I am delighted to announce today two fantastic additions to the Notion team under our Executive-in-Residence program: Melissa Di Donato and Jonathan Gale.

Melissa is one of the best known and most respected technology executives in Europe. Currently Chief Revenue Officer for SAP’s Cloud business responsible for one of its highest-growth and most strategically important revenue lines, she previously ran the ISV program at Salesforce.com in Europe. A passionate advocate for woman in the tech industry, she was recently named as Personality of the Year UK for Cloud Computing, ranked in the Top 10 most influential women in UK technology and won the Technology Woman of Achievement award from Women in the City. Additionally, she is a Corporate Board member for iDEA (The Duke of York's Charitable Program for digital skills for UK youth), Board Member of The Data Science Institute at Imperial College in London, Trustee for Founders4Schools, Entrepreneur, Executive and mother who believes that we can change the digital world one girl / woman at a time. *

Jonathan is one of Europe’s most accomplished SaaS executives having been a driving force in senior executive positions at three of Europe’s biggest and best-known SaaS success stories: MessageLabs, Mimecast and NewVoiceMedia. At MessageLabs he led global sales and product strategy (as part of a leadership team which included several of the Notion partners) helping take the business from $10m to over $150m in revenues before its eventual $700m sale to Symantec in 2008. At Mimecast as SVP Product, he was as a key contributor to their proposition development and go-to-market strategy in what went on to become a multi-billion-dollar public company. And most recently as CEO of one of Notion’s earliest investments, NewVoiceMedia, he led the business through revenue growth from $5m to over $75m and fundraisings totalling $140m (from respected investors like Highland, Bessemer and TCV) which allowed a UK only company to establish itself on the global stage with a highly innovative product.

Both will be part-time at Notion, continuing their respective existing responsibilities elsewhere but both will dedicate time, expertise and passion to supporting Notion’s mission and strategy. The XiR program aims to bring leading technology scale up talent into our firm in order to broaden our network and deal-flow, support our portfolio companies and mentor / coach our portfolio leadership. Refining a business’s proposition, identifying its ideal customer profile, defining its go-to-market strategy and driving real commercial scale are all core to Notion’s DNA and form the pillars of our Platform of value-added support to portfolio companies. I cannot think of two people better qualified to help that mission so I am really delighted to have them on board. Both share our vision and values as long-standing friends of the firm and of the Notion team.

Stephen

* the Notion team is committed to diversity, internally and across our portfolio. We are approaching 50:50 men and women within our team and have some fantastic female tech founders, with more to come (watch this space!).