Laura Padilla: Embedding Ecosystem Thinking from Day One

Chip Rodgers  0:00  
Hey everyone. Chip Rodgers saying hello again. We're here in Palo Alto at vectara headquarters, which is really it's cool to be here. And this, this great ecosystem partnering event that's happening all about AI and exciting, exciting to be here. I think, I think better is expecting about a couple 100 people, something like that. So and I am so excited to be joined by Laura Padilla. Laura is a part with sapphire ventures, and as a partner and head of, Head of Business Development for sapphire ventures, and I was with SAP for 13 years, so I know a lot of the Sapphire ventures in the history, sort of Romney burnetski and a bunch of folks there. So just really excited to be talking with you, Laura, and you have such a really interesting background for I think you know, we're all interested in partnering and how to how to partner better. And you have a long history in partnering, most recently with Zoom and Nutanix and box and riverbed prior to that. So always in partnering. So tell us a little bit about why don't we start with, you know, the work that you're doing with sapphire ventures, and how you're sort of bringing all that to sapphire ventures and the portfolio companies? Yeah,

Laura Padilla  1:21  
absolutely. So at Sapphire ventures, like, like, I think you said, I run the business development team, and so we're a small team, and what that means is we help in three different areas. One, build brand awareness for the firm, and that's different industry events that we do, and so forth. Second is expert advisory. So I advise our portfolio companies on how to go to market scale the business, as well as partnerships. Specifically, the third is helping them accelerate their revenue. So we own a large community of customers and partners that give us act that we give access to our portfolio companies, so customers like redible, Amadeus, CVS, for example, that we do innovation sessions for and give them thought leadership updates as to what's going on in the market, industry trends, and also companies that may be of interest to them, and then partnering with banks and other VC firms and industry type companies to be able to also give more access to our portfolio and pipeline companies too. And so that's kind of what I do, and my team does for the firm.

Chip Rodgers  2:19  
So that's that's exciting. It sounds like a fun job, really? Yeah, yeah.

Laura Padilla  2:24  
I get to meet some really exciting people, and also meet with some really smart young founders who have an amazing vision for different companies and technologies, and helping them scale that vision and make it a reality is really cool. Yeah,

Chip Rodgers  2:37  
so kind of continuing on the partnering theme. Or if we can pick that, pick that up. How important we talked a little bit about this before earlier, but how important is it is partnering for startups and and and companies in the you said, Sapphire Ventures is kind of series being up, sort of in the growth phase. How important is partnering,

Laura Padilla  2:59  
right? So most of our companies or all of our companies, are companies that are, we call growth phase and above. So usually around Series B, they have product market fit. There's about 10 million AR and above, and so, I mean, obviously I'm biased, but I don't think we can name one company in the valley that's been successful without a strong partner ecosystem. It's pretty critical to your go to market motion, especially with all the things that you're seeing today from a technical perspective and a platform perspective, to all the different ways your customers touch your product right. And the only way to really be able to do that is through partnerships, and you can do that in either partnerships either help you accelerate product or help you accelerate sales right? If you're thinking about partners in the technology stack side, or partners on the sales side or services side. If you don't understand how to really construct that strategy with partners, there's only so much growth you can really get out of your business, and so we really also invest in leaders who understand that. And if you're going to go either international or different revenue streams or increase the value of your product, you have to do that through partners. And so I spend quite a bit of time also advising our portfolio founders and CROs on how they're going to do that and what things that they should do and how they can leverage that customer value cycle through partnerships to be able to augment it. And so it's pretty critical. I mean, I don't understand how a company actually can do it without partners

Chip Rodgers  4:24  
well. And here we are, vectara, you know, young startup and and they're launching their ecosystem here today,

Laura Padilla  4:32  
yeah. And I love that, by the way, because I think the smartest founders are those that actually understand that early on and invest in it early on. I mean, Bader, who we're seeing today, right? Very experienced partner leader understands that already launched a partner program, you know, right away. And so I love the fact that they're kind of getting started in this, and being able to embed that partner motion into the sales DNA from the beginning is just super important. It makes. It way more organic when you do a little bit later. It caused a lot of conflict in the field, right? And with the different motions. And so as soon as you can start thinking about that, the easier it's

Chip Rodgers  5:09  
going to be. So you're speaking today what? What are you going to be talking about?

Laura Padilla  5:13  
Yeah, so we're on a panel today with various other partner leaders and just industry leaders. We're going to be talking about everything from Gen AI to, how does a partnering work with Gen AI, right? What? What do partnership companies have to think about when integrating Gen AI strategies into their partnership models, just the industry in general, you know, what are we seeing? You know, how are things evolving? And then, you know, just, just in general, the industry.

Chip Rodgers  5:39  
Yeah, well, that's fantastic, Laura, this has been great. Really appreciate you sharing some of your thoughts around partnering and especially in the startup space and and I love that that sapphire Ventures is thinking about that and how important it is for their portfolio companies to be, you know, successful. Great. Thank you for having me chip. This is awesome, awesome. So thank you Laura, and thank you all for joining and we'll see you. See you next time. Thanks everybody. You.

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