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

I'm a co-founder & CEO of Schematic -- an entitlements and monetization platform built on top of Stripe Billing. 

Our thesis is that AI transforms B2B monetization. 

SaaS monetization was static & seat-based. 

AI monetization is hybrid pricing & hybrid selling across multi-product offerings. 

Developers shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to implementing & maintaining pricing & packaging. Product & growth folks should be able to control and iterate on monetization without code changes. They should be able to operate with speed and easily align their product roadmaps with continuous pricing & packaging releases. 

The future of monetization looks far more like telecoms in the 90’s than SaaS in the 2010's.

Enough about that.

As a kid, I wanted to play professional soccer, and I pursued that into my early 20’s, playing collegiately & then semi-professionally. 

My professional journey off the field began with a community visioning campaign to help continue Chattanooga TN’s revitalization, then a short, but formative stint with an edtech startup, which got me interested in startups, and then a year at a fund of hedge funds, before founding my first company in 2012, RootsRated.

Founding RootsRated kicked off what has now been a 15-year journey into building startups. RootsRated began as a go-to site for outdoor recreation and adventure travel. We later pivoted to SaaS, launched Matcha, a content marketing platform, and eventually, were acquired by Springbot, an email marketing service. 

After Matcha, I joined Automox, a leading ITOps platform, where I wore multiple hats—Director of Growth, Chief of Staff, and VP of Ops. Among other things, I led pricing at Automox, which led to the founding of Schematic. 

I grew up in Chattanooga, spent the last ~7 years in Atlanta which is one of the great cities, and recently moved to Colorado with my wife, two kids, and two dogs. Attended the University of Richmond, captained the soccer team, and studied International Relations & French (though my French has since atrophied). 

Outside of work, I enjoy trail running and becoming a cycling addict. Occasionally share my thoughts on history and technology on Substack.

Monetizing SaaS:
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@schematichq
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5yjegk5duBz3LtvjwOo8ai
- Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/monetizing-saas/id1757006729

Fynn Glover

Hi, I'm Benjamin Papillon. Ask me about entitlements! :-)

Co-founder & CEO of Schematic | helping SaaS & AI startups monetize smarter and faster

My friend James Wood and I are hosting a group of founders, operators, CEOs, and product leaders on Wednesday March 18th in San Francisco for drinks, food, and conversations about what's working in SaaS and AI pricing, packaging, and monetization.

I first met James when he was advising on pricing at Automox. He's one of the first people who shaped how I think about monetization as a discipline, so I
I'm excited to co-host with him.

Expect a candid group sharing what they're learning, struggling with, and finding success with across hybrid pricing models, credits, custom enterprise deals, upgrade levers, and more.

DM me if you want the details. Wednesday in SF, space is limited.

I think this is an important read for any CTO or CPO responsible for handling the evolution of pricing & packaging as their company matures into hybrid billing, multiple sales motions, and multi-product offerings. It's written by Benjamin Papillon, Schematic's CTO, and ryan echternacht, who led billing engineering at Crossbeam, before joining Schematic to help us build enterprise grade entitlements infrastructure a new world of monetization.

link in comments to full article

Companies owned by PEs like Vista Equity Partners & Insight Partners have a critical opportunity in front of them as we move into the AI era.

Most of them are sitting on 5, 10, sometimes 20 products acquired through M&A. Each with its own product catalog. Its own billing setup. Its own way of managing what customers can access.

That's not just a technical debt problem. It's a monetization problem.

I was on a call this morning with a finance and engineering team from a PE-backed company that processes billions of dollars in payments annually. 

They're consolidating 5 brands into a unified product suite & moving from simple seat licensing into hybrid usage-based models.

Here's how they framed their situation:

"To date, developers in each business unit have hard-coded entitlements and access permissions themselves. No unified standards, no best practices — just everyone doing it their own way. The question we're asking ourselves, is whether we want this to continue to maintain in house, or is it time to look at a commercial-grade entitlements vendor that helps us better manage multiple products, hybrid pricing models, and both product-led and sales-led buying experiences?"

That question is the right one. And more PEs should be asking their CEOs, "how will you design the monetization stack to support consumption based pricing, upgrades, and price transparency, so our customers feel value is aligned with their investment?"

Here's what we recommend in this situation:

1/ Treat pricing and monetization as a cross-functional architecture.

2 / The foundation is a robust, first-class entitlements system enforced at runtime & decoupled from billing & code. A dedicated system that knows what every customer can do, at what tier, based on what they've purchased and consumed.

When that infrastructure exists, here's how life changes across the organization:

- Engineering stops getting pulled into every pricing change. New package, new limit, custom enterprise term...none of it requires a code deploy. They get back to building product. As a byproduct, CEOs and CTOs don't need to accept 10, 20, 30 person billing engineering teams. 

- Product can iterate on packaging and monetization without redeploys and quarters of waiting. They can test, adjust, and move at the speed the market requires. 

Finance gets auditability. Every customer, every entitlement, every usage event — queryable and reportable. No more hunting through code to answer a QofE question.

- Sales can offer custom terms and exceptions without creating operational chaos. The system can handle it.

The companies that use this moment (consolidation, AI, competitive pressure) to rearchitect their monetization will emerge with a durable advantage. 

The ones that don't will keep fighting their own engineering team every time they want to change a price.

This is a solvable problem. But it requires treating entitlements as mission-critical infrastructure.

one of my favorite things about Schematic is that it allows you to combine product usage data and billing data in the same place and see usage over time against the limits defined in the subscription or the contract. this combination was painfully missing for me in prior roles and companies, which made it so difficult to have a complete picture of customer behavior, churn risk, and expansion potential.

the rate of entitlements decisions is about to increase by orders of magnitude, and anything hard-coded or loosely defined won't survive it.

we're seeing enterprises look to re-architect monetization & we're seeing startups choosing a decoupled architecture from the very beginning.

There is a big difference between systems that describe limits and entitlements at the plan level versus systems that evaluate and enforce them in-product at runtime. 

The latter tends to deliver a much better developer experience and more business agility once companies pursue usage-based pricing, hybrid selling, or multi-product offerings.

Open article: Who Owns Pricing? by open.substack.com

Auth handles identity. Billing handles invoicing. So who handles what a customer is actually allowed to do with your product?

Most SaaS companies assume the answer is "the billing system." It's not.

Billing systems are responsible for invoicing. They're not responsible for entitlements inside your product... in real time, at the user level, across usage-based limits, add-ons, and custom enterprise terms.

So companies do what comes naturally: they hard-code it. 

It works until it doesn't — which is usually the moment you try to change your pricing, launch a new package, or add a consumption-based component.

At that point, every commercial decision becomes an engineering project.

There's a name for this: entitlements, or commercial permissioning. 

Not who you are (that's auth). Not what you owe (that's billing). But what you can do based on your contract, your subscription tier, your usage to date, and your seat count.

Entitlements have always existed. They're just getting harder.

Companies are moving toward hybrid models: seats plus usage. PLG and SLG running in parallel. Multi-product bundles sold to different personas. 

And rapidly... agents acting on behalf of customers, making entitlements decisions not once per session but thousands of times per workflow.

The companies that hard-coded this for a simple seat-based world aren't ready for what's coming.

Commercial grade entitlement management is critical infrastructure for the world we're moving into. 

They must decoupled from code, enforceable at runtime, and controllable to the business users who own pricing and packaging.

taplio

The Battle

Nathan Parcells

Fynn Glover

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreFynn Glover's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Nathan Parcells

Fynn Glover

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Fynn Glover's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreFynn Glover's LinkedIn Performance