Products are cheaper and easier to build than ever before, and product talent is plentiful. Differentiation comes from solving real market needs, not just building interesting products.
Something’s wrong when company founders feel the need to uproot from their homes and move to Silicon Valley to be close to their capitalists. Proximity to customers is what matters.
Andrew is a Founding Partner of GrowthX. He has been in the technology sector since 1998, based in New York City, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Palo Alto.
Andrew began his career in technology as a lawyer for early Internet pioneers such as Alta Vista, Yahoo, and Salesforce while practicing law at Skadden Arps. He left private practice to join DoubleClick prior to the Google acquisition. Andrew then joined Thomson Financial where he co-founded their financial news business leading to the acquisition of Reuters. At Thomson Reuters, Andrew served as Publisher of Reuters News, where he worked on innovation and design-thinking with nearly 3,000 journalists based in 200 countries worldwide. He then became Co-Founder and Managing Director of the company’s legal media business in Asia Pacific and the Middle East.
After 6 years in Asia, Andrew returned to the U.S. and returned to helping early-stage companies. In Silicon Valley, Andrew was early at Guidespark, an employee communication SaaS platform, and BrightTalk, a content marketing SaaS platform and professional community. He then co-founded GoodMoney to democratize high-performance, values-based investing. During that “wonderful learning opportunity,” Andrew met his current partners and co-founded GrowthX.
Andrew is a Kauffman Fellow, Trustee at the Nashville Children’s Theatre, Founding Organizer of Nashville Entrepreneur Week, Regional Board Member of Venture for America, and a proud Mentor at Alchemist Accelerator in Palo Alto, Matter in San Francisco, WeWork in Nashville, and, nationally, at Galvanize. Andrew received his undergraduate degree from the University of Cincinnati and his law degree from Georgetown University.
Sean is a Founding Partner of GrowthX. Sean has over 20 years of experience bringing new products to market, including as a five-times sales founder. Sean’s deep expertise has been codified into a proprietary market acceleration program and entrepreneurial sales training curriculum.
In addition to helping dozens of startups find product-market fit and predictable revenue models, Sean helps global multinationals to identify new applications for their existing technology portfolio, bring new products to market with profitable business models, and organize and train self-managing early product-stage sales and marketing teams. Sean’s successful corporate advisory track record includes work for Bridgestone, Canon, Faurecia, and Clariant.
Sean is a globally recognized sales and marketing thought leader. He was named as One of the Top Sales Influencers You Should Be Following On Social Media, as well as Top 20 Inside Sales Influencers. Sean is a former professional golfer, PGA certified golf instructor, and an active mentor, advisor and guest lecturer at global startup accelerators, innovation conferences, and colleges and universities including Galvanize, Alchemist, GSVLabs and the London Business School.
An investor in more than 150 start-ups, Will has made it his life’s mission to help other entrepreneurs succeed in developing successful companies and achieving their goals. His skill and experience in connecting people have allowed him to build a global network of investors and entrepreneurs, all of whom he considers members of his extended family.
Before co-founding GrowthX, Will raised and led the Silicon Valley Growth Syndicate, a seed-stage MicroVC. Will was also a selling-founder of One-and-Only.com, the largest internet dating site and one of the top 100 sites of the 90s, acquired by Ticketmaster for $47 million dollars and rebranded as Match.com.
Will began his career working with N.B. Hunt, who sent him on a series of amazing adventures across Russia and Nicaragua, including physically carrying $250K of gold from Managua, Nicaragua to Miami, FL every other week. This increased Will’s risk tolerance to the point that starting an Internet company seemed rational.
Max has extensive experience developing and executing go-to-market strategies at the early product-stage across various industries and products. Max’s expertise is helping companies develop the right ideal customer profiles, messaging and strategic approach to build repeatable and scalable revenue generation engines.
As a founding partner at GrowthX, Max has lead over 50 companies through the Market Acceleration Program methodology. In doing so, Max has sold and delivered early-stage technology to numerous Fortune 500 companies.
Before joining GrowthX as a Founding Partner, Max build the sales technology stack and lead generation playbook for multiple early stage companies. His experience identifying ideal prospects and constructing sophisticated, multi-step email campaigns resulted in a 3-5X increase in lead generation and overall pipeline development, putting all companies he has worked with on a path to predictable revenue.
Trends & Insights May 9, 2018
CBInsights recently released their State of Innovation Report based on a survey of 677 strategy leaders. It’s worth downloading and digesting. Based on those findings, here are four deeper insights about corporate innovation from GrowthX […]
How To May 9, 2018
During this podcast interview by Investor Connect, Andrew and host, Hal Martin, explore a variety of important topics impacting funders and founders. Highlights include Andrew’s discussion of four leading trends impacting venture capital and the […]
Trends & Insights March 28, 2018
(This article was authored by Greg Orme, a London Business School Associate Program Director and author of ‘The Spark – How to Ignite and Lead Business Creativity‘) Innovation hacks straight out of Silicon Valley Want […]
