Founder, partnerships.community · Fractional CEO · Cultural Sector · London
The brief is always the same. Find the people who are extraordinary at what they do and invisible in the market. Build the commercial infrastructure around them — the CRM, the pricing architecture, the partner relationships, the revenue engine — and get out of their way.
partnerships.community is a fractional CEO and digital partner practice for LGBTQ+-adjacent creative founders: nightlife operators, fashion designers, cultural producers, fine artists. The people who can fill a room, stop a runway, or stop you cold in front of a canvas — and have no idea what to charge for it, who to pitch, or how to make it compound. I’m a gay man and an AuDHD savant — the brain that people spent years calling a liability is the one that holds the commercial architecture and the human truth at the same time. The parallel processing is not a bug. It is the entire point. We build the engine. They drive.
The career that built this: at Braze (NASDAQ: BRZE), the mandate was open: build a world-class global partner ecosystem from zero infrastructure, pre-IPO through to post-IPO Rule of 40 discipline. The outcome was $200M+ in partner-influenced pipeline, a 1,600+ partner network across EMEA, Americas and APAC, AWS Marketing Tech Competency, Snowflake Leader status, and three consecutive Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader designations. The title was Global VP Commercial Partnerships. The work was ecosystem architecture.
Before Braze: took a $1.1B global media portfolio through a commercial turnaround at Carat ANZ (Dentsu Aegis), led cross-agency GTM strategy as the first-ever APAC Chief Client Officer at Dentsu International, and generated $100M in measurable value from a $2.6Bn investment portfolio at Amplifi. The capability set is commercial transformation at scale. The sectors are SaaS, media, cloud and MarTech. The titles are evidence of scope, not the point.
The same muscle that built a $200M commercial partner ecosystem also built a community of artists through the ROMON Art Fund, an antiquarian library and AI book programme that led to a formal appointment as Camden Book Ambassador under Councillor Pat Callaghan, and a double-decker library bus bringing weekend art exhibitions and reading spaces to underserved young people across London. The mechanics are identical: identify an underserved community, build the infrastructure, bring in the right partners, sustain it. The only difference is the P&L.
Most fractional arrangements give you one consultant, one brain, part-time. This gives you a three-layer configuration: commercial design, operational precision, and mechanical execution that never sleeps. You are not hiring a person. You are accessing a tested system with humans inside it.
AuDHD savant. The brain that holds commercial architecture and human truth at the same time — not despite the neurodivergence, because of it. The pattern recognition that enterprise SaaS teams paid millions to access now runs at fractional cost for creative founders who deserve the same infrastructure. Twenty years. $200M partner pipeline. 1,600+ partners across four continents. Pre-IPO to Rule of 40. WPP Partner of the Year. Three Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader designations. The engine designer who now builds the same architecture for the people the industry forgot.
Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Sadler’s Wells, 12+ years — the house where the world’s most technically demanding dance productions run, and run flawlessly. Stage automation specialist. West End: Get Up Stand Up, Groundhog Day, We Will Rock You, Big the Musical. Edinburgh Fringe. The Black Cap. Her Upstairs. Queerest of the Queer. She runs systems that cannot fail, in front of 2,000 people, with no second takes. The calm that tech week teaches cannot be simulated. Now at partnerships.community: the same operational precision applied to commercial infrastructure. She doesn’t manage systems. She makes them hold when it matters.
Claude (Anthropic) · HubSpot · Stripe · Vercel Pro · Cloudflare D1. Twenty-seven live production subdomains running simultaneously. The documented AI Workforce case study: 14 FTE displaced, £225,000+ in annual staffing costs eliminated, tracked in real time with zero obfuscation. This layer executes the decisions already made by the humans. It does not replace judgment — it removes the cost of implementation. One operator running what used to require a company. The proof is public and auditable.
“Three operating layers. One engagement. The question is not whether you need the engine — it’s how fast you want it to run.”
Engage the configuration →Most partnership programmes fail not because the partners are wrong, but because the architecture is missing. Every ecosystem I have built has followed the same three-phase discipline: establish the commercial foundation before recruiting partners, design the co-sell motion before measuring it, and only then scale what the data proves is working.
Career milestones covered across global, Australian and APAC's leading trade publications. Conference speaking record spans iMedia, Mumbrella 360 Virtuoso Stage, and international broadcast media, from appointment announcements to major commercial wins and industry keynotes.
Whether the ecosystem is a $200M SaaS partner network, a community of artists, a Camden literacy programme, or an LGBTQ+ movement inside a global agency group, the building method does not change. Find the underserved community. Build the infrastructure. Bring in the right people. Sustain it over time. What follows is what that looks like when the brief is self-assigned.
London NW1. Working with a small number of LGBTQ+-adjacent creative founders in nightlife, fashion, fine art and cultural production. Good at what you do. Not at the pitch. That's what we're here for. If that's you — or if you know someone it describes — let's talk.
Direct lines.
The broader ecosystem.