5: Tom Shea, OneStream Software CEO: The Platform Evolution

Tom and Avanish kick off the session focusing on what it means to build a platform, and a partner ecosystem around that platform. Then, they dig into where Tom is on the platform journey. He’s been building OneStream for some time and it has grown amazingly well, with a marketplace of over 50 solutions and over 200 partners. They cover… 

• Driving towards constant improvement and platform dependency (7:23)
• What the true definition of “platform” is and the necessary mindset to achieve platform status (9:27)
• Recognizing the right patterns early on in the platform journey (15:25)
• Separating platform thinking from traditional product thinking (17:00)
• The biggest roadblocks for platform building (19:10)
• The evolution of cloud ecosystems over the last several years (28:09)

Guest: Tom Shea

Tom is an original founder of OneStream Software™, an original architect of OneStream, and serves as CEO of the company.  He is passionate when it comes to delivering value, success, and support. Tom’s vision is to change the entire CPM ecosystem with a solution that combines power and flexibility with ease of use, deployment, and maintenance. Prior to OneStream, Tom was an original founder of UpStream Software in January of 2000 where he invented and architected UpStream TB and later UpStream WebLink. These products pioneered a new space called Financial Data Quality and achieved a better way to manage data quality for Hyperion products by providing a packaged product (UpStream/FDM) every company could use. Tom is a graduate of Oakland University, where he earned his BS in Accounting and Finance as well as an MBA in Systems Analysis and Design.

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

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• Follow our host, Avanish Sahai
• Learn more about Tidemark

You can find the full transcript here.