ALLISON PICKENS
I'm a solo GP investor and independent board director, spending my time supporting the CEOs of SaaS companies such as dbt Labs (on the board), Jasper (the fastest growing SaaS company ever), Mutiny, Hex, and Tackle. Founders tend to think of me as a fractional independent board director - a COO thought partner and active advocate as you scale your revenue and organization.
I was formerly COO at Gainsight and scaled the company from $1M in ARR to 650 employees, paving the way for its $1B+ exit to Vista in 2020. Besides building dozens of functions, I published hundreds of thought leadership pieces about Customer Success in order to build our software category. I became known as a top expert on recurring revenue growth, which led to advising many SaaS CEOs and executives, joining boards, and investing. Here’s a summary of my bio:
•Former COO at Gainsight, a platform for driving recurring revenue at SaaS companies
•$1M ARR to pre-IPO levels
•Category creator & dominant market leader
•Book The Customer Success Economy (Wiley)
•100+ blog posts on recurring revenue
•Host of The Customer Success Podcast
•Readership base of 1000’s of execs and CEOs
•Top Women in SaaS
•Top 50 People in Sales and Business Development
•Top 25 Customer Success Influencers
•Fortune Most Powerful Women community
•Board Director, dbt Labs (formerly Fishtown Analytics)
•Board Director, Commvault (NASDAQ: CVLT)
•One of youngest public company directors
•EIR at Bessemer and Senior Advisor at BCG
I'm particularly motivated to work with CEOs on these topics:
You are a contrarian thinker, but your timing is right to spark a movement. You don’t believe in “converting” people to your cause but rather enabling them. You want to figure out the right messaging, create thought leadership content that inspires others, build community among early adopters, and leverage them to tap a broader market and establish your “new normal.”
You want to deliver outstanding customer adoption and value and then monetize it. Regardless of whether your model is bottom-up or top-down, you want to drive expansion. You may want to translate self-serve momentum into corporate contracts, pitch new use cases, or leverage your raving SMB fans to land big whales. You are trying to design the right org structure across customer-facing functions and hire terrific leaders.
You aspire to align all functions around your OKRs or your go-to-market strategy. You may want advice on "running the biz" - building an all-star exec team, creating the "glue" across functions, and ensuring predictability in achieving results, all while fostering a strong culture. You want your organization to run like a healthy ecosystem without your constant intervention. You may want help hiring a COO/CRO or independent board director.
You're working on a problem in a thesis area that I have. Those areas include but are not limited to: AI (e.g. Jasper), modern data stack (e.g. dbt Labs), and vertical SaaS (e.g. Adonis). But I love working with SaaS companies across a broad array of problem spaces.
I’m happy to hop on the phone with any Series A+ SaaS CEO to whom I’m introduced. Check out my Substack newsletter, book, and LinkedIn for content.
>600 top SaaS executives subscribe to hear about jobs that cross my desk. My enterprise connections also allow me to make introductions to large prospective customers.
I’ll always be an operator first, investor second. I usually formalize long-term relationships with CEOs by investing. My fund’s LPs include tech CEOs, top VCs, and well-connected people who want to help you.
I currently serve on two boards – dbt Labs (backed by Sequoia, a16z, and others) and Commvault (NASDAQ: CVLT) – and am open to taking on a limited number of additional board positions.