SignalFire Nabs Stripe’s CMO In Bid To Win VC Operations Arms Race

Data-driven VC firm SignalFire has hired Stripe’s former chief marketing officer as the latest bet that its bench of operating vets will beat out the large rosters of support staff cropping up around Silicon Valley.

Jim Stoneham departed Stripe in October after a two-year stint leading marketing functions at the $95 billion valuation payments company during a pandemic-powered boom in e-commerce. During his tenure, Stoneham scaled the marketing team fivefold and established a practice of targeted outreach to drive enterprise customer demand. Stoneham also amassed operating experience in the same position at IT firm New Relic, and as CEO of Opsmatic (acquired by New Relic) and Payvment (acquired by Intuit), two other startups that built backend technology. His hire is the latest big-name get in the venture capital industry arms race to build “value add” support for portfolio companies.

SignalFire launched in 2013 as an early mover in using data to source talent, deals and market intelligence and now argues it’s among the first in sourcing operational staff as well. Tawni Cranz, Netflix’s former chief talent officer, joined the firm in 2017 to help on human resources, and former TechCrunch editor Josh Constine came onboard in 2019 to helm content. Stoneham starts at SignalFire as one among several recent high-profile marketing hires made by venture firms which include Udacity’s ex-CMO Shernaz Daver joining Khosla Ventures, and LinkedIn ex-CMO Shannon Brayton, now on the roster at Bessemer Venture Partners. “In those cases, their main focus was on marketing the fund itself,” contends SignalFire’s Constine. “We hired Jim specifically to help our portfolio companies,” he tells Forbes.

Key hires are imperative for smaller firms in a time when bigger guns are amassing manpower, perhaps none more loudly than Andreessen Horowitz. The prominent firm employs well over 300 people, including a team of more than 30 that is specifically dedicated to go-to-market strategy. For Stoneham, who says he spoke to several VC firms that were building up their operational staff after he left Stripe, the focus on quality was the draw that led him to pick SignalFire. “I didn’t see this in other places,” he says. “I saw platform teams filled with a lot of junior folks, with a couple of senior leaders, whereas SignalFire is hiring people with senior operating experience to really bring their expertise and rolodexes to the portfolio.”

Stoneham joined SignalFire about four weeks ago and has been so far using his marketing experience to offer advice to portfolio companies on functions such as testing their brand messaging on social media and developing decisions on when and who to hire to their sales and marketing teams. “Oftentimes, people jump right to hiring a sales team before the marketing team,” he says. “But, sales do not scale very well if you don’t have marketing to build repeatable sales plays.” Over time, Stoneham says he may also assist in bringing new deals to the firm.

SignalFire’s signature data software, called Beacon Talent, can also provide an edge in marketing compared to other firms, Stoneham says. SignalFire has used its machine learning capabilities to track data points like patents and regulatory filings to help portfolio companies make hires, and the firm itself to spot potential investments. “My perspective is that it’s also a massive database of possible prospects and customers that [our portfolio companies] could reach out to,” Stoneham says. “Every VC says they’ll promise customer intros, but that’s a very one-at-a-time kind of thing. We’re building out a scalable way to deliver entire lists for our companies.”