21. Adrienne McCallister, Google

In this episode, Avanish and Adrienne talk about:

• Changes in the productivity space that have impacted Workspace’s platform strategy (9:55)
• Balancing product and ecosystem developments while you scale (16:10)
• Taking a principle-based approach to building a platform (19:00)
• The necessity of a multifaceted strategy in creating a successful platform (20:30)
• Innovation and “first-of-a-kind” thinking in partnerships (22:50)
• Building a partnership strategy based on product and business goals (24:40)
• Creating missions at the business and team level to achieve your goals (27:40)

Guest: Adrienne McCallister

Adrienne McCallister is the Vice President of Global Partnerships for Workspace and Messaging, where she oversees Workspace’s productivity suite partnerships, as well as all Comms/Messaging partnerships, covering Google's consumer communications products Messages by Google(RCS), Meet, Dialer and Business Messaging.

Adrienne’s previous roles at Google include partnership lead for Android’s U.S. carrier partners, Google’s VR/AR/Lens efforts, helping to launch Chromecast, Google Home and leading its global distribution partnerships, as well as leading strategic content partnerships for Google TV. Prior to joining Google in 2011, Adrienne held senior business development roles at Associated Content (a Yahoo! company), Clearleap (an IBM company) and AOL. Adrienne holds an M.B.A. from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, and has a bachelor’s degree in finance from the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia.

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.

Links

• Follow our guest, Adrienne McCallister
• Follow our host, Avanish Sahai
• Learn more about Tidemark