Partnership

And how is that different from the, quote, partner schools?

Partnership schools are the schools that actively recruit.

So you have to be a professional school to be a partnership school.

So a Ballet West Academy, a Colorado Ballet School, you know, whatever, you know, the Rock School.

Sure

... a little bit deeper into the sports sponsorship because you have invested quite heavily into the partnerships like McLaren and Arsenal.

Mm-hmm.

So a lot of marketers still see sports sponsorship as a bit of a black box, and they're not sure they have the right investment.

Um, but in terms of what we're doing to, to make it interesting, I mean, so much of these ends, so much of this ends up being about the IP.

So it's not necessarily just being on social.

Like when we think about using our partnerships to the best, uh, or to, to kind of get maximum value, the brief really is how do you think about this in the most integrated way? So what's the, what's the platform? So for example, with McLaren, the, the platform in the first year was, was shifting perspectives and we weaved in art and sculpture and, and, you know, the next platform was what's next.

And then similarly, we, we took a, a more cultural, artistic approach to it.

There's been ample opportunity provided to me along the way.

I'm now in a National Head of Partnerships role, so it's employer, broker, insurer, relationships, account management, BD.

type role which didn't exist when I started at Procare but obviously we're a national company now with 500 staff so it's a necessity and a big part of what we do but I

like what we stand for you know

Atlee, tell me, in your own words, what do you do at Shopify?

I am VP of Partnerships here at Shopify, so I oversee partner programs across apps and agencies.

How

long have you been there?

Now, how do we achieve that? There, you know, at the end, we've got one technology platform, one underwriting platform, um, and we can grow that by partnering, we can grow that by using it ourselves, or we can grow the business by buying other platforms and integrating them and bringing on, onto our, uh, onto our thing, um, onto our platform.

At the end of the day, whatever I have to do to achieve that, um, whether it's buying other businesses and integrating them or making new partnerships, we will do it.

Um, we're, we're entrepreneurs, we're opportunistic, um, but at the core of it really is this, this credit platform that sits between these different parties.

That is a SaaS tool, if I understand it correctly, and as a SaaS provider, I was wondering, does white coding scare you? Meaning, one, in terms of competition, we've been seeing the, the, the collapse of share prices, um, Monday, Figma, whatever-

They're not like a journey.

when you think about you know like a library right it's really like it's all of these resources on stacks right but then if you go into you know if you've got a really great librarian they're going and helping you find just the right resource for you at just the right moment right like in and so in some ways that's kind of the difference between support and partnership the the partnership is more like we're coming alongside you at just the right moment so support is what you offer but Partnership is what the member feels when everything that you offer is coordinated, right? Partnership is really, I mean, fundamentally, it's the experience of being known, right? Like a partner knows where you are in your career and what's likely to come next.

A partner anticipates needs, connects you to the right people at the right moment, shows up with emotional understanding.

It's not just a resource.