DEAR STAGE 2: We’re a series A startup and our investors have shared codes and intros and programs that give us access to various platform’s startup programs. Obviously we’ve used the credits, but our investors keep saying "co-sell" and we definitely haven’t had any luck there yet. How do I actually get value out of a platform's startup program beyond the credits? ~PROGRAM MAXXING
DEAR PROGRAM MAXXING: We at Stage 2 have this exact vendor partnership sheet - we’ve partnered with companies like Anthropic, Google, Datadog, Snowflake, etc…to bring free licenses, compute, credits and support to our portfolio. But we probably don’t do a good enough job of helping founders take advantage of the many perks. When I saw this question, I knew exactly who to call - Josh Lillie, Stage 2 LP and Director of Startups at Databricks. Josh runs the Databricks Startups Program and previously helped build Microsoft for Startups (the program now called Founders Hub). He has spent the better part of a decade building these programs inside tech giants and working with founders on these exact questions. Read on for his take…
The program is three things, and most founders only use one
Josh breaks the Databricks program into three pillars, and in our experience, most platform programs follow a similar “credits plus” setup:
Credits: $200K at the top tier and smaller tiers up to $50K that most applicants receive.
Engineering: architecture guidance and help building your product on top of the platform.
Go-To-Market: matchmaking with the vendor’s enterprise sales teams and coaching on how to co-sell with them.
As Josh puts it: “It’s not just giving startups a bucket of credits and saying, go have fun and start building. It’s what can you actually do with those credits, and can we actually make those credits valuable for you as a founder?”
If you have only touched pillar one, you have used a coupon, not started a partnership. Pillars two and three are where the real value is, but you need to work harder to take advantage of these offerings.
Show up with a point of view, and at the right time
The first mistake Josh sees is founders applying to every credit program in existence with no idea what they would do with the vendor. Apply for the credits, sure. But have an answer to the question “how does this vendor fit into our roadmap?” before you get on a call.
Timing matters more than founders expect. “As soon as we get the application, our team is jumping in from day one, ready to start building with you,” Josh says. “If you’re not at that stage, that’s fine, but it probably isn’t the right time to be having that conversation.”
The flip side is waiting too long. “I’ve seen so many founders come in and say, we have all these customers, we’re hitting rate limits on the current architecture, we’re having outages, we need to scale the engineering team just to keep the lights on. It’s a lot harder to do that when you already have 100 customers.” Josh encourages founders to start having the architecture and scale conversations before something breaks and actually work with vendors to plan ahead.
The founder owns the relationship
Delegating the vendor relationship to your engineering lead is fine for ensuring you use the credits, but it’s not the way to drive a longer term partnership. “The founder needs to set the top-down vision for what that relationship actually looks like,” Josh says. When it gets handed down without a clear strategy, the technical team optimizes for the technical conversation and the go-to-market half never happens.
And he recommends the founder taking the lead on the go-to-market half specifically. Co-sell is a conversation about your value prop to an enterprise customer. Nobody else at your company can have it in the early stages. Over time you can bring product, AEs, and marketing in, but the founder needs to set the tone.
Co-sell is your work, not theirs
Put yourself in their shoes for a minute. The vendor’s AEs each have a quota, a territory, and a hundred other things to do. A generic “can you get us into some accounts?” is a request for them to do your job.
Josh shared a playbook for founders who make this work: “Here are the top 10 to 15 early-stage conversations we’re having today. These top five are priority number one. Which of these are already Databricks customers? Here are the two or three people we’re trying to reach. Can you help broker an introduction?”
Next, tell the rep what’s in it for them. In a consumption business, a startup built on the platform means more queries and more usage inside that customer’s environment. “That creates a data flywheel that’s good for the startup and good for Databricks,” Josh says. “You have to be able to tell that story as a founder.”
Try this exact approach. Take the work off their plate and make your asks incredibly specific and pointed. When you are clear in who and why, it becomes a much easier task to drive next steps on.
One more thing worth asking about: some vendors will retire quota or pay their reps on the incremental consumption your product drives. It is not universal, and it depends on the company and stage. Josh’s advice is not to lead with it, especially as an early stage company. Start with the application, get to know the team, and let them navigate the internal programs for you.
Go vertical, land one lighthouse, then roadshow it
Big platforms often go to market by industry. Databricks runs seven verticals, and its events, marketing, and sales teams are organized the same way. So a horizontal “we help companies with data” story gives them very little to work with, while a financial services case study with one named customer gives them the start of an actionable playbook.
“What is really helpful is landing one design partner or lighthouse customer that we can use, and then doing a roadshow with that customer across all of our teams,” Josh says. From there, joint blog posts and co-marketing become so much easier.
Events work the same way. If you sell into financial services, be at Money 20/20. Sponsor if you can. If you can’t, show up anyway. Yes you will meet prospects, but you will also meet the vendor reps you want co-selling for you and these personal relationships are critical.
So this week: write one paragraph summarizing what you want from each program you are in. Then pick your top five prospects and figure out which ones are already the vendor’s customers. This is the starting point of a joint GTM effort.
Until next week!
The co-sell ask goes better with one named account in hand. "We both sell to this company, can we work it together" is an easier yes for a vendor rep than a general partnership.
the coupon line is the one that stings. $200k in credits feels like the win, and then you realize you never actually used the partnership