Doug is an entrepreneurial revenue executive who thrives in settings where he can connect the dots between different parts of the company. How does pre-sales work with post-sales? How does goal setting affect the company’s operational cadence? These questions are important to get right as you scale.
Highlights
The entrepreneurial start
Doug started his career in the consumer/SMB web hosting industry, where he ran and sold a web hosting company while still in college.
Zendesk
In 2016, Doug joined Zendesk and spent about half of his time there in product management and the other half in go-to-market. He led the implementation of Zendesk’s company-wide goals program and helped Zendesk’s COO build out the leadership team that helped get the company to over $1B in ARR.
Grafana Labs
Doug joined Grafana Labs as COO prior to the company’s Series A, when it had roughly 70 people. He led GTM and operations—which encompassed sales, marketing, post-sales, self-service, and BizOps—through the company’s Series D, when it had more than 1,000 people.
Doug loves working with founders and teams on managing the many (fun) challenges of scaling companies, particularly their go-to-market efforts.
Superpowers
Navigating GTM inflection points
Companies hit many inflection points as they grow (multi-product, international, moving upmarket, accelerating PLG, etc.) and Doug loves helping founders and teams navigate them with (relative) ease.
Building GTM teams
Doug has built GTM teams across multiple companies at multiple stages of growth and is happy to share learnings and experiences with founders as they work to do the same. And don’t hesitate to ask him to interview someone.
Figuring out the now, next, and later
Doug enjoys partnering with founders to determine what they need to solve now, what can wait a few months, and what they have to start working on now so that it will fall into place later.
