the things that did come up was like, we as a senior leaders need to rethink our organizations, right? And it has nothing to do with Do more with less, or how can we make them more productive? It's just are we now staffed up and organized well to make it easy for this time's partners to work with us and to me, I think that requires some.

[00:24:51] Asher Mathew: Some, dedicated thinking time and dedicated planning time. And also I would say it requires dedicated networking with other leaders who, [00:25:00] just to see like how are people think other people, what's working and what's, yeah, because like, one of the fundamental questions that I would challenge everybody that's like listening to this thing is if you have an app partner manager and you have a channel partner manager.

[00:25:17] Asher Mathew: Like, how do you assess the productivity of each of those roles? Those are two separate roles. Yeah. And where do you go to get that data, as not a partnership leaders, I'm just saying, I'm just proving the point where they're like, you have to go talk to other people to, really make sure that you have, you are, as you have assurance that this data is actually correct.

[00:25:39] Asher Mathew: and that you're measuring and, looking at, the right thing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. yeah, so, that, yeah. Is just some other, another big thing that's come up outside of the value partnerships, there's like org design. there's obviously the pilots that people are running with ai.

[00:25:58] Asher Mathew: I think we're getting to a point where [00:26:00] we do now understand the few use cases that you can have success with ai. I would still say like even for my own usage. you just have to be careful of like hallucinations even today, right? Like when you ask AI for data points, you have to validate that and verify that and probably talk with other people.

[00:26:20] Asher Mathew: And it's like, I'm back to the gtp. GPT five just came out yesterday and yeah, it's, better. It's better, but, again, you, still need to, yeah, you need a short, you need a human in the loop. Totally. Totally. Because the thing is we're not talking about sales, right? It's not hey, there's A first call that takes place. Then, there's deep discovery that takes place. Then the solution test takes place. Then you have to figure out like budget and the timeline, et cetera, et cetera. You do that. you there a lot of partnerships is now, I would say systematized, right? But you still need to talk with other people who have domain experience [00:27:00] To understand the nuances of what's happening in the domain, because whatever macro trends are taking place are going to affect the customers and then equally to the partners. and the value of just making sure you have a network or, 10 people or 12 people that you can chat with, I think it's, still very important and I don't think AI can substitute that today.

[00:27:24] Asher Mathew: Yeah. Yeah. So Asher, let's talk about pl. Yeah. you guys have, you're in the middle of the Catalyst Summit series right now. That's, going on. You've got, catalyst London, or Europe coming up in London. Very exciting. And, but tell us, Atlas, there are so many things that you guys are doing.

[00:27:46] Asher Mathew: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about what's, coming. Yeah. I talked a little bit about this earlier, but the, journey that we are on is an industry elevation journey. and like, I said, like our hero [00:28:00] is the partnership leader or anybody who identifies as the partnership leader, right?

[00:28:04] Asher Mathew: And, and for us, as we have grown the network. We ident pretty much like our rule is like, Hey, whatever the people need, just build it for them, right? Yeah. And so, when we started a major, we got, we had a major benefit from COVID because COVID really gave us that pun intended catalyst, right?

[00:28:29] Asher Mathew: To create this digital network. And then when COVID subsided, we started a meetup, which I believe. we did one at the frying pan in New York, which is essentially two ships kind of partner next to each other, which was technically the first partnership event, which is amazing. that, the location like that even existed, I think 60 or 70 people showed up to it.

[00:28:54] Asher Mathew: and and then on the backside of that, we actually did the first official [00:29:00] meetup, if you wanna call it, which was the first catalyst, but Yeah. Which four 20 people showed up to it to And so Miami. Miami, exactly. And then from Miami, we went to, or let's see, where, did we go after that?

[00:29:12] Asher Mathew: Denver. Denver, yep. Chicago. Chicago. Yep. Seattle and then Seattle. Seattle, yeah. So, CHIPS basically said when we've at Miami, I'll be here. For when we celebrate the 10th anniversary, he actually has all the badges and, I've still got the badges. Totally, And, that actually gave me the idea to actually have all the badges.

[00:29:28] Asher Mathew: And so I have actually also have the badges because you actually inspired me to do that. and actually I also have the first gobo that we had, I, dunno if you remember the, big catalyst sign that we, put out. Oh yeah. And then the, when I was leaving the, texts were like, Hey, you should take this with you.

[00:29:44] Asher Mathew: 'cause. It'll be memorable. but anyways, like that, scope of subsiding gave us catalyst, right? And then as we kept on maturing and, and, [00:30:00] growing, and, earning the right to serve leaders, we realized, research and benchmarking is very important. And thank you to our friends at HubSpot who actually taught us.

[00:30:12] Asher Mathew: The value of really good research. And we've done a number of, things with them. We did a number of things with, your older, ex-friend, or not ex-colleagues. Yeah. 'cause they're still friends at works span. you and I met at, the cross people event, in, in Philadelphia. And then Crossbeam was like.

[00:30:34] Asher Mathew: Supporting us in the beginning to just figure out how a community forms, and so, we've had crossbeam, we've had HubSpot, we had work span, so like start this movement with us, right? Then we met our friends that in partner. Then we had some friends online matrix, Salesforce, like tackle, like, all these companies that we've been fortunate to work with allowed us to.

[00:30:59] Asher Mathew: Elevate [00:31:00] ourselves to earn the right to work with executives. And then those executives wanted research benchmark, supported research advisory, and, and talent. And so we created this unit called Atlas. And so today, partnership leaders, the company has this membership business, this events business And this research and advisory business. And so in in a way, we would look like any of the. Large, research and advisory firms that we all read reports from and stuff, because they all have events and they all have digital communities and stuff. And so, we would be very closely, we would look alike them today.

[00:31:41] Asher Mathew: And like I said, like we're building this for a very long time and see, we'll see where it goes. But, focused on partner leaders Yes. Only, right? Yeah. Very much focused on partner leaders. And so as we, exited last year. or wrapped up last year, we were thinking about like, we have [00:32:00] tons of mixers that we do, And meetups that we do, and, they are very focused on what's the number? It's incredible. It's a lot. It's, in addition to Catalyst, I know I, it's a lot literally around the world. I probably need to chat with Chris about like where, how many we've done, but. But between digital events and between physical events, I think one year we did a hundred plus events, and I think that was a lot.

[00:32:23] Asher Mathew: Yeah. and, but, then, 10,000 people went through these things, right? or if you think about it, the, what we learned was that. connecting and networking is great, but we now need to provide high quality content in some of the key cities where there's lots and lots of partnership leaders.

[00:32:47] Asher Mathew: And so San Francisco would be one. New York is one. Austin is one. the, Denver is one. Salt Lake City is one. Chicago is another one. Yeah. [00:33:00] So, we, said, okay. How Francisco, I don't know if you said Yeah. San Francisco. Yeah. so we said, okay, how about we do a five hour event and we take the top, top, thing, things that, that, we're learning from our community, and then we address those challenges and share successes at these things locally.

[00:33:22] Asher Mathew: Yeah. Makes it a little bit more convenient for people to go out to and attend an event for half a day. And, and, then they get the top trends. That are happening. and they can also meet with other leaders and, like, share, share their, their success, stories.

[00:33:41] Asher Mathew: So, that's how the summits became a, program. And, now, in the second half, the thing that's unique is we're going to be going to a number of, conferences that are run by other companies. And so this year we're gonna have a summit. At the same time, there's Dreamforce is taking place. we're [00:34:00] gonna have a, summit at the same time as reinvent. As reinvent is taking place. And we did that last year too, right? And then we're going to have a summit at the same time as Ignite is gonna take place and we're have the same summit at the same time as Inbound is gonna take place.

[00:34:12] Asher Mathew: And so, we figured that the company names that come up the most in our community, it's worth us going to their conferences and showing them. The same type of respect and love that they've shown to us. By sponsoring our event, we should go and do things there and then build the partner hub at these events.

[00:34:33] Asher Mathew: And so no matter where you are as a partnership leader, you can attend one of our summits. You can go to Catalyst in London if you happen to be in London, which is the first time we're gonna do that? because of the number of times people have requested a European event. and, and, then I guess we'll see where we go from here.

[00:34:52] Asher Mathew: Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. You've got a lot going on. I don't know how you guys are. I know. It's, insane. I just look back and say [00:35:00] we're, like, we're super fortunate to be able to build a company for a persona. That we deeply understand. Yeah. Love and are connected in, right? Yeah. And and it started as a passion project.

[00:35:15] Asher Mathew: It's totally, it's a totally, it's a company. It's a company, we would be a series B company if we actually, were fundraised and, so, it's, become a thing, and we're super grateful for the opportunity for, and, for, frankly, for all the support that we've received from like the members.

[00:35:35] Asher Mathew: The senior leaders in the market, the sponsors, the people that are building technology. there's a number of new entrepreneurs that are entering this space who are gonna create amazing software that is a little bit more AI first, and and then we'll see, where it. Yeah.

[00:35:55] Asher Mathew: Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Asher, thank you so much for taking the time [00:36:00] and sharing all the things, the amazing things that are going on with, partnerships in general with the industry, with, with, challenges that we all have and with, with pl And thank you for, you and Chris and Ty for, for kicking it off and getting it started and, building this incredible, executive network of people together. Yeah. And thank you to personally because you took a bet on us when we were, I would say nothing. like I remember having that conversation at, on a tabletop in Philadelphia talking about just catalyst and. I think it was like two months later that we did Catalyst, right?

[00:36:40] Asher Mathew: Yeah. And then we were like, Hey, I think we need to go to these, regions to figure out what's happening. And you're like, what's going on out there? you're like, oh, let's go figure it out. Yeah, exactly. so, thank you for being a, core driver of this community with us. I also, if we were to go back a [00:37:00] little bit, I remember.

[00:37:02] Asher Mathew: going to an EcosystemAces community event. way, back Mayfield back. Yeah. The Mayfield office, And 2017-2018 somewhere. Yeah. And then we, you had, some executives from SAP and that was the first time we, I was like, wow. There's a group of partnership leaders that gets together, to discuss just what's happening in the space.

[00:37:26] Asher Mathew: and so you've done tremendous amount of work, plus all the amazing drone videos, that you've done, which have taken off, and now this, project, which, will also, is for the benefit of the industry. Yeah, fantastic. Asher, thank you. Thank you. And thanks for taking the time.

[00:37:44] Asher Mathew: Thank you to our sponsor and thank you all for joining us. Sponsor Coke. that's right. we, both grabbed a Coke and we homey. And partner. And partner, just coincidentally. All right. thank you all for joining and we will see you next time. [00:38:00] Thanks everybody. See you people.

[00:38:05] Asher Mathew: All right. Cool.

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