This week, Avanish has a conversation with Laura Padilla, VP of Global Partners and Services at Airtable, to find out how you really nail building out partnerships. Laura Padilla is a veritable expert in the field, with experience at a number of companies that have scaled platform and partnerships. Throughout the conversation, she and Avanish impart wisdom on measuring success, strategically selecting partners, and creating an optimal experience for parties on all sides.
In this episode, you can hear Laura and Avanish discuss:
Guest: Laura Padilla, VP, GLobal Partners, Airtable
Laura Padilla is currently the VP of Global Partners and Services at Airtable where she is building the partner and services delivery strategy. She brings over 20 years of leadership experience in leading/building complex business units and new revenue streams to scale small, private companies to +$1B post-IPO revenue including Zoom, Nutanix, Box and Riverbed. Leadership experience across marketing, alliances/business development and partner/channel sales roles in the SaaS, Enterprise Software and Hardware industries. She most recently was at Zoom where she led the global partner and platform sales business unit that was composed of over 300 team members and over $500M in revenue. This included indirect sales with and through VAR’s, service providers/carriers, OEM's, referral partners, ISV’s and SI’s, as well as influenced revenue with technology partners such as Slack, Dropbox, Box, Okta, Five9, Twilio and others. She is known as a function builder where her strength is in scaling new organizations to drive incremental revenue and customer value.
Host: Avanish Sahai
Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and has served as a Board Member of Hubspot since April 2018 and of Birdie.ai since April 2022. 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.
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Avanish: Welcome, everybody, to another episode of The Platform Journey. I am super excited about our guest today, Laura Padilla. Like me, she has a pretty strong background in building ecosystems. I think it will be a really fun conversation. Laura is currently Vice President of the partnerships and services teams at Airtable.
I should disclose that I’m an advisor at Airtable, so we won't talk about anything confidential—we’ll keep it to her experiences and lessons learned. With that, Laura, give us a bit of your background. You’ve been a part of some amazing companies and journeys.
Laura: Thank you, Avanish. I’m super excited to be here as well, because you’re someone I’ve always looked up to. We’ve crossed paths in previous lives, and I love to see your journey as well in your career. So thank you for having me.
I’ve been at Airtable for about four months now. Airtable, in case you don’t know, is in the low code/no code space. We’re a connected apps platform, which means we help businesses automate their workflows and build their own applications. You don’t have to be a developer to do that! It’s a really exciting space, democratizing software so that anyone can take advantage of the power of software creation.
I run the partnerships team and the services team at Airtable. We’re looking, as partners, at empowering the whole sales process, from pipeline generation to qualification, all the way to delivering services for our customers. As our customers are on this journey to being able to build their own application and customize how they do their work, Airtable is at the center of that. We’re in the process of developing a partner program—recruiting the right partners and defining what partners we need, especially in different regions, and from a skillset and capabilities perspective. It’s a really fun journey.
Before Airtable, I was at Zoom for four years. I came in pre-IPO, when it was the same size as Airtable (about 900 employees or so). They didn’t really have any idea about what partnerships would look like. They were originally going to hire two people for the role that I eventually got—one for product partnerships and another for the channel. Then they saw I had a background in both, so they just said, “Hey, you run with it.” Honestly, it was just an amazing journey, and I learned so much as a leader and about how to help build a business. I ended up taking that from a team of four people when I started, to a team of about 350 when I left.
We were able to contribute to sales revenue too. We took it from about 0% when I started to about 30% or so of direct sales with three partners. That included four different revenue streams. We’ll talk about, as we get into what partnerships mean, how you can do this so many different ways at different companies.
At Zoom, I ended up doing four different revenue streams. One was your traditional resellers. The second was a referral network of partners—they referred in leads, and we compensated them for those leads. The third were large global service providers, who created different services offerings, productized those offerings, and then sold that to their customers. Then, finally, were the ISV partnerships, where partners embedded Zoom into their offerings using our APIs and SDKs, then added a brand-new solution that they offered out and sold out to their customers. When I left, that was the fastest-growing revenue stream by far. That’s why I was excited to come on your podcast to talk about this whole platform concept, and why it’s super exciting right now from a partnership perspective.
Before that, I was at Nutanix, pre-IPO, which was a very different company. It was a much more about infrastructure, but again another disruptive technology. I ran product partnerships there—working closely with product and engineering on solutions, integrations, certifications, etc. They were about 300 people when I joined; I left when they went public with over a billion in revenue.
Prior to that, I was at Box pre-IPO. Box was about 800 people. I helped build a channel there—there was no channel, so I decided to do it. Before that, I was at Riverbed, which was a WAN optimization company. I joined just post-IPO there, to help build up their technology partnerships, and then did the channel at the end. I was there for five years.
For me, with partnerships, I wanted to learn the technical ones first, and then I moved into the sales partnerships (or channel) because I wanted to see the full circle. When you think about conception, creation, and productization with the technology partnerships—how do you actually take those to market? And do so through different partners? It’s been just awesome to have that full-circle experience.
Avanish: What an amazing personal journey. Each of those is an iconic company in their respective category, and some of them have become verbs—Zoom is certainly a verb. Box in some ways is a verb. And let’s hope Airtable is on the way to becoming a verb too!
Let’s step back a bit. I always think about platforms and ecosystems, and partnerships. To me, they’re interlinked. I think you alluded to that too. Maybe take one of the recent examples, either Zoom or Airtable—how did they define the platform and then the ecosystem strategy? And, when you adopt that, it obviously requires product, business, sales, marketing—everything—to align. Talk about your experience, both the journey and the triumphs.
Laura: That’s one reason why I’ve loved this job so much, honestly. My background was marketing, and then I was supporting a partner team and doing partner marketing. I saw that, wow, this job is so cool! Not only do you help shape the product, you have to understand legal and contract negotiations. You have to understand the go-to-market motion and how you actually sell these solutions, and through which vehicles (meaning direct or through partners). Then there’s the compensation of the sales reps in between, and how you actually build ROI around that and operationalize it, which is a huge part as well.
Also, through my career, I’ve started seeing this concept of partnerships and channel really evolving, too, Avanish. If you were to think about it 20 years ago—this is pre-cloud, or when cloud was just starting to come out—it was pretty siloed. You had a channel that sold boxes, or hardware, or stand-alone software, that only did one thing, and their whole thing was just selling. They just shipped to order. [Crosstalk] Then you had a separate team that was very technical, doing technology integrations and certifications for hardware platforms and things like that, right? Those are your traditional TAP programs and things like that.
What you’ve seen with the cloud, and with SaaS, is that those are all blended now. The best ecosystems take advantage of the product, and the extensibility of it, with platform—really extracting and extending the product through APIs and SDKs and toolkits. At Zoom, for example, I called it micro-features. What I mean by that is, for example, we had an SDK just for the video engine, in case you just want to use that for gaming or something like that. You didn’t want or need the slick, complete application, but you could embed the technology behind the video into different things. We also had partners who wanted just the meetings client that we had already built up, that they wanted to embed—then customize it around branding, or integrate with their own healthcare solution, or education solution, or something else.
Being able to open up all these APIs so that different companies can develop into your solution, rebrand it, customize it, and then send it out, is really where you’re going to see the most return. Most of the CEOs I’ve worked with have been founders, so they’re very product-led. Being able to have this platform concept and extend the original vision for the product, and make it much bigger—partnerships are key to realize that. For example, one of the biggest deals we closed at Zoom was an ISV deal. That was with a large Indonesian telecom company that decided they wanted to embed the video engine into a super-app, and a few other applications as well. This one product that you built as an application becomes a lot bigger and has a lot more value in return.
Avanish: Love it. I think that it becomes very strategic in terms of how you think about it. Talk a bit about some of the work you’re doing at Airtable. It’s a new journey; you’re in building mode again, as we were discussing. Where do you start? You can’t do it all at once, so you’re not going to peanut butter it, I don’t think. How do you come up with a build strategy?
A lot of organizations are probably either currently going through or about to go through a very similar process. You’ve done it so many times now, I’d love to pick your brain on what that process looks like. How do you prioritize? How do you align? How do you get other people to connect with it, etc.?
Laura: I’ve learned a lot of lessons, and there are things that now I do, I hope, better than I did a few years ago with different companies.
Let’s say you’re looking for a job as a partnerships leader. I think there are key things you need to ask before you decide whether it’s the right role for you. One is about company alignment. Is the company behind this and the value that it can bring? There’s a large investment that needs to be made for partnerships to be successful, and it takes a while to realize that. People have to have patience and really be bought into the vision. Make sure that there is company alignment around that.
Then there needs to be alignment around what you want to accomplish with partnerships. Is it sales growth? Meaning, are you looking to have partners drive sales and pipeline gen? You’re going to build a program to support that model. Is it services? If you’re saying, “You know, what I really want is post-sales services to be delivered by our partners,” then you’re going to look for a different type of profile than the sales partnership.
There’s also product. I do think everything starts with the product. You should think about how partners would consume a product. How would they modify it? How would they support the product goals that the company is trying to achieve? Think through that, and really understand what the company is trying to do with the product and how partners can help accelerate that. That’s really important.
What I do, Avanish, is start asking a bunch of questions, especially in the interview process. Where are you guys at in this journey? Talk to me about where you think partners can add value. Why are you interested in investing in this?
Then actually meet different stakeholders. At Airtable, it was Howie, the CEO, and Seth, the CRO and Head of Product. Really understand, are they on the same page? Are we all clear on what we’re trying to do? The good thing was, at Airtable, there was pretty clear alignment around needing this (which is part of why I was super excited to join the company). We know it’ll help us grow exponentially as a company and scale a lot faster and more efficiently. If we look at other companies—for example, two of your prior ones, ServiceNow and Salesforce—they did a really great job of embracing that concept early on.
I also look at companies that are iconic industry leaders, studying how they did it and learning lessons from them. At Airtable, we’re trying, first and foremost, to help partners with the sales process on the service delivery point of view, which is why they moved services under me. Right now, we’re 100% Airtable led. That isn’t really efficient, as we’re going to scale to this large global company—we need partners to be able to support our customers. They’ve already built practices around digital transformation; they’re already doing things around low code/no code, databases, and things like that. They probably have much better skill sets than we have internally to be able to do it.
Our focus will be defining what a services model looks like for partners. One is a partner-led model, where partners will deliver the services on our behalf directly with the customer. The second is outsourced, where they’re subcontractors, and we’re facing the customer. That’s the first thing we’re doing—building the model and the program around that, and then recruiting the right partners who will help us both down- and up-market to deliver the services at different segments and size of organization.
The second thing is around product and the platform. If you think about Airtable—this actually is why I was so excited to come—the secret sauce of the product is connecting all these different applications and workflows, and making it really easy for our customers to be able to share data. Compare that to the world now, where I have a SaaS application here, another one here, another one there, and they don’t talk. I use them all independently. If I want to pull data from one, I’ve got to download a file, manipulate it in some way, and then maybe upload it somewhere else. That is extremely time consuming, and requires a lot of resources. If you’re able to do that really easily, which is what Airtable does…That got me excited to see how this role at Airtable will be really critical to the company’s success and growth.
Avanish: Love it. Again, I think it’s a very thoughtful way of approaching this. You can’t do it all at once, so what’s going to drive value to the customer first? Then sequence from there. These are great examples of how you’ve thought this through.
Now we’re going to step back a bit and ask, as a student of the industry, of partnerships and ecosystems—what are some of the key factors that you think someone who is thinking about starting something like this should consider? You talked a bit about alignment. You talked a bit about the investment. But at a level that you are directly influencing or controlling, what are some of the key success factors that you think allow companies like Box or Zoom to really get this off the ground?
Laura: At a functional level, you have to learn how to organize your team and just make it happen—be able to execute. I’ve always hired a really strong person to own and operationalize the program so that there’s a business leader defining the benefits and requirements and how we onboard a partner, etc. What does that motion look like? What do we require? You need an ops leader to be able to put that information into systems, because the number one thing people are always going to ask is, what is the value your team is bringing to me?
If it’s not a direct reseller channel, if it’s product and other things—I mean, we’ve all been down this road. They’re going to ask, how do I measure success? How do I give you more headcount? Why should I give you more headcount? Why should I keep investing? One piece of advice I can give is to start thinking, at program creation, about how you start track success. What are the metrics?
For example, we’re building a partner capacity model for how many hours of services we think partners are going to need to deliver over the next two years as we grow. That’s going to define how many partners we have to onboard and recruit, and how many I have to train. We’re building a model all around that. That model will go to the partner managers I’m going to hire, and those are their metrics for success: I need you to recruit and onboard this many partners, get them trained, get them certified, and then—when we hand off customers for them to deliver on it—start surveying and make sure our customers are really happy, from an NPS score perspective, about the work that’s being delivered to them. Being able to define what we want to do, measure and track it, and then make it actionable for how we structure our team, is super important. That’s one thing that I’m doing on the services side.
Avanish: Perfect. I was chuckling when you talked about systems, because it is one of those things where all of us who have been down this path look back and think, “I wasn’t sure, going in, that was something I would get stuck on.” But the systems piece is so fundamental, right? It’s how you track it, and how you make sure the value is being delivered, and acknowledge that it's been delivered. I can’t stress how much I think that’s one of my lessons learned, too. You have to think about it up front. And if it isn’t credible, then everything else kind of starts to be questioned.
Laura: I agree with that. At Zoom, which was hyper-growth already, the company grew at about 360% during Covid, and the partner team revenue grew 750%, almost double. As you can imagine, every system broke. Every process broke. Things that weren’t even baked, that we were just trying to figure out, exposed even more things that weren’t working. So, I agree with you. Focusing on the ops piece so you can scale out is so important, and it’s something that’s overlooked and not talked about enough. Having a really strong ops and systems team to support you is critical.
Avanish: Yeah. You’ve done this at scale multiple times. I think you may have already implied it, but what’s the biggest challenge on something like this? Is there a common challenge that you’ve seen across the different places you’ve been?
Laura: Yeah, there is some commonality. However, each company is so different in what they define as success. That’s actually the question I ask now, as I’ve gotten a little older and wiser. Before taking a role in this field, you should ask, “How would you define success for me a year from now?” If they don’t have a clear answer, then develop a framework. Let them reflect on that and give you feedback.
I do think it’s really important to get everyone on the same page about that. If they’re not, expectations may not be met. You may think you’re doing a great job, but they may not think so because they had a different idea of what a great job looked like. I can’t emphasize that enough. It’s actually probably the biggest thing I hear from some of our peers, Avanish. They’ll leave companies because they’re doing something, and all of a sudden the CEO or the CRO doesn’t like what they’re doing or doesn’t support it. It becomes a big conflict of interest, and that’s when people leave. Getting that clarity and knowing what you’re walking into is really important.
Let’s say there’s a scenario where you walk in and you have different opinions. You’re going to have to spend a lot of time selling them on why you think what you’re doing is important to the business, and what that return will look like. I’ve had to do that quite a bit, for example, at Zoom. We talked about systems and operations, but I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to make sure you also talk about metrics. If I deliver these things, does that sound like success to you? Have them say yes or no, so that you can actually build the reporting at the beginning to be able to track that.
I’m doing that now at Airtable as we build out the program—making sure I sit with the Salesforce teams (because we use Salesforce as our CRM) and say, “Hey, I’m going to want to pull a report on XYZ. Can you do that for me the way you’re building out the portal and the accountability in the CRM system?” If they say no, I tell them to put that in the scope of work on the BRD now.
Avanish: Yep. Very practical, and very thoughtful insights. You’ve done this with various classes of partners, right? You talked about your four different classes of partners, for example, from the Zoom days. Let’s see this from the perspective of the prospective partner. Is there a particular value proposition or messaging… Are there things from a partnership perspective that you feel have been distinctive or unique? That help win the heart and mind of the person on the other side of the table?
Laura: Yeah. If I look at Nutanix, for example, I was running technology partnerships there. The story was about how we had a storage and virtualization stack. It was about running mission-critical workloads on that stack. We had to partner with the SAPs, the Citrixes, and the Microsofts—those companies.
Avanish: Easy companies to work with.
Laura: Super easy companies to work with, yeah.
[Laughter]
Laura: And of course, all the way down to small ISVs that wanted to partner with us, too. The value there was being able to unblock our sales teams and allow them to say, “You can run all your workloads on Nutanix because we’re certified. We’ve tested all of it and it works. We even have integrations to help you manage the environment better.” That was a specific thing that we brought to our partners: If you join the program, we’re going to put you through our certification and testing environments. You’re going to be—I think at the time it was “Nutanix Ready” or something branded. Then we’re going to take that out to our sales teams, and they’re going to market you in all of our different solution areas as a partner who is verified to be able to run on our stack.
It was much more technology-driven at Nutanix, and that was the value there. We had hundreds of applications that wanted to be able to do that, because they wanted to also run on the Nutanix stack and have customers feel confident around it. That unblocked deals and it was actually pretty important, especially when we got up into the enterprise. Customers were asking for that verification process.
At Zoom, honestly, it was the Zoom name. You know? Partners were just saying, “Hey, I have all my customers asking for Zoom. I want to be able to sell it; I want to make money selling your products.” On the sales side, it was definitely just return on the margin they would make off the deal. Then, towards the end, we were giving them more services. They were able to be trained on services, from on-prem to the cloud-type migrations. Then there were audio-visual partners who would do installations of the Zoom rooms, and get certified and trained on that. There was services revenue they could get as well as revenue from the actual license piece.
On the product side, the platform was pretty young when I got there. It was just integrations with some of our partners, like Google Calendar and Microsoft and stuff like that—which are important. But there was much more emphasis towards the end of my time on building up the APIs, the SDKs, extensibility, all that kind of stuff. There’s huge interest in that now. The story to the partner was, you know the Zoom name—we’re everywhere! Integrate with us, and it’s going to unblock you in your sales process with your customers, making it easier for you to work with Zoom in their environments.
It just depends on the type of partner and what you’re trying to achieve. Whether it’s a sales ROI for the partner—and you spelling out that for them—or if it’s on the product side, unblocking them from deals. Yeah, it depends on the type of partner.
Avanish: I think the takeaway is that there is no one-size-fits-all—you have to do the work to make it land. It’s not a single playbook. I completely, completely agree.
As we wrap up, any advice you would give to someone who’s embarking on a similar journey? You’ve had a lot of great insights already, but any particular piece of advice to someone who is going into a company where this may not be fully aligned or fully invested in?
Laura: Yeah. I would focus on where you can show success and what you think you can do well. We talked about there being reseller models, platform models, project models. Where do you think you can add the most value to the company that you’re looking to join? You can’t force something if they’re not ready, but what you can do is start showing value in one of those elements, then showing success, and growing it from there.
The great thing in our job is that we have influence, from the product roadmap, to the sales go-to-market motion, to systems and everything else in between. But starting where you think you can really make the most impact at the beginning to show wins is important. For example, at Airtable, I know that the services piece is really top of mind. We’re going to make that happen right away as I work with the product teams on the platform story. Just focus on where you think you can show success, and grow it from there.
Avanish: Love it. Don’t peanut butter it—prioritize where you can get quick wins. Very practical.
Laura, this has been awesome. Any final thoughts before we wrap?
Laura: Look, the thing about this role, and about partnerships in general, is that the evolution we’re doing right now is super fun and exciting. Especially what we’re seeing in the democratization of everything—the internet, money, now, with crypto, and Airtable for software creation. The partner model itself is evolving.
The only advice I would give is to not be afraid to disrupt what you’ve done before. Let’s say you’re a really strong channel leader, and you’ve done mostly channel before. Don’t be afraid to think more broadly—how can I grow from that into blending the product partnerships with the channel success that I know really well? If you can do that, those are the leaders that everyone’s looking for right now. Don’t be afraid to disrupt yourself, and to think of that larger circle of value that you can bring to a company. We’re evolving just as much as the industry is.
Avanish: Yeah. Awesome. I think that is one of the biggest shifts we’re seeing. In fact, that’s the reason a lot of these roles are being called ecosystem roles, right? Because it’s no longer just those silos you mentioned.
Laura, again, I can’t thank you enough. It’s been a real pleasure. Wishing you and the team at Airtable lots and lots of success. I think you’ll crush it there.
Laura: Thank you so much. It’s been a blast.
Avanish:
Thank you for making the time.