32. Greg Sarafin, Sarafin Advisory

This season features conversations with key decision-makers who have shaped the evolution of today's leading technology platforms and ecosystems. We talk to C-suite executives, board members, investors, and others who must be bought into the platform journey.

In this episode, Avanish and Greg discuss:

• Greg's journey at the intersection of technology and professional services, including his role building EY's global partnerships practice into a substantial business driver
• Why most companies remain confused about partnerships, platforms, and ecosystems, and how successful companies are "built from the ground up" to orchestrate ecosystems
• Microsoft's transformation under Satya Nadella as the gold standard for ecosystem strategy - shifting from competing against everyone to becoming a platform that orchestrates the capital of hundreds of thousands of companies
• Why the future belongs to companies that shift from linear value chains to orchestrated ecosystems where they either orbit around or become the center of mass for other participants
• The urgency for C-suites to think beyond operational AI improvements and envision what their industry will look like in five years

Host: Avanish Sahai

Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and served as a Board Member of Hubspot from 2018 to 2023; he currently serves on the boards of Birdie.ai, Flywl.com and Meta.com.br as well as a few non-profits end educational boards. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow.  From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase.  Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early-to-mid stage startups in Silicon Valley.

About Greg
Greg is the Founder of Sarafin Advisory which he launched in 2024 to provide companies with actionable advice and insights to help them grow Enterprise Value in an era of immense change and opportunity. Previously, Greg spent over 9 years at EY where he was most recently the Global Vice Chair - Alliances and Ecosystems. Prior to joining EY in 2015, he spent seven years as an executive at IMB, running one of the top five accounts at the firm and then managing the professional services P&L for Banking and Financial Markets in North America. He also held significant leadership positions in financial service technology and digital disruption across industries. In addition, he helped found a health payments dot-com and, prior to that, ran his own software development company.

About Tidemark

Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale.  Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years.  Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.

Links

• Follow our guest, Greg Sarafin
• Follow our host, Avanish Sahai