Meet your new partnerships mentor

Nelson Wang 3 min

Hey Everyone!

I’m here to share my lessons with you after being in partnerships for 17+ years at companies like Airtable, Miro, Box, VMware, Optimizely and Cisco in both leadership and IC roles. I’m incredibly passionate about passing the torch forward so that partnerships will be a huge success for you and so that you don’t have to go through the same painful lessons I did in my 17-year career.

Along my journey:

I’ve met hundreds of partnership ICs and leaders from many of the top tech companies and startups to baseline partner programs and strategies and want to share the best with you.
I’ve built partner programs from zero to $150M+.
I’ve worked with CxOs and the board directly at startups that have had decacorn valuations.
I’ve had a wide variety of mentors that have taught me lessons across principles, strategy and frameworks that will help you be successful, no matter where you go.

In many of my conversations with other partnership professionals, I’ve also heard a lot about the challenges we all face.

Some of the most common challenges I’ve heard are:

Companies struggling to understand the value of partners and what roles they play.
Not knowing which partner types and specific partners to prioritize and invest in.
Not knowing how to build a partner strategy from 0 to 1.
Not knowing how to scale a partner strategy.
Needing help with a framework to help consistently build partner pipeline and revenue Learning how to enable partners to prosper over the long term.
Negotiating resource allocation effectively for partner programs.

And one of the toughest parts?

It can often be really hard to find a great mentor and support system to help you solve these challenges. That’s why I’m writing these posts.

I want to be that mentor and guide for you. I want to share the core principles and frameworks that have driven my success, so that you can crush it with partnerships at your company too.

I want to make sure that you don’t go through the same pain I went through when I first started my career in partnerships or when I ventured into new partnerships areas on my own (like a 0 to 1 build for the first time).

And I’m proud I can get this message out to you in partnership with Nearbound.com, one of the most trusted partnership media platforms in the industry. I wanted to partner with them because we have the same fundamental shared belief that having strong partner principles is critical to the success of a partner program.

In the spirit of giving back, I want to be able to pass on all the lessons and learnings I’ve had over the last 17 years.

That’s why I’m starting a newsletter called Partner Principles. Each week, I’ll share one of my most important lessons on partnerships with you. I’ve spent the last few years slowly batch-writing a year’s worth of content.

To kick off my first post, I’m sharing with you (in partnership with Partnership Leaders and Nearbound.com) a package of free slides I’ve created that highlights the value of partners.

This is the #1 question I’ve heard over the last 17 years of my career in partnerships:

"What value will the partner add?"

In those moments, I would have loved to show a visual slide on how the partner would add value.

Could I explain it? Of course.

But visuals hit home. They give clarity. Complex concepts become simple ones.

That’s why I’ve built a 20+ slide bundle called “The Value of Partners”:

In it you’ll find slides that cover: