The Partnership

Maya Mehan

GTM Lead

As the first employee at Tunic Pay, Maya faced one of the hardest GTM environments imaginable, selling AI into highly regulated tier-1 banks as an unknown startup with no team and no room for error on credibility. She built a trust-led GTM from scratch, embedding deeply in the fraud and banking ecosystem, positioning partnerships as collaborative efforts rather than vendor relationships, and working directly with engineering to shape a product that met banks within their AI comfort zones. The results speak to the quality of execution: fifteen-plus pilots secured with top fintechs and banks in London, including closing the largest business bank in the UK, all as a team of one.

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Elizabeth Niemczyk

Senior Director, NA Sales

Leading a sales organization through full-scale AI disruption, Elizabeth faced the compounding challenge of transitioning her team from selling a VoIP system to a comprehensive AI-powered communications platform, all while managing shifting buyer cycles and net revenue retention complexity. She deployed a structured AI strategy anchored in process, people, and product alignment, rebuilt the go-to-market motion around faster execution, redesigned the entire compensation model globally, and repositioned Aircall from a communications tool to a genuinely AI-competitive platform through deeper partnerships and market reeducation. Conversion rates more than doubled, year-over-year growth accelerated significantly, and the team is now hitting targets that weren't even attempted the year before.

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Elain Smith

SVP Commercial

When Elaine stepped into a VP of Partnerships role in 2024 and then SVP of Commercial in 2026, she was navigating two challenges at once: building external credibility in a market where even the terminology for what Volt does varies by country, and finding her own voice as a leader who had to overcome the feeling of being too junior for industry conversations. She pushed through both by stepping onto panels, appearing on podcasts, and deepening partner relationships through targeted events, while executing a lean Australian market entry by leveraging existing global partners rather than waiting for dedicated local headcount. Four partners completed global integration to bring Volt live in Australia, the partnership channel maintained its position as the dominant revenue driver while the business grew, and Elaine has gone from first-time panelist to someone actively sought out by companies and event organizers.

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Sophie Yang

Head of Developer Relations

Tasked with building Mistral AI's developer relations function from scratch, Sophie faced the dual challenge of establishing technical credibility and brand presence in markets where Mistral AI had no existing footprint, while competing against incumbents with deeply entrenched developer ecosystems. She built a comprehensive four-pillar function spanning enterprise adoption, community management, a global events program, and a structured advocacy network, scaling through a contributor model that trained community moderators as ambassadors and empowered local communities to run their own events. The result is a self-sustaining developer community that expanded Mistral AI's presence into entirely new markets and transformed open-source adoption into enterprise pipeline.

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Laura Modiano

Founder Experience

When Laura took on her role, Europe and EMEA were still largely seen as secondary markets, underrepresented at the global stage and underserved by the channels that amplify founder ecosystems, while international product needs risked getting lost in a backlog dominated by US priorities. Her response was to become a genuine bridge, championing European founders through public speaking and LinkedIn, redesigning playbooks around real customer feedback, leading high-impact partnerships, and maintaining a hands-on community presence that belies her seniority level. EMEA is now recognized as a growth opportunity on par with the US market, international startups are included at the same strategic level as top global companies, and she successfully shifted internal product prioritization to give international needs equal weight.

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Stephanie Valenti

VP of Sales, Direct, Channel and Partnerships

When Stephanie set out to transform Bill's channel organization, she started by meeting with more than 100 accounting firms to understand exactly how they wanted to be supported, letting that research shape a full organizational realignment led with transparency and a willingness to acknowledge mistakes and adjust in real time. Net new retention improved significantly in the first quarter, with nearly half again as much growth delivered across the full first year, all executed without pushback from the sales organization. Beyond Bill, Stephanie has taught thousands of senior leaders globally on forecasting and revenue modeling and is currently focused on how AI shapes the prospect and customer experience, making her a model for what thoughtful, customer-first revenue leadership looks like at scale.

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Ash Lomberg

Vice President EMEA GTM

When Ash set out to transform Chargebee's go-to-market, he started with a premise most GTM leaders overlook: that product and pricing belong in the room alongside sales, marketing, and customer success. He expanded the GTM definition accordingly, moved away from large-scale trade shows toward intimate executive experiences that generated higher-quality conversations with senior decision-makers, and built the cross-functional alignment that shortened sales cycles and tripled deal values through tighter ICP focus. Three quarters of the team hit President's Club, with success distributed evenly across the organization rather than concentrated at the top, making Ash a compelling example of what happens when GTM transformation is built on alignment and precision rather than volume.

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Shannon Warner

General Manager, ISV Global Partner GTM

Building a partner ecosystem motion at Intel meant operating at a scale where coordinating ISVs, system integrators, resellers, and hyperscalers could easily become an obstacle in itself. Shannon tackled this by building a comprehensive operating model for Intel's CoSell program end to end, reframing deal registration as a genuine deal incentive program with MDF funding tied to proof of concepts, and hosting ISV summits across the US and Europe to create the matchmaking infrastructure that turns partnerships into real deals. The program generated substantial Intel revenue wins in its first year, the broader co-sell motion delivered hundreds of millions in AI deals that included ISV partners, and Shannon's enablement work across generative AI, agentic AI, and computer vision has helped establish Intel as a genuinely differentiated partner in a market where most competitors aren't running anything comparable.

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Tanner Braden

Agentic Engineer

When Tanner joined Replit's BizOps and Partnerships team in late 2025, partnership operations were largely manual and fragmented, with no centralized infrastructure, no scalable event tooling, and no automated pipeline management. Working as a one-person team, he built the entire partnership and GTM technical stack from scratch, leveraging Replit's own AI-native tools to operate at a speed multiplier that traditional dev teams simply can't match. The results are concrete: a LinkedIn Certifications platform that earned Replit a featured spot in LinkedIn's Verified Skills program launch alongside GitHub Copilot and Zapier, a full-featured startup accelerator platform built in under five weeks, and buildathon infrastructure now reused across high-profile university and industry events.

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Brian Wiechowski

SVP of Revenue

When Brian took on the challenge of scaling Contentful's go-to-market beyond its early adopter base, he faced a classic but genuinely hard transition, moving from an inbound-driven model to a coordinated outbound motion capable of landing larger deals in bigger organizations, while competing in a market where the biggest obstacle wasn't a rival product but the status quo itself. He built a hiring process that became the company's highest retention in the business, implemented AI-powered outbound tools ahead of the market, and developed a partner motion with AWS and major system integrators that consistently closed deals faster and larger than direct sales alone. Over six years the North America team exceeded its goal for the first time in several years and the customer base shifted from predominantly international to majority US, a fundamental repositioning of where the company's growth engine sits.

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