BC Startup Sales Podcast – Building Communities to Support BD Efforts with Shai Goldman (SVB)

This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Shai Goldman, Managing Director at Silicon Valley Bank in NYC, to discuss “Building Communities to Support BD Efforts.” SVB works with the world’s top entrepreneurs, technology companies, and VCs to offer them best-in-class banking services. A large part of their strategy focuses on community building efforts with these different groups, and given that, we couldn’t think of a better person to host on today’s episode to discuss unique ways to build a community to service your customers!

Shai Goldman is the Managing Director at Silicon Valley Bank in NYC tasked with engaging the local VC community. He moved to NYC from the Bay Area in 2011 to help build out the SVB office and launch a new group serving early-stage founders. Previously, he was a Venture Partner at 500 Startups, where he conducted investing, fundraising, community building and portfolio management. Shai also serves on the NYC Advisory Board for BUILD.org. He graduated from Santa Clara University. Similar to SVB, Shai has a global background, having been born in Israel and growing up speaking three languages. He is married to a California native and helps raise their two children and two yorkies.

In today’s episode, Shai and I discuss the beginnings of SVB in NYC and many of the community initiatives that the bank has run over the years. One of the more eye-opening insights is the fact that despite being a large bank with tons of clients and programs, SVB’s community efforts are still built from the ground up. If you have a good idea, and it’s to the benefit of the end customer, you’re free to be entrepreneurial and run with that as a team. Perhaps this is the reason that we here in NYC have seen everything from surf days with SVB, to workshops for entrepreneurs in their awesome office, to “Tech Gives Back,” a multi-city effort over the course of one day to enable the tech community to volunteer their skills to the benefit of dozens of organizations.

What tech companies are doing a great job of building communities, and how do they measure those? Shai and I also discuss that topic. In addition, Shai provided tons of insight on the tech stack he likes to use to build, and keep track of communities and the events his community engages in. Thank you Shai for taking the time to share a bit more of your world, and how you build communities to support BD efforts at SVB!

If you liked “Building Communities to Support BD Efforts” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the podcast to get all our new content each week!