6: Kathy Tsitovich, Chief Corporate Development & Partnerships Officer at LegalZoom: Hope Is Not A Strategy - Thoughtful Platform Building

In this week’s episode, Kathy Tsitovich discusses LegalZoom’s transformation into a platform, with all of the challenges and successes that have occurred along the way.  See key topics from her discussion with Avanish below: 

• The early days of platforms and the LegalZoom customer channel (01:42)
• Identifying stakeholders in order to guide platform strategy (05:51)
• Curating valuable, lasting partnerships (09:45)
• Defining and measuring platform success (14:35)
• The importance of executive support, organizational alignment, and the long view (17:14)
• Kathy’s lessons major lessons learned and final thoughts (23:58)

Guest: Kathy Tsitovich

Kathy Tsitovich is the Chief Corporate Development & Partnerships Officer at LegalZoom – the industry leader in online small business formations and a leading online platform for legal, compliance and tax solutions.  Within this role, Kathy is responsible for driving company growth through inorganic efforts, a robust integrated partner ecosystem created for LegalZoom’s newly formed small businesses and opening new channels for new user growth via strategic partners. 

Prior to joining LegalZoom in 2020, Kathy spent more than 20 years at Intuit, where she held multiple leadership roles, including Vice President of Business Development & Partnerships for the consumer group, leading the Global Partnerships team focused on delivering small business partner solutions and integrations via the Intuit Developer Platform. She was also a key member of Intuit’s Corporate Strategy & Development. Kathy holds a patent for algorithms and models for creditworthiness based on financial management data and is a 2014 winner of the Scott Cook Innovation Award for her contributions to QuickBooks Capital.

Kathy graduated from the University of Missouri with a B.S. in Business Administration and Finance and is currently the Executive Sponsor of the LegalZoom Women’s Network. 

Kathy lives in Chicago with her husband, two kids and dog, Bear.  When she’s not catching up on email or writing a “to do” list, she enjoys spending time with family and friends, reading and playing golf as much as possible during the super short Chicago summer!

Host: Avanish Sahai

Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and has served as a Board Member of Hubspot since April 2018. 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 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,  Kathy Tsitovich
• Follow our host, Avanish Sahai
• Learn more about Tidemark

You can find the full transcript here.