Charles Blanchet

I have spent the past 20 years of my career successfully bringing five early-stage, venture-backed B2B frontier technology startups to market on behalf of investors such as Accel Partners, True Ventures, In-Q-Tel, etc. I have abundant experience configuring sales, marketing, customer care, and product management to achieve product/market fit with early adopter customers.

My expertise lies in SaaS, DaaS, and space (earth observation) offerings and a wide variety of both commercial and government customer types. 

When I was at DNX Ventures as an Operating Partner, I was particularly successful in due diligence and advising the portfolio.

I am seeking a position that will allow me to identify investments, support a portfolio, raise capital, and perform due diligence. 

In all five of my early-stage startup adventures, I came into the organization just as the initial product R&D phase has completed with the mandate of developing the go-to-market functions from scratch. This involved defining an addressable market, value propositions, sales and marketing channels, customer success methodologies, and a strong connection between the customer and product management. It was always important to hire a go-to-market team that is well suited for the dynamic and undefined nature of early adopter sales. Lastly, the work involved a lot of short sprints and quick iterations. 

As an Operating Partner, I was most successful in performing due diligence on potential investments and providing advisory support to the portfolio. 

In my previous role, it was important to get mentoring on being an intrapreneur within a Series C/D scale-up since all my experience was entrepreneurial at Series A/B startups. I have also been working on developing a more patient and wise approach to my work in order to better fit into the European startup culture.