Announcing SignalFire’s Mentor Program

No startup is an island. Each builds upon the strategies pioneered by the founders and experts that came before. 

That’s why SignalFire’s Mentor Program is designed to provide our portfolio startups with strategic guidance and expertise from experienced operators as an included benefit of having us on their cap table. SignalFire’s Mentors help companies navigate critical decisions, scale their businesses, achieve growth objectives, and see around corners to avoid costly mistakes.

Hailing from fast-growing early-stage startups and scaled businesses, our Mentors are passionate about helping younger startups see around corners. They are practiced advisors with deep knowledge of some of the most important areas that technology companies must master, including sales, marketing, partnerships, pricing, open-source strategy, engineering leadership, machine learning, and more. 

Specifically, SignalFire Mentors assist with expert advice and mentorship around strategy and planning. For ongoing support and detailed execution, SignalFire also offers our Specialist Program, which connects vetted practitioners and agencies for critical functions to our portfolio companies that compensate them directly as vendors. 

Being a SignalFire Mentor provides leaders across functions with ways to keep their skills sharp and meet amazing companies while getting to share in the returns of the firm that stem from their hard work. They also get first-hand experience in venture capital, assistance with building their brand from SignalFire Venture Partner and former TechCrunch Editor-At-Large Josh Constine, and the opportunity to build lasting professional communities alongside fellow industry leaders.

Meet our mentors

To kick off the Mentors Program, we focused on one of the toughest challenges in the current macroeconomic environment: go-to-market. With funding now harder to come by, we want to help our portfolio companies maximize ROI on marketing, build product-led growth strategies, and find partners who can efficiently introduce them to new customers.

Bill MacCartney

Bill is an advisor and investor with 20 years of experience in the AI space. Bill most recently served as VP of Machine Learning at Cohere, where he led a team of 50 machine learning scientists and engineers in developing large language models. He was previously Director of Proactive Intelligence at Apple, where he led 100+ engineers and scientists in using machine learning and natural language processing to build predictive models of language and user behavior. Since 2010, Bill has also served as an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.

‎Shani Taylor

Shani Taylor is a GTM leader with experience building and scaling high impact pre- and post-sales teams. She is currently Senior Director of Customer Experience and Solutions at Figma. Shani was an early employee at Airtable, where she joined as the first Customer Success Manager and helped to build and scale the Success and Solutions organization to more than 100. Shani holds an MBA and MS in Design Innovation from Northwestern University, an MHS in Health Communication from Johns Hopkins University, and a BS in Psychology from Duke University.

Jacob Petrie

Jacob works in developer experience, developer relations, and as a platform ecosystem software engineering leader, building global teams to support and grow platforms. He was the Global Head of Developer Relations at Stripe, and he’s currently the Director of Technical Advocacy at Datadog, building the technical content programs, speaking initiatives and platform awareness and adoption.

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser

Jeanne is Chief Business Officer at Stripe. Previously, as the company’s Head of Revenue and Growth, she spent seven years helping build much of the sales organization from the ground up. She drove go-to-market strategy and built many of the specialized functions required to support a diverse customer base, ranging from high-growth startups to Fortune 500 companies.

Keith Pradhan

Keith is the Head of Monetization Strategy and Pricing Operations at LinkedIn. He is a veteran executive with a passion for turning data into high-impact action. He brings deep expertise in sales operations and analytics, strategy (corporate, product, marketing, and sales), and business development across multiple industry verticals.

Chris Aniszczyk

Chris Aniszczyk is an open-source technologist with a passion for building a better world through open collaboration. He's currently a CTO at the Linux Foundation where he co-founded the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and is also responsible for developer relations across The Linux Foundation (LF). In a previous life, he led Twitter/X’s open-source efforts, bootstrapped an open-source developer tools company, and hacked on many open-source and Linux-related projects.

This is just the beginning—we’ve recently brought on new mentors, and we’ll be introducing them in a future post.

As a founder, you know that access to industry leaders you can rely on and trust is quintessential as you grow. That’s why we’ve invested in this program and encourage potential founders to check out SignalFire—please reach out to me.

SignalFire may engage Mentors, Affiliate Advisors, Retained Advisors, and other consultants as listed above to provide their expertise on a formal or ad hoc basis. They are not employed by SignalFire and do not provide investment advisory services to clients on behalf of SignalFire. For more information on their specific roles, please contact us.