Sharpend

I work with startup founders to develop self-awareness, improve emotional intelligence (EQ), learn communication/leadership skills and scale with their business.

Prior to coaching I spent 7 years as founder and head of marketing at Looksharp, and then worked as a marketing executive and advisor to a number of leading San Francisco startups. 

Learn more at https://www.sharpend.co/

Executive Coach

500 Startups

Mentor

Parallel18

Various Companies

Advise, consult, and do marketing work for various venture backed startups.  

Specialties include:
-SEO
-Content Strategy
-Content Development
-Marketing Ops (automation through sale)
-Lead Generation 
-Business Development
-Data and Analytics
-Email Marketing
-PR and Marketing Communications
-Brand Strategy & Creative

Software Expertise includes:
-Google Analytics
-SQL
-Marketo
-Salesforce
-ExactTarget
-Mailchimp
-Optimizely
-SproutSocial
-Trello
-more

Marketer in Residence

Carta

Helped Carta through a critical rebrand, new marketing team hires and growth of demand gen channels that resulted in a 40% lift of net new MQLs.

Demand Generation:
-Managed Carta's inbound marketing efforts including webinars, white papers, and product marketing content. Webinars alone accounted for a 20% increase in monthly marketing generated revenues.
-Collaborated with Carta engineering team to implement site-wide SEO changes that resulted in numerous keywords moving from 50+ rankings into top 3 results and a 70%+ increase in organic traffic.
-Developed and launched Carta's first-ever event marketing series including two large-scale half-day events in New York and San Francisco. Each event was cash-flow positive and resulted in hundreds of net new leads, increased brand exposure and powerful online content.
-Worked closely with Carta's outbound email team to nurture new leads from lead generation through the sales pipeline.

Rebrand:
-Helped develop new brand messaging map, including key messages for press, current customers, internal stakeholders and more.
-Worked with engineering team to develop strategy for domain cutover and technical rebrand implementation.
-Collaborated with marketing, engineering, and design team to help redesign and rewrite content for every webpage on the Carta website and reposition product pages with new brand in mind.

Team:
-Hired and grew marketing team from 1 to 6 people. Led charge in interviewing, hiring and training new marketing hires.
-Used Asana to manage team goals and sync day-to-day work with broader business strategy.
-Developed marketing dashboards and pulled key marketing metrics using SQL, Google Analytics, Looker, and other tools.
-Presented marketing metrics at monthly KPI and leadership team meetings.

Digital Marketing

Looksharp

Founded Looksharp and led the marketing team from idea stage through Series A and beyond. Used an "Iterative Marketing" approach (running rapid fire tests and using data to track and scale campaigns) to drive user and revenue growth.

Overall:
-Grew student audience from 0 to over 10 million uniques annually through SEO, business development, content, press and more.
-Generated over 100,000 inbound B2B leads to support successful sales operation.
-Built reports using SQL and Google Analytics to measure campaigns and drive business strategy.

SEO:
-Worked with engineering and design team to optimize website and gain #1 ranking for over 90% of top keywords in the internship space.
-Developed content strategy and managed team of fifty plus writers to support SEO goals. 
-Used Optimizely to improve conversion rate on SEO landing page by over 50%. 

Content:
-Developed long term content strategy using personas, competitive positioning, and SWAT analysis.
-Managed editorial team of 50+ bloggers to create compelling daily content.
-Invented new recurring B2B content including 'Annual Internship Report' to monthly "College Hiring Webinars" and more that drove thousands of net new leads.

Data​:
-Queried SQL database to develop monthly cohort graphs used to analyze business KPIs.
-Queried Salesforce and Marketo to pull reports and graphs and analyze marketing / sales operation.

Branding and PR
-Developed relationships with top industry journalists and received press mentions in publications including: the WSJ, TechCrunch, WashingtonPost, Mashable and more.
-Managed brand transition from established brand to a parent brand including a number of technically challenging changes.

Founder

Founder -> CMO -> Exec Coach

I coach founders and co-founders from Series B - D. I specialize in co-founder dynamics--helping co-founders build more effective and fulfilling partnerships. 

I believe in a world where leaders have done the work to know themselves, in order to build lasting businesses and a more interesting future.

Nathan Parcells

Right now, I coach 15 startup founders and executives and write a monthly newsletter.

I became a coach on accident after a decade building software companies. After my last company, I was doing some soul searching when a friend asked me if I’d ever considered being a coach. I hadn’t. I had always been frustrated when I asked people what I was good at and they told me I was a great listener. I never put two and two together that being a great listener could be a career. But I’m thankful that I did, because I love working with my clients to help them navigate the challenges of being a founder with a bit more help than I had.

On top of the listening part of coaching, though, I’m also a teacher (when asked to be). Just like Richard Feynman redeveloped his own physics from the ground up to better understand how the world works, I’m studying psychology, management, leadership, human motivation, and more to better understand—and teach—how these things work.

I’ve been starting businesses since I was a kid, although my judgment has hopefully gotten better over time. My first business was a neighborhood lawn mowing operation called “All American Mow and Blow.” My Mom was gasping for air laughing when she found the flyers with the name all over the street.

In college, I began homebrewing beer and selling it to my friends, but the ATF wasn’t hot on a nineteen year old brewery CEO.

Since then, I’ve spent my entire career making it easier for people to find the knowledge they need to do good work. Most recently, I founded Holloway, a digital book publishing platform where we hoped to build the best reading experience on the web and help authors widen the reach of their books.

Before Holloway, I co-founded Mattermark, a business analytics and database company where we enabled VCs to take a data-driven approach to sourcing investments.

Writing has also  been a big part of my career. In 2016, I published The Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital, a 310 page book that helps founders both decide whether venture capital is the right path for them and demystifies how to raise money from VCs. I’ve also written several newsletters, most notably The Mattermark Daily (100K+ subscribers at peak).

So, if you've made it this far, you're not just trolling for sales leads, and you're interested in chatting for whatever reason, get in touch.

Andy Sparks

My best description of the current moment is that a small subset of the population just realized they can drink radioactive gatorade and get superpowers and everybody else is pretending it's 2019.

Founder → Executive Coach to Founders & CEOs

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