PartnerStack’s CEO Bryn Jones on 10 Years of Building B2B Partnership Networks and Why Growth Nearly Broke Him

When Bryn Jones retired from Canada’s national swim team in his early twenties, he thought his competitive days were over. Fast-forward ten years, and the PartnerStack CEO has channeled that same stroke-by-stroke discipline into building one of the most interesting companies in B2B partnerships.

Jones reveals how swimming taught him to fall in love with process over results, why most partnerships fail despite their potential, and the brutal truth about what four consecutive years of 100% growth actually does to a business and its founder.

Let’s get into it.

Mark MacLeod:

In this episode, I sit down with Bryn Jones, co-founder and CEO of PartnerStack. Bryn’s company is about to celebrate their 10th anniversary. They help companies like yours succeed and grow revenue through the partner channel. Bryn’s a former competitive athlete. He was a competitive swimmer. And so we talk about that background and how it set him up for success as an entrepreneur.

His company began in YC, and we talked about that kind of important foundation. Chances are, every single person listening or watching this episode grows through partners. And so we spend a bunch of time going through best practices on what they’ve learned there. Bryn’s also creating his own category. Many of you might be doing the same thing. So we talk about that.

And you’re going to want to read to the end because we actually ended up with a really important discussion around how to stay on top of success, keeping up with massive growth, and the importance of following your intuition, which was a hard lesson for Bryn.

So I really hope you tune in and I hope you subscribe for future episodes.

Bryn, welcome to The Startup CEO Show. It’s a true pleasure to have you here. How are you doing today?

Bryn Jones:

Good. Mark, thank you for having me. I really appreciate you inviting me in.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, it’s a real pleasure. Bryn and I are up in the frozen north, AKA Canada. We’re recording this in mid-April, and for anyone who’s watching, I just had the heater on in my room. I’ve got a fricking thick sweater. I’m wearing a scarf. I’ve got a dog on my lap to keep me warm. Like, it’s ridiculous. Canada has many great strengths, but its weather at the moment is not one of them. Anyway, that’s not why we’re here.

Bryn Jones:

You’re not Canadian without that April snowfall.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, that’s exactly right. Hey, Bryn, for those who don’t know, just maybe take a second and tell folks what PartnerStack does.

Bryn Jones:

Yeah. So, at PartnerStack, we enable B2B companies to go to market through partnerships. We think partnerships are one of the most efficient go-to-market channels that are out there. And if you look at the biggest and best companies, whether they be Shopify or HubSpot, they all have an incredible partner channel. And it’s core to their strategy. And it’s core to their strategy early days.

And so what PartnerStack does is enable go-to-market teams to go to market more efficiently in a more scalable way. We say that we’re ultimately changing the way the world sells software, and we’re pretty excited about our progress in achieving that mission.

Mark MacLeod:

So I definitely want to spend a bunch of time unpacking kind of the space that you’re in and what you’ve learned about best practices for going to market and kind of working with partners.

But let’s take a step back and talk about you. You know, I often tell my CEOs that they’re mental athletes. I use that athlete analogy all the time. You know, especially those who’ve raised lots of capital. Like, your expectations on your shoulders are the same as of professional athletes. And you look at an athlete, and they surround themselves with whatever they need to be at their peak.

Now, you literally were a competitive athlete before becoming an entrepreneur. So, I’d love it if you could tell folks about that and how that background kind of set you up for success in this kind of new world.

Bryn Jones:

I always say that I’m an athlete turned entrepreneur. I still think everything that I learned in athletics I apply in everyday life, in business, and in my personal life. I was a member of Canada’s national swim team, and I thought my future was going to the Olympics. Everything I was doing was pointed at going to the Olympics, and I had a real shot at it.

And then I got sick, I got injured, and when I got injured, I was forced to deal with retirement. And you’re not supposed to retire when you’re in your early 20s. It’s a very weird thing to go through. And I realized my coach had always talked to me about how being an athlete was about learning to fall in love with the process. And if you learn how to fall in love with the process, you could apply it in so many different areas of life.

So, my retirement in my early 20s, I leaned into that as much as possible, and realized that when I was in graduate school, subsequent to retiring, I fell in love with technology. Everything that I got in sports, the competition, the ability to work with incredibly capable people that push you, was available and made available to me in building a business, and specifically inside of technology.

So, I fell in love with building because I thought that building something in many ways, as athletes, what you do, especially in swimming, is you build a race. You have this foundation of training that you create. You surround yourself with support staff who help you optimize what’s there. You leverage technology to figure out how to break this very complex problem down inch by inch and perfect it.

And I realized that the same opportunity existed in building a business. And the most important part of all that, beyond falling in love with the process, was understanding that you needed to apply the same resilience you had in your athletic career to business.

Because the only thing that I knew to be true was that there were challenges ahead. And I think that the lessons I took from sport, I’ve applied them, and I’ve been fortunate to find people around me who also embrace that type of methodology. And it’s really unlocked a lot of opportunities for me.

Mark MacLeod:

It’s amazing. I’m guessing your 20s were some time ago, so you didn’t overlap with like the Michael Phelps of the world, did you?

Bryn Jones:

I did, actually, yeah. Swimming was really exciting. So when I was on the national team, it was in 2008 to 2010, and Michael Phelps set all of his records in 2008. At the time, I was going to meets with Michael Phelps and I got to watch him and learn about what was required to be an athlete.

Now, I was nowhere near as good as Michael Phelps, and he is way better, I will say, than any medal could possibly be and anybody could imagine outside of the sport of swimming. But to see that level of excellence, and to see him come back year after year and try to improve on it, even after the fact, after he had set all of his records, was a really special moment. And I’m happy I was able to witness some of it.

Mark MacLeod:

I was never a competitive athlete. In fact, I was a fat fuck as a kid. If you can believe that. In a way, I weigh the same now as I did when I was 11. In my teens, I studied karate for six years. And what I got out of that was just discipline. And now I’m a yoga teacher, not quitting coaching, obviously, this is just a passion on the side.

But every day I practice. Like, I live that. Like, I don’t just teach people how to do it, I live it. And I can only imagine that to get to the level that you did that you just must have a tremendous amount of self-discipline. Did that go away, or do you feel like that’s just beaten into you now? It’s just part of your DNA.

Bryn Jones:

I feel like the most disciplined people believe that they don’t have discipline. And because that’s how you are most critical. And it’s really challenging to find that balance. But it doesn’t go away. And if you can embrace it and apply it and learn how to apply that to so many things, whether it be work, your career, your craft, or you know, your personal life, whether it be as a partner or as a parent or as a friend, you learn so much there and you realize how much of it is just about being deliberate.

I remember my father asking me when I was 13 years old, and we would swim nine times a week. We would do between five to six kilometers every single session. And he asked, what do you think about when you’re swimming? That’s so many strokes roughly in one lap. You’re taking anywhere between 12 to 14 strokes. You’re doing more than 200 laps every single session. And I remember telling him, because it didn’t seem weird to me, I said, I just think about every single stroke.

Mark MacLeod:

So you’re just so present, literally stroke by stroke by stroke. Wow.

Bryn Jones:

Right. And so you can apply that to whatever you go in and do. You can actually find the joy in it. And that’s the important piece is getting curious and that being an exciting thing. And if you can get curious and you can fall in love with the process versus the result, you can do a lot.

Mark MacLeod:

I love that so much. So, I’m a CrossFit. We call ourselves athletes now. But I’ve been doing CrossFit. This is my fifth year. And that’s literally the motto of CrossFit. Trust the process, right? It’s like, show up, put the reps in, don’t be attached to the outcome. Just keep perfecting technique, like we’re doing. Clean today, and it’s not about having the biggest biceps; it’s actually about generating the most power in the most efficient way. And magically the barbell’s up, so it’s pretty cool.

Bryn Jones:

Exactly. It’s very satisfying. And I mean, you’re far more of an athlete than I am today, that’s for sure.

Mark MacLeod:

So we’re going to move on from this. But like I do tell all of my CEOs that health and fitness are actually the foundation of your performance as a CEO. Like, today’s productivity began last night when you went to sleep. And so I’m curious, now you’re a father of a young child, as we were talking about before, and that can throw everything out the window. But do you prioritize health and fitness today? Do you think about it? Just tell us about that.

Bryn Jones:

Yeah, I absolutely prioritize health and fitness. What I’ve also realized is that health and fitness can be different for different stages and moments of your life. You know, sometimes if you’re a new parent, it is quite literally maybe that walk to work is as good as it’s going to get. But what matters is you can get back to that centered balance place where you are at your best, and can you not beat yourself up when you miss it?

And I find that that’s where there’s a lot of drop-off. But I’ve been fortunate that I’ve always been able to get back to what makes me feel right, because when I am active and I am living a healthy lifestyle, I can deal with the ups and downs. And honestly, the ups can be more challenging than the downs.

Mark MacLeod:

I’ve had a couple of founders from Y Combinator on here and I’m always fascinated by YC because of its track record of producing unicorns and how it makes all investors suspend disbelief and abandon all of their pre-money valuation disciplines and give these, I don’t know, 12-week old companies what I consider to be bonkers valuation.

So, tell us about your experience with YC. Like, I’ve had Michael Litt from Vidyard on here, and like you, he also moved back to Canada to build. So I’m just curious about that decision as well.

Bryn Jones:

Yeah, so you know, I did not graduate way back in 2011 when I graduated with a degree in technology and the Canadian ecosystem, because we were in London at the time, moved to Waterloo shortly thereafter was still emerging.

You know, Shopify didn’t go public until after 2015, and that’s when we founded PartnerStack. And so, the decision to go to YC was actually like a necessity. And the reason it was a necessity is that we had applied to every single business incubator up and down the East Coast and across all of North America, and YC was the only one that accepted us.

Mark MacLeod:

Wow. I would argue that they have the highest bar and the most inbounds.

Bryn Jones:

Yeah, I mean, everybody has their YC story about being accepted. Our YC story was that we didn’t get the call until midnight on that day. And when Kevin Hale picked up to let us know, my first reaction was, what took you so long? But it just came out. We were getting ready to leave on our plane the next morning.

And then the second reaction was, why? And Kevin said, we only invest in companies we believe can be those unicorn companies. And it’s this balance of super ambitious, a little bit of being naive, and having a unique insight into a market, and the combination of those three things, plus a great team. You know, we want to take that bet. And that was our welcome to the program.

The best part about YC was the unstructured nature of YC. What YC is, and it’s a lot of things, but at its core, it’s a network. It’s a network of ambitious people who are thinking about the world differently and believe they can shape it.

Those ambitious people aren’t waiting on anybody. They’re not waiting on anything. They’re not dependent on what’s there. They are operating on their own. And YC supports that approach. So it’s a very unstructured program. But the things that they are structured on, they are incredibly structured on.

And so even the interview process it’s 10 minutes. They make a decision. And I’m sure it’s changed since 2015. But you apply. Once you apply, they invite you down. They actually pay for you to fly down, which can be prohibitive for many entrepreneurs. You meet with them, and approximately, there are no measures, but they let in about one in three that they interviewed, but the interview is 10 minutes.

And it’s pretty much restating exactly what was in your application and being tested in a few areas. And then that evening, they call and inform you that you’ve been accepted and they would like to invest in you. That’s the process we went through. And then we just met every two weeks with a group of entrepreneurs who are trying to build.

And we learned through them. We saw people who had built and sold companies for hundreds of millions of dollars who were in our group and had started something new. And we realized that there’s no secret to any of this stuff. There’s just a lot of, quite frankly, pain that is tied to it and unknowns and an ability to operate and move forward and build through those unknowns.

Then the last thing that YC does is they create a market for their demo day. And by creating a market, they give you an opportunity to fundraise very efficiently. We made the decision to come back to Toronto because after a conversation we had with one of the partners there, we realized that in order to build a very meaningful company, it was going to take a minimum of 10 years.

You know, a lot of people go places for short periods of time with the thought of, oh, we could build something quick, sexy, and flip it. We realized that we wanted to build something meaningful, and that was going to take a minimum of 10 years. And for us, in order to be successful on that journey, we wanted to be close to our families. That was an important thing for us.

And so returning to Canada, as much as I would love to say that it was all Canadian pride, it was much more to do with our families were here and we did like our community and we’ve been so fortunate to connect with entrepreneurs and operators in the space and seen the whole community evolve. But as soon as we realized that and accepted that a company was going to take 10 years to build if it was going to be meaningful, it became very important for us to be near our families.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, I mean, if you read TechCrunch too much, you think you can build and flip, and it happens. But it’s rare. And those big outcomes are even rarer, right?

Bryn Jones:

Exactly. That was the best piece of advice that YC provided to us. When we came back to Canada, at the time, we had term sheets in the US, and we made the decision to walk away from millions of dollars worth of investment because part of the requirement was to be in the US.

And so, it was unique then; it’s not as unique now. Like, the Canadian market has evolved so much. Capital is not as restricted in borders. The pandemic really changed that. But we’re very happy that we’re Canadian-based.

Mark MacLeod:

And so this 10-year thing, not very good with numbers, but my understanding is you’re about to finish your 10th year or maybe you just have. Is that true?

Bryn Jones:

That’s correct, yeah. In the next couple of months, we’ll celebrate 10 years since being incorporated. And yeah, it’s been a crazy journey.

Mark MacLeod:

Wild. Can you see the next 10?

Bryn Jones:

Yeah. The truth is, when we started, I didn’t think I’d be working on partnerships 10 years later. Anybody who says that, especially on their first go-around, is naive. And we were certainly naive, which is a superpower. Because when you don’t know, it makes you do things that no one else would have.

And we always told investors way back in the day, they’d always ask, well, what happens if so and so comes along and tries to buy you early, like, why aren’t you going to sell? And the answer we provided then it was true. I just didn’t know how true it was. Which is I think partnerships are an incredibly complex problem.

And if I can fall in love with a problem the same way as I fell in love with the process tied to athletics, it’s a problem I can continue to solve forever. Because it’s so complicated. It applies to more than just B2B SaaS companies. It’s a dynamic that exists in markets. And this is something we could build forever. It used to be something I said; it’s now something that I absolutely believe.

Mark MacLeod:

I think falling in love with a problem is actually the only enduring source of motivation. If you fall in love with a market, it’s a big market. Well, money is just not an enduring source of motivation. Maybe you’ve taken some secondary along the way. I don’t need to know. It’s none of my business. But like if you did, you probably felt happier for 10 minutes and then got on with the rest of your life.

So money isn’t the thing. You could fall in love with your product, your solution. But then you just end up having a closed mind. You’re just evangelizing. Look at my widget, it’s so amazing. Why don’t you buy my widget?

It’s falling in love with the problem that just keeps you going. And so the CEOs that you admire the most, many of whom have gone through YC are in love with the problem.

Bryn Jones:

Yeah. And then if you fall in love with the culture and team that you have, that is like the cherry on top, because then you have a group of people that are on a journey with you that are solving that problem, that provide that different perspective.

And that’s one of the things that I am most proud about at PartnerStack is not only on the founder side but some of our earliest employees are still here solving this problem and are so committed to it. And it’s really inspiring to see the impact of that because it’s not just navel-gazing like it is in the early days of starting a company, it’s seeing the actual impact of the change.

Mark MacLeod:

So let’s move on and talk about partnering. It’s fair to say every CEO who’s listening needs to partner. And you know, I’ve run biz dev a couple of times back in my operating days. Last time was at FreshBooks, where I ran finance, biz dev, and corp dev.

And my observation about partnering is that we all do it. Almost every individual partnership fails to meet its on-paper potential, but kind of you to still need to do them. And any company that has kind of gone all the way has not done that strictly on a direct basis. They’ve had to build partnerships and channels. What’s your take? Like, yeah, what’s the state of the union, the good, the bad, and the ugly of partnering?

Bryn Jones:

I think that partnerships often work in spite of themselves, right? Like, the likelihood of doing something for the first time and it being successful is very, very challenging. The likelihood of now two parties trying to be aligned to a single goal and for there to be success, I think that there’s a lot of credit taken in partnerships when the reality is that the partnership led to a really great success in spite of itself.

I’ve heard stories of some very large founder CEOs at some of the most successful technology companies we know of who champion partnerships. If you go back to the people who were building that partnership team in the early days, I know one specific case where the CEO came in and told the partnership team that they wanted to fire them for four straight years.

And then in the fifth year, they said it was the biggest mistake they ever made. I can say that because PartnerStack enables growth through partnerships. We underinvested in our own partner program, and our team did the exact same thing to me. Like, the exact same type of conversations.

So, what I’ve learned through partnerships is that in order to build a successful partnership, it takes time, it takes alignment, and it requires you to put your partner first. Because if two partners put each other first and you have the alignment and know what the timeline is going to be, it is far more likely that things will be successful.

And we got that first principle from the VP of partnerships at Shopify way back in 2015. We said, what made Shopify’s partner program so successful? At the time, I think it was being managed by like 65 people, and it was all manual. And he said, we just put our partners first.

And it was like a passing comment, and it turns out it was very true. Most people treat partnerships as very transactional and they cannot be. Of course, commerce, the ability to grow, make money, and provide value, is the core of all partnerships.

But that’s not how they start. They start with a simple question of like, what can I do to help you, and what can you do to help me? And if there’s alignment on that, it’s not about driving revenue, it’s about providing value.

And so in technology, if you think of two technology companies trying to work together, can it be as simple as let me tell you about what exists in my pipeline, let’s compare what exists in your pipeline? You know, do we have the same type of ACV?

You have to bring a level of transparency and curiosity to a partnership to make it successful. And you have to know it is very unlikely that you’re going to flip a switch and things are going to drive revenue like crazy.

No CRO would ever say a new sales team that they’re going to bring on is going to perform at 100%, 90 or 180 days in. Like, go-to-market notions take years to build and perfect. For some reason, we as executives and boards are very naive when it comes to partnerships. We think it’s a lot like ad spend, and you’re not buying media. You’re developing relationships with people.

And more often than not, those people have no financial incentive to work with you. And so you have to overcome that. That’s why going back to the first principle of like, in order to build a successful partnership, you need to put your partner first, that’s what it comes down to. And it sounds very airy-fairy, hand-wavy, but it is core to making something like this successful.

Mark MacLeod:

I love it. I mean, I think that recipe had three steps, the last of which was to put your partner first, is probably the key to building an enduring marriage or any important relationship. So not just a business partnership.

And knowing Shopify reasonably well, I feel like that pithy little insight was the result of some rigorous first principles debate. Just like, let’s reduce it down to the core insight, you know?

Bryn Jones:

Yeah, the stories that we heard from that VP of partnerships of how that program was built and the first principal thinking that the executive team took after it was not working after 12 months, and to see where it is today, and that partnerships mean so much more. It’s really an ecosystem now at Shopify, but very impressive.

And you know, in many ways, PartnerStack exists because of Shopify, because of those lessons, and because of how they were great partners in the community for us.

Mark MacLeod:

I remember Harley saying years ago, and I’m sure it’s still true, that the GMV of the ecosystem was bigger than Shopify’s GMV, which is pretty wild to think of.

Bryn Jones:

Yeah, yeah, I think that at HubSpot, it’s for every $1 that HubSpot earns, the ecosystem earns $5 or something like that. And I know that’s true inside of Salesforce and Shopify as well.

Mark MacLeod:

Sure. So, without turning this into an infomercial, what does PartnerStack actually do in this case? Like, where do you fit in, and yeah, what’s the specific value or impact that you provide?

Bryn Jones:

We’re a SaaS-enabled network, so we sell to marketers or partnership leaders, and we give them a source of truth, a portal. They install that portal on their landing page, and effectively, they hang a sign on their landing page that says we’re open for business with partners. We give them all the marketing automation, sales enablement tools, and technology that sits behind there, and we charge a monthly fee for that.

But in addition to that, we connect them to an ecosystem of partners. What’s unique about PartnerStack is that our business model is more like that of LinkedIn than it is like Salesforce. We really believe that putting partners first means not forcing partners to log into eight different portals. Instead of standardizing the way they have the opportunity to work with B2B companies.

So, in standardizing that workflow on both the B2B vendor side as well as on the partner side, it gives you the capacity to not only give the software to power these partner programs, but it enables you to connect them to a broader network of partners. And that’s really, really powerful.

And that network has taken a long time to foster. Networks are so complicated in how you balance the supply and demand of what’s there. When we were back in YC in summer 2015, we had the opportunity to meet with Sam Altman. And Sam said, it’s going to take you a long time. He’s like, it took LinkedIn a long time. It’s going to take you a long time.

Mark MacLeod:

Sure. I remember the graph. It was flat, flat, flat, flat, flat. And then boom, inflection.

Bryn Jones:

Yeah. And I didn’t believe him. And he’s right. And it’s taken us a while for that network to move from vision to reality, but that reality started to come into play a couple of years ago. And I’m really proud that we never deviated from the vision of making it a network.

Very easy for us in the early days just to chase revenue. But we were fortunate enough to work with great investors and board members like Janet Bannister, who really challenged us to stay on the path that we were on and to complete the vision. So, it’s been a lot of fun.

Mark MacLeod:

You know, I remember back in my operating days, and of course, we’re trying to partner with big companies. I remember the frustration all the time, like, if I could just get access to their sales reps, if I could just comp their sales reps. But like, that partner CEO wants the sales rep selling their stuff, not selling your stuff, and it’s hard enough to sell your own stuff. So, have you been able to figure out a set of best practices or just how companies can leverage these partnerships to accelerate revenue?

Bryn Jones:

It comes down to building what we call an ideal partner profile. So every customer, every company is unique, right? If you have a low ACV, the partner types that you need to work with are very different than those if you have a high ACV. And this is the trap that exists inside partnerships today.

Everybody goes in thinking they need to go in and work with Deloitte, or they need to go partner with Accenture. That’s going to be the thing that unlocks everything they have, all the biggest customers. And I like to say we’re in the business of saving time because so many of those relationships, everyone puts months’ worth of work into it. It’s so challenging to set up.

You go into the board meeting, everyone throws high fives, and it’s the last you ever hear about it. And what matters more is that you’re really deliberate in determining who wants to work with you. And that starts with collecting data, right? Hang that sign on your landing page that says we’re open to partners. Tell us a little bit about you. Tell us how you want to partner with us.

That’s the way you would do media buying. That’s the way that you would do customer discovery. And you refine who that ideal partner persona is. And what we found is that they are often not the person the CEO wants them to be. If the CEO is dictating who the partner is, it is very likely that they will fail.

If the CEO listens to who wants to partner with them, and if the partner managers are able to make that case, hey, instead of working with Accenture, there’s this single shop in Singapore, one person running it, and they’re going to drive a lot more revenue for us right now. That might not be what people want to hear, but if you’re open to listening with the same intent that people bring to listening to their customers, if you bring that intent to listen to your partners, you will learn who you should work with.

And so, how do you do that? You figure out how big the partnership is that you’ll be working with. How many employees are there, who do they service as customers, and do they partner with anybody today in a successful way?

Getting down to that, you can kind of build everything off of that if you know who their customers are, if they’re selling or recommending, doesn’t matter whether it’s software or insurance products, for that matter. You can kind of layer your pipeline with their pipeline and figure out unique opportunities.

The second step to that is putting the right types of incentives in place. There’s a period of time in the early days of PartnerStack where people thought you could really incentivize people just with t-shirts and Amazon gift cards. It turns out you can’t pay with Amazon gift cards. There needs to actually be a commercial relationship that’s established for it to scale.

And then the last thing is enablement. Are you going to talk to this partner and provide them the same level of support as you provide to your sales and support team when someone new joins your company? And so a combination of those factors will lead to the right partnership. But partnerships are guaranteed not to be successful if the CEO says, this is who we need to partner with, and the second version is, we expect partnerships to drive X, Y, and Z in revenue in 90 days. You would never expect a sales rep to go in and do that.

The last thing is that there needs to be open lines of communication. When we were first doing customer discovery back in 2015 at YC, I was talking to a partner who drove more new business than the top enterprise sales rep by 4x for a very well-known technology company.

And he had told me that he had to submit support tickets. Now he had a back channel directly to the CEOs of a public company. In fact, the CEO, when this person’s daughter was born, sent a package to him. That’s how meaningful the relationship was.

But they just hadn’t prioritized treating the partner like a human and communicating and treating your partners as though they’re employees, because that’s the level of dedication that’s required to make partnerships successful.

Mark MacLeod:

I’m curious. AI is not new, but of course, it’s everywhere now. And like I’m imagining a world where everyone’s got this open-for-business capability on their website. Like, you have full coverage. And then I’m imagining a world where AI is just automatically lining up based on those insights. Hey, here are the right folks for you to partner with, and almost like eliminating BD reps, because it’s just like the matching is just right there.

Or just tapping into insights from support tickets, and people are asking for this complimentary capability, or do you integrate with so-and-so? Like, all the insights could be there, and then you just have the relationships, and you just feed them.

So, I don’t want to give away a roadmap. I’m just curious, and obviously, it would take a very long time to have full coverage. But yeah, how are you thinking about AI, and is there a world where things can just become even more automated than they are today?

Bryn Jones:

We believe that at the time, no one was talking about AI. But back in 2015, the idea was like, hey, if you standardize the workflows, you can pair the right partner with the right vendor at the right time. The challenge today is without the unique insights, without actually doing the integration work required, and having a trusted source that’s not going to leak data.

Because let’s face it, there’s a lot of information that can be learned about someone’s business by integrating into their Salesforce, and it’s important to have a trusted platform that does that.

So, our vision with AI is to pair partners with vendors at the right time for the right customer. And we can do that because at PartnerStack, what’s unique about us is that both the B2B vendor as well as the partner are our users. So, like LinkedIn, we can aggregate data and make recommendations in a smart way. And the more data the partner shares with us, the more data the vendor shares with us, the better we can become at it.

So, it’s actually about providing the right types of incentives and building that trust between those two groups and us that has enabled us to unlock some of this. And it’s really, really exciting what could be there.

AI will be different in partnerships, though, than other groups and platforms, because you have to share something to benefit from it and to have the rails, and we believe we have the capacity to be the rails that support that, that’s how everything’s going to get unlocked.

Mark MacLeod:

I remember trying to just choose partners. Like, I had led an initiative to choose alternative lending partners for FreshBooks, and I feel like it was a six-month exercise. You’re going out, you’re mapping the market, you’re meeting with folks, you’re trying to assess fit, you’re asking product managers to go and maybe talk to a handful of our best customers and try and do a little sample. Maybe you’re doing a test integration. Like it was a really long process, so there’s tons of friction that could be removed.

Bryn Jones:

It’s a data and people process, because it’s not just about like the perfect blend of pipelines, but it’s also about whether people pick up the phone or answer the email when something comes through. And you can, and we have scored that because you can score both the data sharing side as well as the way that another group works together, and you can quantify that relationship and how much they’re investing, or have things in fact changed. And you know, that matters.

But it is absolutely still a people’s business. It’ll be interesting to see, though, how AI will impact that. And you know, can you have two separate agents working together and standardize what’s there? And I think that if we’re to look forward in 10 years, that’s what partnerships will be. It will be more automated, so people can spend time not just trying to find the one that works, but really honing in on the ones that are working and figuring out everything they can do to make it grow.

Mark MacLeod:

Like, do you think you’re creating your own category? Do you have competition?

Bryn Jones:

I think that we’re creating our own category. There is competition in the space. A lot of the competition are called distributors, and these are hundred-year-old companies. Like, one is a public company with billions of dollars. They were founded way back in 1928. Like that company started as a small shop servicing radios and just kept leaning into partnerships over and over.

The challenges they worked through, at one point, their whole building burned down in the middle of a board meeting. The board passed, and because of the power of this network that they had built, it’s still growing today.

Now they are very different. They’re not technology companies. It is an older way of working. And so ultimately we think we’re competing against distribution, whether it be like distribution through paid media or whatever. We think we are in the distribution business.

But there are half a dozen of these businesses that effectively do the same thing without technology, and we think we’re competing there. Now, we blend that with some technology companies in the space with affiliate marketing and something called PRM, which is partner relationship management.

And we sit in between the three of those because technology needs to service distribution, and distribution needs to be a technology company. And landing in the midst of that Venn diagram is where we sit.

So, oddly enough, we compete against all three categories, and in doing so, we have built our own category.

Mark MacLeod:

So, how does that play with the Gartner mafia? Do you have to convince them to create your own quadrant, or how does that work?

Bryn Jones:

There have been, I think, every go-to-market leader would tell you that you will disagree with the analysts, and my inbox would suggest that has been the case with us. In 2019, I remember talking to an analyst and really being shut down and told that that’s not going to work, that’s not possible. And you have no experience on the side of technology. How would you possibly know?

Mark MacLeod:

Wow, so arrogant.

Bryn Jones:

Very, very opinionated is what I will say. You know, naively, I kind of went to war with them. I remember two years later, a quadrant and report being published, and having to reach out to them and inform them that I was going to have to respond to the quadrant reporter formally and disagree with it. And the reason being is actually going to have to do this is our customers were saying, well, you know X, Y, and Z analyst is saying this, you don’t fit that bucket.

And you just have to be willing to lean in in those types of moments and own what you are. You can’t be defined. No company that’s actually made a significant impact has allowed an analyst to shape their business. You have to be willing to say, no, this is who we are. You should probably play a little nicer than I did. But I think anybody, any great go-to-market leader, founder, executive operator, that’s built something of significance has fought that.

I know, very fortunately, G2 has come around and really leveraged the power of what the customer voices to make that core to everything. And that changed our trajectory because it wasn’t just the opinion of one, it was the voice of customers and partners to say, hey, no, this is what PartnerStack is.

So, we sit on a version of a quadrant, and it’s a little bit different everywhere. But increasingly over the last 10 years, we’ve been able to shape some of it, not all of it. And we haven’t done it intentionally, we’ve just done it by deciding who we were.

Mark MacLeod:

So, coming up on 10 years, you’ve got a lot of ISVs of different shapes and sizes that you work with, and presumably everything was up and to the right in 2021, and then a little less so afterwards. So like, what’s your retro for folks who sell to other startups? Is that very volatile? Like, do you recommend not doing that? Did you have a lot of volatility in your revenue in that period?

Bryn Jones:

Yeah, Tech Winter wasn’t too much fun for us. And Tech Winter is when interest rates started climbing. You know, we’re a platform that sells to go-to-market teams, and go-to-market teams were scaled back significantly because demand decreased. And we worked through that.

So, we went from Tech Summer being post-covid, when liquidity was being pumped into the market and everyone was experimenting with everything to Tech Winter. We were fortunate because the value we provided actually enabled us to grow no matter the season, though growth rates certainly were impacted.

But it’s kind of like you pick your poison. You know, you benefit in good times, and you have to manage in challenging moments. The trick, I think the retro is to know, at the end of the day, you have to be there for your customers. And if your customers need you more, you need to be there. And if your customers need you less, you need to adapt and figure out how you can lean in and provide more value.

Because if you do provide the value you say you do, it doesn’t really matter the market conditions, all that is impacted is the growth rate. And so if you do provide that value, you’ll grow through anything. But by adapting to the market, you’ll be there no matter the season.

So, selling to early-stage startups is tough. I don’t recommend it. Startups, especially technology companies, are incredibly demanding. They are very tech-centered. Now, if you can do it, you will likely build the best platform. But it’s far easier to go in and service traditional industries that don’t have any expectations where you’re automating some small workflow.

But if you can meet the challenge of a demanding user in a demanding role, you’ll build a leading platform. And so I kind of give the same type of advice to entrepreneurs, which is like, don’t do it because if you’re not going to do it because I told you not to do it, like, I just saved you a whole bunch of time.

And so if you’re willing to take on the challenge of working with early-stage companies and trying to separate real feedback from noise and what I mean by that is you can never fix someone’s business, right? Like, at PartnerStack, we’re fuel to a fire. We can’t solve someone’s go-to-market problems. We can only add fuel to the fire they create.

And so you have to know, are you getting feedback because their business is struggling and there’s no tool that can save them except for what they built, or are you getting genuine feedback because you’ve screwed something up, haven’t met the mark, are missing something and you have to be able to navigate that. You have to be able to navigate both to learn what’s there.

So, they’re great customers. You know, we’re so happy that we started there. And both things can be true. They’re incredibly challenging. And so don’t be scared of the opportunity, just know what you’re getting into.

Mark MacLeod:

Love it, that’s very wise advice. A final question, Bryn. Let’s end on a high note, and it’s a big question. You know, you said something in passing that I consider to be very important, which is that success can bring even more challenges, perhaps than the challenging times.

And my understanding is we talked about LinkedIn growth, right? It’s gestating, it’s slow and then boom. And my understanding is that PartnerStack went through like four successive years of a hundred percent growth leading up to that 2021 time period.

So like, many folks would love to have that champagne problem, which is like, oh my God, I can’t keep up with success. But like, tell us about that and how you navigated that and stayed on top, and also how you grew as a CEO to always be kind of a step ahead of a fast-growing business.

Bryn Jones:

Very, very challenging growth. You know the saying is that growth solves everything, because growth does solve everything. Except you know, it solves everything because it lets you ignore problems.

Mark MacLeod:

Oh, such a good insight. Yes.

Bryn Jones:

And you can only pave over so many problems, and do have to go back and fix the problems. You can’t just pave over everything. And that’s what happened to us: growth was solving everything, and we were making trade-offs all the time to accelerate growth.

And every company accumulates debt. Whether it’s technical debt or whatever it is. We accumulated debt that we had just not dealt with. Now, interestingly, the mistake I made is I knew we needed to address it, and I didn’t listen to that instinct. Instead, I just leaned into growth.

Mark MacLeod:

Did you feel you were forced to? Like, oh, my investors are pushing me. Like, what drove that?

Bryn Jones:

I drove it. I drove the “this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Go crazy.” Like lean in, do what’s here, ignore your instinct on the issues that need to go in and be fixed. And I own it. Certainly, that’s the culture, the ethos, and everything that exists inside that startup world.

But as founders and as CEO, you have to own all the decisions that exist. And the interesting thing for me is that that moment was probably the least fulfilling point of my career. When we leaned into growth as much as we possibly could, it just became a graph, it became a number you were chasing like data points versus solving the problem.

Like, I got involved with this and I’m in love with this because I love the problem and I love to solve problems. And ignoring the problems I wanted to solve because we could pursue growth was a big lesson for me. In my personal growth, I trust my gut and instinct and know how to make the trade-offs when growth is the right call and when fixing the problem is the right call.

The most fulfilling part of my career has actually come since Tech Winter, was going back and solving those problems that I created and ignored. And it is the thing I am most proud of. To be specific, the work, at specific points in time, we’ve had to scale back and do RIFs.

And I remember going through that process and talking with our executive team and saying, not all of you will be here at the end of this, but this should be the work that we’re most proud of. That wasn’t easy, and it impacted so many people, and not everybody was there after, but it was absolutely the work that I was most proud of because of where it’s led us and the problems that it forced me to address.

Mark MacLeod:

Fascinating. Final bonus question. You know, you said you ignored your instinct. If you look back, has your instinct ever been wrong?

Bryn Jones:

Yes, there have been times when my instinct has been wrong. But I believe I would have been more fulfilled to have listened to my instinct because I probably didn’t learn the lesson the way I should have if I had instead trusted my instinct. Because there’s no better feedback than failure. And when you fail on your terms, you learn very quickly.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, I ask that question because I find most hard-charging data-driven entrepreneurs push their instincts down. But in my experience, our intuitive mind is far more powerful than our rational mind. That’s why we have these “a-ha” moments in the shower, on a hike, or in the middle of the night, because this capability that we don’t tap into has had space to go to work.

So, I’m surprised, actually, that it’s been wrong for you. I mean, it’s not perfect, but in my experience, it’s more powerful than the rational, logical brain.

Bryn Jones:

It is. I had a similar experience. Around the edges, it’s been wrong. And I always beat up around the edges when failure happens. But it is a superpower, and you have to know how to harness it because it’s telling you something.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, it sure is. Oh, Bryn, this has been a fascinating conversation. Congrats in advance on your 10 years. We’ll have you back on for the 20th-year retrospective. Maybe your beard will be the color of my beard then.

But thank you so much for sharing that. Like, you have a giant TAM, and like, I know everybody listening can take away actionable insights here, so I’m really excited for you.

Bryn Jones:

Well, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Mark MacLeod:

Amazing.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Startup CEO Show. If you’d like to connect with me, be sure to visit my website at markmacLeod.me, or follow me on LinkedIn at The Mark MacLeod, or X account @markmacleod_, and if you want to tune in again next week, be sure to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next time!