A SaaS platform geared to SMB with no enterprise motion. 18 months later, winning Fortune 250 logos. Then an $850M exit.
Zipwhip sold to small business. I was brought in to move the company upmarket, I defined the enterprise ICP against real board skepticism, and build the motion from the field up. We started in a regulated industry, insurance. The team got on site with customers, inside their call centers, close enough to see and understand the operating pain and compliance requirements before we built the playbook. Retail and Financial Services followed. The platform had to grow with the motion, so I partnered closely with Product and Engineering to harden the enterprise feature set (RBAC, SSO, analytics, hierarchical account design) while project managing the implementation of SOC 2 Type II across the company.
The Guidewire alliance opened P&C insurance; Salesforce AppExchange opened the rest. The ecosystem started to compound as partners carried us into accounts we would never have reached cold.
The harder lesson was internal. Owning the full customer facing surface meant the coalition work landed on me: pricing, billing, support, product, marketing, and legal all had to harden around deals none of them had been built for. Big deals create downstream effects you do not anticipate until you have broken glass. Those breaks are what taught me to build a revenue operating model that is resilient to internal fragility rather than dependent on nothing going wrong.
Twilio acquired Zipwhip for $850M.
- Farmers: multi million dollar expansion
- Goldman Sachs–led Series D
- Guidewire alliance
- Salesforce AppExchange
- SOC 2 Type II