$1.5 Trillion of Value was Set Up Right in Front of Me
Today, you see astronomical valuations of Seattle’s Tech King Amazon. In yesteryear, we were barely trying to hang on for dear life and eBay was giving us a run for our money. We were bleeding money.
However, one thing we had was INCREDIBLE people. Here are a few:
The Best Damn Business Development Team in the World
The “God” before the “Goddess”
Before Sheryl Sandberg, it was Owen Van Natta. In LA news, Van Natta dropped $10 mill on a Santa Monica property. Owen’s had an incredible track record including Amazon, Facebook, Myspace and Zynga. He was the COO of Facebook. I remember hearing stories about how he struggled just to keep the site up on their hockey stick trajectory. They were growing too fast for their servers to handle. He was the CEO of MySpace before that to help Zuck figure out how to not Suck. He was also the EVP at Zynga and I remember him being just one of the “higher ups” in Amazon. His official title was VP of Worldwide Business and Corporate Development.
Bigger than the “God” before he became as big as he did?
For some reason, I didn’t think of Owen, but Mark Britto instead as one of our most successful former BizDev folks. Currently, he’s the EVP Chief of Product at PayPal. For some reason, I thought of Britto instead of Van Natta b/c I remember him being quite high up the chain. Officially, he was SVP, Worldwide Services and Sales at Amazon while I was there. He went onto become the CEO of Ingenio and then the CEO of Boku and now the position he has at PayPal. Quite a record, I’d say.
I’ll continue with this post later with this incredible roster:
There were definitely others as well, but each of these Biz Dev pros were just every day people (maybe hungrier ones if I had to be more specific), but they all proliferated to what they were supposed to be: the best damn BD pros in history (in whatever eventual capacity they became).
While I could probably detail this out more to prove my point, I just had to start this post because I realized how amazing the group was when talking to another person who was focusing on business development for their startup. You just have to click on their LinkedIn profiles to see how amazing all of these are. Even the ones who’s profiles might not look stellar were frankly still the most talented folks I’ve ever met. Keri, at the bottom, was possibly just as good, if not better than most on the list.
The team had regular internal competitions of out talking one another. They not only proved their mettle internally, but as you can see, externally was where they were wizards.
The other reason I’m starting this (to hopefully come back and detail out more later) is because I’ve also realized over time (and Jeff knew it from the beginning), but Business Development departments can be the quiet reason why some companies succeed and others fail. I haven’t done the research yet to see if others have written about this, but frankly, the partnerships and deals that these departments solidify many times generate HUGE boosts to companies — sometimes much larger than any single digital marketing channel can. The contract negotiations and the salaries that are demanded for these folks are truly weighty, BUT if the investment in them can be made, it can definitely boost your startup or growing organization in ways that only some of the top companies in the world have witnessed.