External Mentors
This program gives you access to a variety of external mentors, across a variety of expertise like Marketing, Growth, Sales, Fundraising, Storytelling and more!
Long Story Short
External Speaker
Founder and Managing Director
Long Story Short
For more than a decade, Alex has helped organizations big and small successfully build their brands and “tell better stories. A communications and design specialist by trade, he understands the complexities of technology and how to best deliver your message in a persuasive & memorable way. Born and raised in Toronto, he’s helped build brands and businesses on a global scale with stints in New York and London, UK along the way. To date, he’s collaborated with clients that include MasterCard, Unilever, TELUS, Nissan, MIT, Colliers & AB InBev to launch iconic initiatives across Europe and North America throughout his career.
Hai Habot
VP Product
GoFundMe
Hai is an experienced silicon valley based tech executive and entrepreneur, focused on strategy, product and growth. Currently serving as the founder and CEO of a VC backed startup and co-founder of a venture studio, Hai previously held leadership positions at various startups (including 1 IPO and 3 additional exits), as well as large public companies (Walmart, eBay) where he led product, growth and innovation teams. Hai also served as an advisor to multiple B2B and B2C startups (Media, eCommerce, Developer Tools, SaaS, ML, Robotics, Computer Vision), mentor in multiple accelerator programs, speaker in conferences and occasional investor. Hai holds LLB and LLM degrees as well as MA in Marketing and MBA.
Enjoy the Work
This program gives you access to dozens of mentors, including our partners at Enjoy the Work!
Schedule an office hour session with one of our External Mentors below by emailing: officehours@enjoythework.com,
please also CC us: gfsa-bf-team@google.com.
General Partner
Enjoy the Work
Devan loves the early stage journey, particularly uncovering the magical intersection between what the market wants and how to sell it. There are so many open questions, different stakeholders, shifting variables – it’s like a game of chess where the right moves lead to rising revenues and happy customers.
For the last 10+ years, Devan has built and led go-to-market teams for 3 organizations, Jive which went public in 2011, Origami Logic was acquired by Intuit, and TripActions, still a public company valued at over $5B USD. B Building startups has fed Devan’s ambitions for years. He joined Enjoy The Work so that he could impact not just one startup, but rather a portfolio of them across the globe.
General Partner
Enjoy the Work
Lesley has worked in tech for 14 years as an operator in growth and analytics roles. She founded Quantified Ardor in 2016 to support growing startups around the world on data-driven decision-making. She has also spent the last 7 years as a startup advisor (including as a mentor for Google For Startups since 2016) while holding multiple COO positions for startups at various stages.
General Partner
Enjoy the Work
Leslie’s career as a startup founder and product leader began after earning her PhD in Game Theory and Behavioral Economics from Caltech. In 2008, she founded her first startup, Crowdcast, and successfully exited the company in 2012. Following Crowdcast, Leslie helped lead three more startups: Spigit (SVP Product), tenXer (Head of Product), and Swerve (Founder, CEO). After her four startup experiences, she ventured into the enterprise world and joined Salesforce (VP Product), where she helped ship the company’s first AI product. But it was through her involvement in Salesforce’s M&A process that she ultimately realized she wanted to return to startup life.
General Partner
Enjoy the Work
With more than 20 years as a technology product development and marketing executive, Rick has helped grow companies from seed stage to series F. He led multiple companies through acquisition as a VP or CMO, and has worked with numerous CEOs to successfully raise $100M+ in funding. Later, as he moved into consulting and advising, he sought to become an even better company advisor and leadership coach. He became certified with both the College of Executive Coaching and International Coaching Federation as part of this effort.
General Partner
Enjoy the Work
Over the last 20 years Mike has founded and successfully exited three startups. First was Qloud, a B2C on-demand music streaming service that grew to over 10M monthly unique visitors. Next was Kapost, a B2B SaaS company that grew to over $13M in revenue and 100+ employees. The most recent was Onward, a ride-sharing service for seniors that partnered with hospitals and medical facilities.
Alongside those experiences, Mike also experienced hyper-growth at Airbnb. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Head of Product for Airbnb for Work and Airbnb Luxe. While there, bookings grew from zero to over $1B in 2.5 years.
Although each company created value in different ways, he grew to appreciate the things that stay consistent. Building a high functioning team, shipping good product, honing a sales motion, raising capital, etc. Now he’s giving back and paying it forward as a General Partner at Enjoy The Work, and grateful to work with founders bringing the next generation of technology to market.
General Partner
Enjoy the Work
Ruben joined his first startup more than 25 years ago and was immediately delighted by the blank slate in front of him. He has always sought out companies that were early in their growth stories, which led him to join Amazon, Google, and Pinterest many years before they became some of the world’s largest enterprises. The common denominator – novel software, products, and teams that surprised and delighted massive numbers of customers.
His joy comes from bringing new products to the world. He’s learned that there is a right way, a harmonious way, to ship those solutions. And he’s grateful now to have the experience (and scars) to help others get there faster.
His journey from engineer to CTO to advisor has taught him that there is a cadence of communication, delivery, and metrics core to every successful company. With the right foundation in place, a founder can build a company that delivers on the promise of a better tomorrow.
The best part of advising is having the insight to guide a company towards their own unique answers – the ones that both reflect their values and lead to business success. He’s excited to be a General Partner at Enjoy The Work as he continues to teach, learn, and be in awe of the imagination of our founders.
Founder and Managing Partner
Enjoy the Work
Throughout his 20 year career, Jonathan successfully built a $1B business segment for a large public company, guided the turnaround of a distressed $100M+ revenue business, launched and sold a venture-backed startup, and led the rise of one of the world’s fastest growing B2B SaaS businesses.
His first career was in hospitality, where he served as the first VP of Loyalty Marketing for Harrah’s Entertainment and led the turnaround of a failing 3,000-employee hotel and casino company. In 2007, he founded his first startup, which he successfully sold after 4 years and several rounds of capital. Starting in 2012, he served as COO of Taulia, growing the business from seed to D in less than 3 years.
Since 2014, he has led Enjoy The Work, a firm of expert early stage operators who have combined their considerable skills to advise the next generation of startups to launch, grow and reach scale. He founded Enjoy The Work because he believed that the biggest positive impact he could have on the world would be to positively influence the next generation of startup entrepreneurs. He’s dedicated his professional life to that end.
General Partner
Enjoy the Work
Jenn has spent the past decade advising CEO founders and their executive teams on leadership, strategy, growth, organization and culture, at companies ranging from Seed to Series D. Her partners and founders range from first-timers to serial entrepreneurs self-funding their latest venture – and most share a common thread of purpose-driven intentions in both their business impact, and leadership aspiration. Her work as an advisor and executive coach followed a decade and a half of CMO, go-to-market, and general management roles across both startups and new business/market development at Fortune 500 companies.
In nearly every advisory role, she heard the same question from founders: “Why does this have to be so hard?” Yet, every challenge is not a new one, and she believes deeply that when equipped with the right resources, relationships & know-how, founders would ask this question far less. And perhaps enjoy the work more.
Whether advising, mentoring or coaching, my energy is fueled by partnering with good humans doing incredible things in the world. And that is the bench of talented startup founders we support at Enjoy the Work.
General Partner
Enjoy the Work
Ned has been involved with startups ever since founding his own software company in the mid 1990s; the bulk of his career has been defined by venture capital. In the early 2000s, He co-founded Pittsburgh-based VC firm, Birchmere Ventures.
Over the following 20+ years at Birchmere, we raised and invested six funds and our portfolio companies achieved a cumulative market valuation of $15 billion. Through those funds, he was fortunate to work with dozens of incredible entrepreneurs.
Throughout his career, his highest highs have come when lending a helping hand to well-deserving, high-achieving founders. His passion lies in watching others achieve success. Through Enjoy The Work, he’s able to fulfill this passion by taking founder mentorship to a deeper level than he could in the VC world.
Managing Partner
Enjoy the Work
Ever since Anu joined his first startup in 1996, He enjoys working with small, driven teams, helping to transform cutting edge technologies into real businesses. His first two startups revolutionized fiber-optic telecommunications, resulting in two acquisitions among the top 10 largest VC-backed M&A deals of all time. After the .com crash, he shifted his sights to consumer internet and started one of the world’s first social networks, hi5.com, which grew to 60M MAU. Later in his career he followed the explosion of smart phones to found an app discover site that organically attracted 15M installs.
General Partner
Enjoy the Work
Yanush has had a few careers in various industries, but independent of his functional roles, the most important skill he mastered is the ability to ask good questions.
He developed that skill over a 20 year career that has spanned banking, entrepreneurship, personal coaching and startup advising. He helped start 6 businesses, including co-founding a software company that they built from start-up to a profitable multi-million-dollar global operation to a successful M&A exit.
He has his CPA license, multiple academic degrees and a professional coaching certification but above all else my greatest passions are mentoring my fellow entrepreneurs and volunteering at my kids’ schools.
General Partner
Enjoy the Work
Throughout his career, David led both early-stage, venture-backed startups and global private equity-backed corporations, He’s been motivated to build teams that find creative, often unexpected paths to success.
David’s journey has taken him from an executive at AOL in the early days of the consumer internet to the management team of two venture-backed startups that successfully exited. He then joined the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange as its first Chief Digital Officer.
Over the past 25+ years, He has bought or sold dozens of companies and raised close to $1B in debt and equity.