I'd love to hear PG and other knowledgable folks around here talk a bit about partnerships: when, whether, why?
My experience too is that most partnerships are only valuable for social proof. Often nothing much else happens, maybe one or two customer connections. At the same time with some partnerships there is a risk of brand dilution. If you are letting someone re-sell or bundle, there's a risk that they might downplay your brand in favor of theirs and sort of appropriate your brand equity.
These sorts of things do sometimes make me feel out of my depth as I try to put on biz-dev shoes as someone who's primarily technical.
In my experience partnerships in a SaaS-like thing tend to be binary:
0) Press-release and a few links on a website: Basically worthless.
1) Sales-team integration: you train the partners sales force, they get quota retirement (somehow, this can be complicated), this has some great customer outcome -- you give them margin on re-selling/kickbacks/discounts/whatever to get access to their sales/marketing machines, making it worth their time/effort.
In my opinion, it is often useful to take the meetings but most won't be fruititious. You are likely to gain industry knowledge especially from other startups. If you are talking to a big company and you get to a meeting with an hour+ powerpoint, you have to really reconsider whether it is a good use of your time. If the deal is really you selling your SaaS software, it is probably worth it, otherwise probably not. Definitely don't take a sharp turn and sit in startup no-man's land while considering some big new partnership that will likely never work within the scope of your current vision.
If you're working with content licensing (i.e Spotify, Netflix), product integration (more common in b2b SaaS), marketplace supplier relationships with major partners (say if Airbnb wanted to offer Mariott rooms on their platform), etc. than partnerships are important.
My experience too is that most partnerships are only valuable for social proof. Often nothing much else happens, maybe one or two customer connections. At the same time with some partnerships there is a risk of brand dilution. If you are letting someone re-sell or bundle, there's a risk that they might downplay your brand in favor of theirs and sort of appropriate your brand equity.
These sorts of things do sometimes make me feel out of my depth as I try to put on biz-dev shoes as someone who's primarily technical.