I’m truly excited to announce today that I’ll be joining Notion Capital in an Advisory capacity as their Customer Success Expert. I’ve known the good folks at Notion for several years now starting when I moved to London in 2016 to build out Gainsight’s EMEA operation. We developed a wonderful, mutually beneficial partnership which included me doing informally with them what I’ll now be doing formally.

Customer Success has become a critical part of every successful SaaS company. Notion recognized this years ago and I worked with them to spread that word to their portfolio and to mentor and educate some of their investments. It’s work I love doing because I have passion for both startup companies and Customer Success. This role simply extends what I’ve been doing already and engages me in two of my favorite things in life.

Kudos to Notion for their forward-thinking in bringing on experts who can share their operational experience and wisdom with their portfolio. I think they are on the leading edge of a trend that will become a necessity in the venture world. Many Silicon Valley VCs are doing, or considering, a similar model. I’m very pleased to be one of the first on board in this role with my friends at Notion.

A note from Stephen Millard

I am delighted to welcome Dan Steinman, Chief Evangelist at Gainsight, to the extended Notion Family as our resident Customer Success Expert. I have long been an admirer of Gainsight, the global customer success leader that Dan built together with Nick Mehta. Gainsight created a new category and profession to the benefit of us all, because Customer Success is critical to any and every SaaS company, and Dan has been instrumental to that journey.

At Notion we put a lot of focus on our portfiolio's ability to win ideal customers and to do so at scale, but without a commitment to world class customer success - ensuring those ideal customers are successful, renew, expand their usage and become powerful advocates - then all that investment in customer acquisition is wasted. Customer success is, in my opinion, the primary driver of exponential growth in SaaS.

As our portfolio grows both in number and scale the ability for us to create a collective intelligence that connects founders and their leaders with their peers in order to share, learn and collaborate becomes one of our strongest value drivers. We already have an active CS community, which Dan will be taking to the next level. He will be leading regular Customer Success meet ups for our portfolio as well as offering individual company support and personal mentoring.

I am delighted in the confidence Dan has shown by giving up his valuable time to support us and our companies in this way and I am looking forward to learning from him and - hopefully before too long - sharing a few beers next time he's back in London!