New adventure! I’ve joined Andreessen Horowitz as an operating partner to build the program I always dreamed of.
When I was running marketing at Atlassian through hypergrowth and IPO, I had the biggest job of my life. We were growing like crazy, pioneering a new go-to-market model and building a new category in real time.
It was exhilarating, a huge privilege… and incredibly lonely.
The stakes were high, decisions didn’t have one right answer. I often couldn’t share thoughts with the team members that would be affected. And my network of people who really understood my problems was very small - the challenges of growth, the organizational complexity, the intensity, the new patterns.
I had tried several executive coaches, but they didn’t understand my role. I tried CMO clubs where I met smart, accomplished people, but also didn’t find what I needed. Communities mixed B2B and B2C, early-stage startups and public companies, venture-backed hypergrowth with cost-cutting PE. Best practices became too vague and irrelevant when we were solving fundamentally different problems.
Sometimes you need an expert or a framework. Often, you need someone who understands the seat, someone you can call when the situation is hot. Someone to help you discuss the options and get conviction on what to do in your unique situation.
After Atlassian, I began advising CEOs, CMOs, and CROs. I wanted to help other leaders navigate hypergrowth with more support than I’d had. Again and again, I encountered the same pattern: exceptional executives looking for peers or mentors who could really help. I knew the feeling.
When you’re sprinting through hypergrowth, relevance matters. You want to learn from people operating at your scale or beyond, growing your speed or faster. You want patterns that your ambitious CEO aspires to, not ‘the old tried and true.’ You don’t need another networking event. You need people who know how to win in your reality.
That’s why I couldn’t be more excited to join a16z’s Growth team. I get to bring everything I learned at Atlassian, and from advising companies through this stage (Lovable, Miro, 1Password, Weights & Biases, and others), to a portfolio full of companies scaling at extraordinary speed. I get to support their leaders 1:1 and build a community for marketing and sales leaders with real peers.
We’ll provide hands-on support during their most intense moments, serve as sounding boards for their challenges and opportunities, share the best practices from across the portfolio, and build carefully matched cohorts of true peers. We’ll work through multi-product, multi-geo, multi-channel scaling and more.
The goal is simple: no go-to-market leader in the a16z Growth Portfolio should have to scale alone.
The Team
I’m especially excited to build this alongside an exceptional Growth team.
David George has built a16z’s Growth fund from day one to being one of the biggest in the world. raghu raghuram helped scale VMware from startup to global platform, ultimately serving as its CEO and is building out operational excellence across the firm. Sarah Wang and Alex Immerman are remarkable investors and partners to some of tech’s most ambitious and admired companies.
Together, they have built one of venture’s biggest and best growth platforms, with more than $24 billion managed across five vintages. More importantly, they believe capital alone isn’t enough. They have built one of the most comprehensive platforms of support - the a16z Growth Platform - for helping companies hire the best talent, connect with a massive network of potential partners and clients, and expand internationally.
I’ll also get to work alongside Mark Regan, our Revenue Operations & GTM AI expert and Tugce Erten, our Pricing & Packaging expert who I knew from our Atlassian days.
Plus the amazing New Media team run by Erik Torenberg. He and his team are building the biggest, loudest, most creative distribution engine I’ve seen inside any venture firm: cinematic launch films, original media channels, viral social, and the kind of cultural reach I would have killed for as a CMO.
I know what it feels like to hold a top leadership job at an iconic company during its formative years. I know how thrilling it can be, and how isolating. Now I get to build the support system I always wished existed: candid advice, relevant pattern recognition, hands-on help, and a trusted community of peers living it alongside you.
I can’t wait to advise this portfolio, bring these leaders together, and build the world’s best community for hypergrowth marketing and sales executives.
Game on.
Congrats, this is major. We’re way too close to the things we build and it feels like sometimes proximity distorts vision. Having people you trust give you another POV can really change a business. I want to hear more
Congratulations and loved this post. One note from a very different seat as I lead a marketing team at a payments company in the Gulf and report to the founder. Every decision I make lands on someone I’ll see at lunch, so the line about not being able to share with the people affected is the one that landed. The peer pool is smaller too and the people in this region who’ve run marketing through a fintech scale-up would fit in one WhatsApp group, and a few of them are competitors. Relevance is the right filter but the tighter you set it, the more people end up outside every room. What you’re building fixes that for a portfolio but I'd really love one a platform where you could create or apply to be on virtual i boards with minded people helping each other.