Scaling the Industrial Evolution: Why I’m Joining the Eclipse Team

On a trip to Tokyo a little over a decade ago, I stood amazed and proud inside an Apple store. Unlike the throng of enthusiastic customers jostling to grab hold of the latest iPhone, my excitement wasn’t a reaction to the technology. Instead, I was reflecting on the numerous decisions made to make those phones so broadly available not only in Japan, but globally, and the part I played in making it a reality. Scaling a company — even one as well-known as Apple — isn’t easy and for startups that finally achieve product-market fit, commercial scale is the next step on the journey to becoming a truly valuable business. But scaling isn’t a single action, it’s a confluence of many decisions made over several years. It’s development and iteration on a planful customer acquisition strategy. It’s pricing, packaging, and customer lifetime monetization. It requires (more) mature systems and processes. It’s organizational design and people. And most importantly, it is about beginning to build the critical connective tissue between departments so that customer acquisition, growth, and scale can be frictionless. This is precisely what makes it so difficult. The iteration and cycling of all of these elements to deliver a predictable engine for growth is just hard. It’s a minefield of potential mistakes. And yet, it’s the critical next path for success. Fortunately, scaling is a skill to be learned through experiences of success and failure. I understand and appreciate the complexities founders face as they work toward scaling up; I’ve built a career on solving these complex problems for companies spanning multiple industries and go-to-market models. This is why I’ve joined Eclipse as a Partner to help lead the firm’s Early Growth strategy. At Apple, I led Worldwide Sales Finance and was responsible for supporting and funding growth for more than 80% of the company’s total revenue — over $125B at the time. More interesting though, is that during my tenure, this business grew and scaled by over $100B. I supported the launch of the iPad and helped scale the iPhone from one carrier to virtually every carrier in the world. Following Apple, I was an investor in and served as the CFO of Anaplan while the company was in its early growth phase. Most recently, I was President and COO of Nextiva, a connected communications company, where I led multiple business functions, including sales, finance, customer success, legal and HR, and recruited the entire executive team to lead those functions. Under my leadership, the company’s revenue grew more than 50% and we raised Nextiva’s first external financing of $200 million, valuing the company at $2.7B. I’ve served on several public boards, including Arista Networks, EarthLink, and Windstream, as well as numerous private boards spanning industries from consumer products to healthcare. I’m proud to have helped scale world class brands and now, I’m excited to bring my decades of operating experience to Eclipse. I’ve known Lior and the founding Eclipse team for over five years and have been impressed by the depth of operating experience and the focus on building transformational businesses. My experiences center around growth, operational scale, commercialization, and monetization of technology complement the deep bench of operating expertise that the full partner team at Eclipse offers to support companies from company ideation and creation with our Venture Equity team to seed and Series A with our Early-Stage team to Series B and beyond with Early Growth. I’ll be partnering with Jay Knafel on the Eclipse Early Growth Fund. Together, we’ll identify new opportunities to deploy capital and work closely with our portfolio founders as they navigate their next phase of growth. In addition to helping our portfolio companies scale, I’ll be working to find founders and companies building solutions to solve problems across critical industries from manufacturing, supply chain, healthcare infrastructure, materials sourcing, and more. My time at Apple taught me that building truly differentiated products in large markets and then scaling each success with operational rigor and excellence creates massive company value. I can take very little credit for Apple being the most valuable company in the world, but timing is everything and I was fortunate to be a part of the most formative transformation in corporate history. As I look at the strength of Eclipse’s portfolio companies, the powerful reset of the markets, and the years of discipline Eclipse has shown in staying true to pioneering the funding of the next wave of the Industrial Evolution, I feel it is the perfect time to accelerate the firm’s focus on Early Growth. Let’s go! Visit our Perspectives page to learn more about how Eclipse works with founders on Early Growth. Follow Eclipse on LinkedIn for the latest on the Industrial Evolution.