Partnership Leaders Co-Founder Asher Mathew Named Community’s CEO

Asher Mathew has joined Partnership Leaders, a platform focused on the success of partner ecosystem professionals, as its CEO. Mathew, who founded Partnership Leaders with Chris Samila and Tai Rattigan, was most recently the VP, GTM – Data & Sales Intelligence Cloud at Demandbase.

“I’m very excited to focus all of my energy and attention on Partnership Leaders as CEO,” said Mathew. “The increasing need for companies to collaborate more effectively with other businesses as well as their partners provides an amazing opportunity for partnership teams to shine,” he said. “At Partnership Leaders, we’re eager to create a more comprehensive program that can help our members accelerate the success of their partner programs and teams around the world.”

Community Membership Soars

Asher explained that the surge in membership at Partnership Leaders was a big reason for assuming his full-time position with the community. In the last year, Partnership Leaders doubled its members to 1,300.

Channel professionals are making investments in their skills, striving “to become seasoned operators of partnerships, the same way you would have seasoned operators of sales and marketing,” Mathew told CMR last year. Equally important, they are becoming more vocal about the roles they play, impressing upon their managers the importance of supporting a robust partner ecosystem, he said. Partner professionals are saying they “actually do belong here, and we’re going to make it known,” said Mathew.

“We’re celebrating moments where we see companies bringing management of their partner ecosystems into the C-Suite,” said Samila, who was named Partnership Leaders’ Chief Partnership Officer late last year. “It’s not at the velocity I think we all wish it was. But we do see this happening.” Partnership Leaders, which was founded in 2018, hosted its first networking event, Catalyst, in Miami last year. Following the successful launch of its conference for partnerships, alliances, channels, ecosystems and business development teams, Partnership Leaders is hosting Catalyst 23 in Denver, CO, August 21-23, 2023, with the goal of “enabling the partnerships industry to move up in the go-to-market food chain,” Samila said.