Shlok Vaidya
Director, Product Management at Planview
Austin
Crews
Introduction
Hi everyone, pretty excited about engaging withe everyone here.
About me:Spent many years in counter-terrorism, specialized in ‘systems disruption’ and ‘information warfare’, and worked with a lot of interesting people on hairy topics. Then I was responsible for the background music everywhere you’ve ever been. Built a streaming music platform we sold to a million SMB retail locations; bizdev with Shazam, Amazon, Spotify, Pandora.)
Currently: Over the last four years, led the product integration of five acquisitions at an enterprise SaaS company - $200m+ ARR, 700 employees, 5,000 customers, highly profitable. Built a global customer success organization; built the reference implementation of Gainsight for the Thoma Bravo portfolio. OnDeck Fellow (Cohort 4).
Fun:Matt Taibbi once sent me a grenade for making fun of Tom Friedman in Rolling Stone (www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-grenade-of-understanding-winners-of-the-write-like-friedman-challenge-235625)
Get in touch:https:/twitter.com/shloky
Professional Goals
Modernizing credit unions to unlock acquisitive cooperatives - the 'ownership economy' as its now called
Currently Investing in
Working in
Functional Expertise
Future Interests
Gives
- I can share the problem-sets that enterprises you may want to sell to face - mine and my customers. (Or give you feedback on if you’re already solving them.)
- Happy to help with building, positioning, and selling B2B\/Enterprise software.
- The “digital transformation” opportunity. Basically how data, analytics, and AI feed into the above.
- From a product management perspective, I’ve due diligence-d, acquired, integrated hundreds of millions of dollars worth of companies in the trenches - a very different view than a purely financial view. What product choices to consider, technical debt, etc as you grow. Gartner/Forrester credentialed as well, so happy to help with that.
Asks
My Working Thesis:- There is ~$2T in capital committed to private equity and an entire generation of business owners and managers retiring in the next decade. This is a historic opportunity to standardize, democratize, and distribute ownership. This could look like conglomerates/PE, cooperatives, or both.- Please share any thoughts/learnings/ideas in this area!