Sharpend

I work with startup founders to develop self-awareness, improve emotional intelligence (EQ), learn communication/leadership skills and scale with their business.

Prior to coaching I spent 7 years as founder and head of marketing at Looksharp, and then worked as a marketing executive and advisor to a number of leading San Francisco startups. 

Learn more at https://www.sharpend.co/

Executive Coach

500 Startups

Mentor

Parallel18

Various Companies

Advise, consult, and do marketing work for various venture backed startups.  

Specialties include:
-SEO
-Content Strategy
-Content Development
-Marketing Ops (automation through sale)
-Lead Generation 
-Business Development
-Data and Analytics
-Email Marketing
-PR and Marketing Communications
-Brand Strategy & Creative

Software Expertise includes:
-Google Analytics
-SQL
-Marketo
-Salesforce
-ExactTarget
-Mailchimp
-Optimizely
-SproutSocial
-Trello
-more

Marketer in Residence

Carta

Helped Carta through a critical rebrand, new marketing team hires and growth of demand gen channels that resulted in a 40% lift of net new MQLs.

Demand Generation:
-Managed Carta's inbound marketing efforts including webinars, white papers, and product marketing content. Webinars alone accounted for a 20% increase in monthly marketing generated revenues.
-Collaborated with Carta engineering team to implement site-wide SEO changes that resulted in numerous keywords moving from 50+ rankings into top 3 results and a 70%+ increase in organic traffic.
-Developed and launched Carta's first-ever event marketing series including two large-scale half-day events in New York and San Francisco. Each event was cash-flow positive and resulted in hundreds of net new leads, increased brand exposure and powerful online content.
-Worked closely with Carta's outbound email team to nurture new leads from lead generation through the sales pipeline.

Rebrand:
-Helped develop new brand messaging map, including key messages for press, current customers, internal stakeholders and more.
-Worked with engineering team to develop strategy for domain cutover and technical rebrand implementation.
-Collaborated with marketing, engineering, and design team to help redesign and rewrite content for every webpage on the Carta website and reposition product pages with new brand in mind.

Team:
-Hired and grew marketing team from 1 to 6 people. Led charge in interviewing, hiring and training new marketing hires.
-Used Asana to manage team goals and sync day-to-day work with broader business strategy.
-Developed marketing dashboards and pulled key marketing metrics using SQL, Google Analytics, Looker, and other tools.
-Presented marketing metrics at monthly KPI and leadership team meetings.

Digital Marketing

Looksharp

Founded Looksharp and led the marketing team from idea stage through Series A and beyond. Used an "Iterative Marketing" approach (running rapid fire tests and using data to track and scale campaigns) to drive user and revenue growth.

Overall:
-Grew student audience from 0 to over 10 million uniques annually through SEO, business development, content, press and more.
-Generated over 100,000 inbound B2B leads to support successful sales operation.
-Built reports using SQL and Google Analytics to measure campaigns and drive business strategy.

SEO:
-Worked with engineering and design team to optimize website and gain #1 ranking for over 90% of top keywords in the internship space.
-Developed content strategy and managed team of fifty plus writers to support SEO goals. 
-Used Optimizely to improve conversion rate on SEO landing page by over 50%. 

Content:
-Developed long term content strategy using personas, competitive positioning, and SWAT analysis.
-Managed editorial team of 50+ bloggers to create compelling daily content.
-Invented new recurring B2B content including 'Annual Internship Report' to monthly "College Hiring Webinars" and more that drove thousands of net new leads.

Data​:
-Queried SQL database to develop monthly cohort graphs used to analyze business KPIs.
-Queried Salesforce and Marketo to pull reports and graphs and analyze marketing / sales operation.

Branding and PR
-Developed relationships with top industry journalists and received press mentions in publications including: the WSJ, TechCrunch, WashingtonPost, Mashable and more.
-Managed brand transition from established brand to a parent brand including a number of technically challenging changes.

Founder

Founder -> CMO -> Exec Coach

I coach founders and co-founders from Series B - D. I specialize in co-founder dynamics--helping co-founders build more effective and fulfilling partnerships. 

I believe in a world where leaders have done the work to know themselves, in order to build lasting businesses and a more interesting future.

Nathan Parcells

David Acker Coaching

I coach venture-backed CEOs and executives, founding teams, small business owners, and senior leaders at late-stage and public companies. I help my clients develop their leadership capacity, improve interpersonal skills and influence, navigate complex transition, and find more joy and ease in work and life.

Executive and Leadership Coach

Stanford University Graduate School of Business

I teach and coach MBA students in the Arbuckle Leadership Fellows program, an experiential leadership development program where students deepen their interpersonal skills and hone their facilitation, coaching, and mentoring competencies that help expand their leadership impact with others.

Lecturer in Management

Assisting faculty as a T-group facilitator to MBA students in Interpersonal Dynamics (aka "Touchy Feely"), the GSB's most popular elective, 50 years running. Stanford GSB T-Groups provide intrapsychic and interpersonal training central to leadership development. Through a series of facilitated sessions, T-Group members develop EQ, communication skills, and self awareness. Students leave the course with the capacity to lead more authentically, and build more meaningful, connected relationships at work and in life.

Group Facilitator, Interpersonal Dynamics

Rabil Ventures

Rabil Ventures provides capital, advisory, and operating expertise to entrepreneurs and companies at any stage. We work and invest across a variety of industries, with our deepest expertise lying in sports, fintech, and health and wellness.

Partner

Love Story Yoga

Love Story is a home for the urban yogi who craves a strong physical and spiritual practice, among friends, in a beautiful, warm space. Operating studios across the SF Bay Area.

Co-founder

Turnstyle Cycle & Bootcamp

Turnstyle (now The Handle Bar) is a boutique fitness company operating indoor cycle and bootcamp studios across the northeast and midwest. Sold to new management in January 2020.

Co-founder and CFO

Endurance Fitness 247

Founded, operated, and exited a portfolio of Snap Fitness franchise locations in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maryland, and California.

Managing Partner

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Adoption, efficacy, and growth for CZI Education.

Consultant

Endurance Companies

Co-founder of holding company that operates and invests in diversified entrepreneurial ventures.

Edmodo

Strategy, reporting, and analytics across sales, BD, and customer success.

New Living

Houston-based B Corp. manufacturer/wholesaler/retailer of non-toxic, eco-friendly mattresses, bedding, and custom furniture.

Co-Founder

David Acker

Most leadership development retreats tell you what good leadership looks like. T-group reveals how you actually show up -- the gap between your intention and your impact, in real time, with real people. It’s a space to lean into your interpersonal edges and learn how to influence, connect, and repair in new ways.

Our T-group alums consistently say that this experience changed their lives– as founders, as bosses, and as spouses. What’s most gratifying for me, though, is witnessing participants leave our retreats with a profoundly deeper relationship with themselves.

Though we’ve been leading these retreats for over a decade, Anamaria Nino-Murcia and I are bringing T-group to New York for the first time in June.  If you're a startup founder/operator and this sounds intriguing (or terrifying), link in comments.

Executive Coach / Stanford GSB / Investor / Business Builder

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David Acker

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