When I started in BD your job as the BD person is ideally if you're doing first-in-kind product or platform type partnerships your best friends should be the heads of your engineering and product organization. It's your job to maintain a good face internally about the partner because you don't want your internal team whether that's like engineering product other BD people finance etc. To be adversarial in their process with the other counterparts with the partner's organization. And then also figuring out where it makes sense to press and where it doesn't make sense to press at a given time I think is really critical. At Notion we have a client platform team which basically builds the Notion desktop app the
Today’s episode is with Cristina Cordova, Notion’s Head of Platform & Partnerships. Previously, she was the 28th employee and the first partnerships hire at Stripe, where she cultivated partnerships with companies like Shopify, Squarespace and Apple, built out the BD org, and led their new Corporate Card effort.
After a decade in partnerships, Cristina has bagged big deals, honed her negotiation skills, built out teams — and made plenty of mistakes she hopes others can learn from. In today’s conversation, Cristina pulls from across her career to share the inside scoop on deals that had an unexpected outsized impact — as well as the ones that went sideways.
She also shares her playbook for being a startup’s first partnership hire, including the three critical areas to focus on first, and the common traps to avoid. It’s also full of actionable tactics on everything from dealing with partners trying to push you around, to how to hire for partnerships roles and structure the org chart.
Today’s conversation is a must-listen of course for folks currently in or hoping to break into partnerships, platform or BD roles, but Cristina also shares great tactics for getting better at negotiating, as well as some fascinating stories of how Stripe and Notion scaled — meaning there’s tons to learn here for everyone.
You can follow Cristina on Twitter at @cjc.
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