Grow With It

Optimizing for the wrong metric could hurt your bottom line in the long run, says Martin Gontovnikas, Co-Founder and GTM Advisor at HyperGrowth Partners, even if the optimization is successful. Sound counterintuitive? Gontovnikas shares why with Mike Sharkey, CEO and co-founder of Ortto, and Jesus Requena, Marketing + Growth at Hex.

Dorian Kendal is an incredible growth marketing mind with a track record of helping to build and lead results-orientated marketing departments. It hasn’t always been about marketing and growth for Dorian, he actually cut his teeth in Operations and Data, taking his skills to the likes of Google, Twitter, and then Trulia where he discovered a love of Marketing and Growth. This led him to Unity, where he took on the challenge of building and leading parts of the marketing department for the real-time 3D game engine as it grew from 750 to nearly 6,000 employees. Dorian’s ops experience served him particularly well at Unity, where he led major projects including the creation of a global subscription-focused web store, the evolution of an asset store, and the introduction of a global team that transformed the activation and retention of their user base.In this episode of Grow with It, we’re going to hear about Dorian’s philosophy around data and the role it should play in the marketing function. Plus we’ll get into the nitty-gritty, looking at exactly how Dorian brings data to the party to achieve the kind of results most marketers only dream of. 

Nish Ithayakumar is the Co-founder of Nimbus, a platform that delivers cloud development environments in one click. Each environment is a full computer, giving engineers more power and flexibility, and helping teams scale faster and run more effectively. Before founding Nimbus, Nish held the Global Head of Growth Strategy role at Unity Technologies where he identified strategies and systems that realized significant business growth. Prior to that, Nish held Business Operations and Strategy roles throughout San Francisco and Vancouver, where he overhauled outdated and inefficient processes and used out-of-the-box strategies to deliver on major initiatives. In this episode of Grow with it, Nish speaks to Mike and Jesus about the most common problems businesses face when it comes to data, how he built and operationalized a data set that supercharged growth at Unity, and how he’s applying the lessons learned as a co-founder of a startup. 

After spending several years in Copenhagen as a revenue operations lead at Falcon.io and Soundtrack Your Brand, a Spotify joint venture, Ben Lewinsky moved to San Francisco and eventually found his way to Culture Amp, where he’s spent the last few years overseeing Marketing and Sales Operations.Today, as the Director of Sales Operations at the Australian-founded employee experience platform, he’s responsible for sales strategy and execution, and guiding sales representatives towards the right opportunities to grow the business. Ben describes himself as data-driven with a commercial mindset, and is focused on sourcing data and making it actionable in real time.In this episode, we hear about how the steps Ben has taken to operationalize data in a multi-product environment to lead score and give every sales rep the context they need to sell. 

Sean Whitney is a Principal at Craft Ventures, on the investment team. Prior to Craft, Sean joined Figma as the second hire on the Finance and Business Operations team, where he drove strategic sales operations, pricing and packaging, and partnerships projects. As Figma grew, Sean moved to the go-to-market side overseeing self-serve strategy and funnel optimizations. Through his experience at Figma, and prior in his role as Operations, Growth and Business Development at Enjoy, Sean has untangled data to build strategic initiatives that drive growth. In this episode of Grow with It, Sean speaks to Mike and Jesus about the early days of Figma’s sales function, and how he got scrappy to identify the data signals that would become indicators of a quality lead. We get into the nitty-gritty, talking about how data was structured and filtered through to the sales team.