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Partnership Principles for Startups
Talks about Startup, Startup Lessons and Partnerships
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Cristina Cordova
Chief Operating Officer at Linear
San Francisco, California
Overview
Cristina Cordova is the Chief Operating Officer at Linear, with a background in new business development, strategic partnerships, and product management. She has held significant roles at notable companies like Stripe and Notion, and has invested in a variety of successful startups including Parabola and Softr.
Cordova's career highlights include serving as a Partner at First Round Capital and leading various departments at Stripe, demonstrating expertise in payments, partnerships, and diversity & inclusion initiatives.
Work Experience
Chief Operating Officer
2023 - Current
Building our marketing, sales, operations, data and talent teams.
Linear allows users to manage software development and track bugs.
Raised $52,200,000.00 from Riku Mäkelä, Kenneth Auchenberg, Akash Garg, Lee Robinson, Jorn van Dijk, Kristo Ovaska, Anthony Guo, Anssi Rusi, Illusian Founder Office and Claire Hughes Johnson.
Angel Investor & Advisor
2019
I'm an angel investor and/or advisor to over 60 technology companies including Canva, Merge, Meter, Notion, Stytch, WorkOS, Writer and many more.
Partner
2022 - 2023
I invested in and supported founders at seed stage, with a focus on startups building developer, B2B SaaS and financial technology products.
First Round Angel Track is a community of operators and founders looking to develop their skills and identities as early-stage investors.
Head of Platform & Partnerships
2020 - 2021
As part of Notion's leadership team reporting to the CEO, I led our Platform & Partnerships efforts, building and managing our API, third-party embeds and partner integrations (https://developers.notion.com/). I built the team (business development, developer advocacy and partner engineering) from the ground up. I also led our growth product efforts, led a cross-functional group aimed at growing the self-serve business, hired our first PM and first people ops manager.
Notion is a workspace platform that offers note-taking, collaboration, task management, wikis, and databases.
Raised $343,199,697.00 from Coatue, Shine Capital and Sequoia Capital.
Business Lead, Head of Corporate Card & Treasury
2019 - 2020
I led a business unit working on several new financial products for Stripe, including Corporate Card (https://stripe.com/card) and Treasury (https://stripe.com/treasury). I built the team from scratch and managed managers in engineering, product management and strategy & operations functions.
Head of Payments & Platform Partnerships
2012 - 2018
I joined Stripe as our first Partnerships hire and grew our global team from scratch. I led the Partnerships organization until May 2018. In that time, I led business/product efforts to launch new products including Stripe for Marketplaces (now part of Stripe Connect), bringing top customers including Lyft onboard our platform. I built a team from scratch to acquire and manage our top distribution/revenue partnerships (e.g. Shopify, Xero, Squarespace), responsible for significant user growth and a substantial portion of Stripe's overall payments volume. The organization I led also built first-in-kind product partnerships with Google, Apple, Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter, Twilio and others. Our work spanned distribution, payments, platform, trust and identity partnerships.
Manager, Financial Partnerships
2017 - 2018
In addition to my full-time role leading the Partnerships function, I managed a team within the Financial Partnerships organization. This team developed and managed partnerships with entities across the financial industry—banks, payment networks, and partners providing regulated services and financial technology to enable money movement.
Lead, Diversity & Inclusion
2016 - 2017
In addition to my full-time role leading the Partnerships function, I led diversity and inclusion, working closing with our recruiting and people operations teams. I launched our Employee Resource Groups, Annual Inclusion Survey, Return-to-Work Program and two pilot development programs for mid-career women, while growing headcount of underrepresented groups significantly in both our full-time Engineering function and Engineering internship program.
Manager, Partner Engineering
2016 - 2016
In addition to my full-time role leading the Partnerships function, I managed our Partner Engineering team. This team of engineers worked with our largest and most complex users and partners to help them design, plan, execute and scale their Stripe integrations.
Stripe is an API technology company that provides online payment processing and commerce solutions for Internet businesses.
Raised $9,440,247,725.00 from E1 Ventures.
VP Business Development
2010 - 2012
As the first employee at Pulse, I led business development and hired and managed employees across marketing/PR, community and operations. I sourced and closed partnerships with hundreds of media organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Fox News, Reuters, Bloomberg & BBC News, enabling us to give our users access to high-quality content for free. I led strategic marketing partnerships (placement in TV commercials, print ads, etc.) and distribution partnerships (pre-loads) with carriers and OEMs including Amazon, AT&T, HTC, Verizon & Vodafone pushing us to over 25M users. In April 2013, Pulse was acquired by LinkedIn to power their publishing platform.
Pulse is a news reading app that provides users with news from multiple RSS feeds on a single interface.
Raised $10,000,000.00 from Lerer Hippeau, New Enterprise Associates, Greycroft and SV Angel.
Marketing Intern
2009 - 2010
I joined Tapulous as an intern during college to work on marketing and operations for the Tap Tap Revenge game series on iPhone. I managed the chat program, moderation and policies for games played by over 35M users. When most top games were charging for installs, I created the pitch to land our first in-app sponsorship for a newly released Warner Brothers film and worked with our design team to launch the creative for avatar clothing and accessories, which we sold to users directly via in-app purchases. In July 2010, Disney acquired Tapulous, which is now part of Disney Interactive Media Group.
Investments
Latest Articles
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Sourcing Women in Engineering
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