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

Deloitte

• Lead a team of 6 engineers and architects in developing system design and technical architecture documentation for a web application serving over 13M+ users
• Managed end-to-end technical documentation process, integrating qualitative client feedback to adopt new tools (e.g., PlantUML), achieving a 48% reduction in development time and improving documentation consistency
• Facilitated executive workshops and delivered weekly briefings to clarify technical architecture, align stakeholders, share status updates, and remove roadblocks in the technical documentation process
• Work cross-functionally with User Experience, Security, Application Development and Project Management teams to align on content needs, establish repeatable processes, and promote alignment in the development of technical documentation
• Led organization-wide engineering guild meetings to share best practices, explore emerging technologies, and foster collaboration, resulting in new technical blog content and internal knowledge sharing

Senior Consultant - Technology Strategy | Enterprise Architecture & Application Modernization

• Closed 5 enterprise accounts and $1M in sales by delivering targeted demos, technical Q&A, and consultative guidance on integrating login.gov with existing applications
• Shepherded customers through the sales process (pre-sale & post-sale) by maintaining a thorough understanding of login.gov services and technical requirements to deftly answer inquiries and provide excellent service to customers
• Developed reusable sales and onboarding materials, created facilitation guides for discovery sessions, and improved sales training resources, enabling more team members to participate effectively in presales activities

Technical Account Manager

• Conducted 200+ discovery sessions with prospective customers, achieving an 18% deal conversion rate (205 leads, 37 signed contracts, 22 new agencies), aligning customer needs with tailored consulting solutions
• Standardized and optimized the project qualification process to ensure consistent handling of prospective leads and opportunities
• Performed lost sales leads analysis to develop new service offerings to better fit customer needs
Managed stakeholders across leadership, account managers, marketing, product, legal and operations to qualify and develop proposals/SOWs that translate customer needs and requirements into the organization’s products and service offerings
• Shared key client insights and feature requests with Product and UX teams, directly influencing product roadmap improvements and enhancing solution fit for enterprise customers

Director Of Business Development

• Managed customer relationships with 15 federal agencies generating $4.2M in revenue
• Guided customers through the onboarding process with educational meetings on partnership principles and led collaborative discovery sessions to prepare customer for work with assigned project team
• Managed multi-site SaaS Wordpress platform supporting 52 websites across 14 federal agencies, driving a 76% increase in client onboarding through a combination of content marketing, cold outreach, webinars, demos, and technical support
• Expanded customer relationships by identifying and closing a $3.2M follow-on engagement, contributing technical content to RFPs and proposals that secured the largest contract in 18F’s history

Federal Account Manager

• Managed the security, sales and technical support for a large multi-site Software as a Service (SaaS) Wordpress platform that supported 52 websites spanning 14 federal agencies. 
• Led a comprehensive marketing and on-boarding process with content marketing, cold calls, webinars, presentations and demos to solicit clients resulting in a 76 percent increase in clients          
• Earned Special Act Award for providing outstanding customer service

Product Lead

Peace Corps

Community Economic Development Advisor

Resources for Residents and Communities of Georgia

Affordable Housing Development Intern

10+ years in Solutions Consulting and Technical Account Management roles managing discovery, integration design, and client enablement for large-scale federal IT programs.

• Closed $1M in new sales by onboarding 5 enterprise clients for login.gov

• Managed 15 federal accounts generating $4.2M annually, including a $3.2M expansion deal

• Led 200+ discovery sessions, resulting in an 18% conversion rate

• Co-led REST API development projects and piloted a UML tool reducing diagramming time by 50%

• Built reusable sales materials and enablement content, driving cross-team efficiency

𝙍𝙚𝙡𝙚𝙫𝙖𝙣𝙩 𝙎𝙠𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙨

• Technical Discovery & Requirements Gathering

• Solution Design & Integration Consulting

• Stakeholder Management & Executive Presentations

• Agile Facilitation & Cross-Functional Collaboration

𝙏𝙚𝙘𝙝 𝙎𝙩𝙖𝙘𝙠
Salesforce, Jira, AirTable, PlantUML, REST APIs, AWS (Associate), SQL, SurveyMonkey, Zendesk

In a personal capacity, I am a big proponent of wellness. The ability to show up well in any capacity requires taking care of yourself both physically and mentally. I find joy in self-improvement and enjoy helping others become the best version of themselves.

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The Battle

Nathan Parcells

Kendrick Daniel 🏳️‍🌈

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