23. Warren Chen, Canva

In this episode, Avanish and Warren talk about:

• Developing extensions based on user and partner feedback (4:15)
• Thinking of ISVs as customers in their own right (9:10)
• The importance of internal alignment, and transparency both internally and externally (11:55)
• Getting buy-in from the board all the way down for ongoing investment in platform (14:20)
• When to prioritize adoption vs. monetization on your platform (19:50)

Guest: Warren Chen

Warren is Head of Ecosystem Partnerships and Developer Success at Canva, with over a decade of experience in App Platform Ecosystems at Salesforce, Atlassian, and Canva.

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, Warren Chen
• Follow our host, Avanish Sahai
• Learn more about Tidemark