Alex Gordon-Furse

portday

Portday is an AI-powered platform built just for shipping agents.

It automates your Proforma & Final Disbursement Accounts (PDA/FDA), handles port tariff updates, invoice reconciliation, document generation and more.

It does this all from one clean software product so that you can spend less time on manual data entry and more time managing your clients.

Co-Founder & CEO

Playmaker

Intelligent document processing for traditional industries, with customers across Financial Services, Real Estate, Logistics and more. 

After finding a specific need in the maritime logistics industry in late 2024, we decided to focus fully on that industry in early 2025.

Stealth Startup

Refining my opinions on where the world is going, and learning what people will need more of :)

Building something new

Community Hacked

Founded and ran a side project with a few of my friends where we built a global community of the best community builders & experts. 

Ran many events where I interviewed the global heads of community from companies like Salesforce, Notion, Peloton, Airtable, Canva, Zendesk and many more.

Co-Creator / Founder

Startup Grind

CSO for Startup Grind global: the world’s largest startup community across 600 locations in 120 countries.

Helped thousands of pre-seed and seed-stage startups gain access to funding, mentorship and customers.

Closed several $million in sales relating to innovation and sponsorship with some of the world's biggest tech brands like Microsoft and Snowflake during my time there.

We also ran the largest tech conference in Silicon Valley, hosting speakers like the founders/CEOs of Google, OpenAI, Zoom, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Uber, A16Z, Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital and many more.

Chief Strategy Officer

VP Sales & Startups

Director, Startup Programs

SG DAO

Built a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) that aimed to be the world's first truly community-owned accelerator. 

Pivoted into a community-backed micro VC run by Startup Grind that invested into pre-seed and seed-stage companies. 

We made 8 investments before I left in Feb '23

Co-Founder & Co-Lead

Multiple startups

Angel investor in companies like Bevy (https://www.bevy.com/), Odin (https://www.joinodin.com/), Goodloans (https://www.goodloans.co/) and Paus (https://paus.tv/).

Angel Investor (temporarily paused)

Freshworks Inc. (formerly Freshdesk)

Led Freshservice (Freshworks's fastest-growing product) GTM in UK&I

One of the 5 winners of the first ever President’s Club in 2017.

Freshworks IPO'd in 2021 on NASDAQ under the ticker FRSH

Head of UK & I Sales

2nd hire in EMEA

Worked on developing and executing the go-to-market

Accenture

Front-to-back systems transformation project at UBS Investment Bank and blockchain research project for a presentation to the board of HSBC UK.

Won multiple awards as a top-performing Analyst at both Accenture and UBS Investment Bank.

Business & Systems Integration Consultant

iris worldwide

Worked on the ideation and development phases of projects for the Adidas and Durex accounts.

Account Management Intern

Co-Founder at Playmaker

Empowering shipping agents from across the world to transform their operations with AI.

Learn more at https://www.portday.com/

Co-Founder/Co-Lead

Aiming to be the world's first community-owned accelerator, and has recently pivoted into being an LP in the new community-backed Micro VC run by Startup Grind that is investing into pre-seed and seed-stage companies.

I feel most alive when I realize something that is inevitably going to happen, but to which most people are still blind in their busy lives. 

I believe this is the same feeling that Tero Kuittinen had when he was the first analyst to give a sell recommendation to Nokia. Or to Petteri Lahtela, the founder of Oura, who, with his team, took the global health technology industry by storm. No investor believed in Oura's team and idea, except themselves and another investor Jyri Engeström. What we know now is that they were certain of the direction of the world that others just hadn't realized.

I also used to be blind. I learned the traditional way of doing B2B sales. I was the salesperson who spent a lot of time building a prospect list. 

Every week I scoured Google, LinkedIn, websites, and various company databases to find suitable companies to call. And when I found one, I looked for the right decision-makers and their contact information. At worst, it took me dozens of minutes to find just one phone number.

And around me +15 other sales reps repeated the same process day after day, week after week, month after month. And even though this data should have been filled into the CRM according to the process, you can probably guess how many decision makers and phone numbers actually ended up there. Which led to each salesperson in turn wasting their time searching for the same phone numbers that others had already searched for.

When it was my turn to lead our sales team, I decided to stop this madness. With our CMO Aleksi we first spent 6 months cleaning up the CRM. Then, with him and our CTO, we developed a process to build all the companies in our target group into our CRM and a way to constantly update the data. The only problem was that we didn't have a tool to find not only companies but also decision makers with their contact information, so it was still up to the salespeople to enrich the CRM before outreaching.

In my team of +15 sales reps this was a +1M€ problem.

Now with Aleksi we are building the next generation prospect tool to solve that. This ultimate tool is called Clevenio - you can think of it as a "Clever Revenue" -tool, because the other comparable ways are so mad. This one tool can already free sales teams from that madness, which will end up to 3x more time for actually selling.
 
Jump in if you want your sales team to focus on what you recruited them for. That's what I wanted too.

taplio

The Battle

Alex Gordon-Furse

Santtu Seppänen

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