May 2013 was a historic month for Bowery Capital. Not only because we launched our firm, but because we convened over 75 revenue leaders and their teams from our portfolio for a day of learning from senior CROs in the business software ecosystem. Learning from these executives about topics like how to sell effectively into CMOs/CTO/CIOs, how to hire and retain sales talent, and how to think about metrics appropriately gave our portfolio’s revenue leaders real tools to help them in their day to day.
One of the main points of feedback following the offsite – outside of keeping the CRO network alive (more on that later) – was that this should be done for all of our CXOs including finance, ops, marketing and technology. The entire group felt that this value exchange and advice was incredibly helpful to them and they wanted their entire C-suite to have the same experience.
We went back to the drawing board and thought hard about what makes sense for us and our portfolio. We didn’t want to duplicate the already successful CEO forums of our co-investment friends at First Round Capital and Google Ventures. There are many firms that build networks beyond the CEO and we sought to learn from their success and failure. After a lot of research and discussion we all agreed we wanted to ‘fight for the users’ – by that I mean, the actual users of the technologies we invest in and evangelize, be that a junior analyst or a CMO. We took the feedback from our CRO Summit and are working to empower everyone else at our portfolio companies in a fixed and focused way by sharing incomparable knowledge.
After one more test run with CFOs in August of this year and much more discussion with folks in our portfolio, as well as investor friends, we think we’ve figured out the recipe that works. Today, we are announcing our CXO Summit Series. Hosted once a quarter, the end goal of these summits is simple, to connect portfolio CXOs and other industry leaders for a day of learning. We have our CMO Summit upcoming in December and will, in a calendar year, host Summits for CTOs, CROs, CFOs and CMOs. We plan on blogging/tweeting throughout the day of these events in an effort to share learnings with the broader ecosystem and we’re excited to make this public as another way we’re giving our portfolio the tools they need to build massive, successful B2B businesses.
