Meet Julia Wester, CEO and co-founder of 55 Degrees, who's built a thriving business from within the Atlassian ecosystem over the past 13 years. In this episode of The Ecosystem Experience, we explore the realities of building a company when most of your revenue depends on someone else's platform... and why that's both the biggest opportunity and the greatest risk you'll ever take.

Julia takes us back to 2012 when she and her husband Daniel started after his 15 years building internal plugins at Turner Broadcasting. They weren't business people, but they knew Jira, Confluence, and the Atlassian ecosystem inside out. The marketplace handled payments, VAT, currency conversions, and all the complexity they didn't want to build themselves. It seemed like an easy, safer way to start. They had no idea how right that decision would be.

We discuss the uncomfortable truth every ecosystem partner faces: the platform could build your features tomorrow and you wouldn't know until your revenue drops. Julia's refreshingly honest about this dependency risk whilst being deeply grateful for what the Atlassian ecosystem has enabled. She shares how 55 Degrees is actively diversifying into Azure DevOps and other platforms, not just for growth, but for survival... because you can't have all your eggs in one basket when that basket belongs to someone else.

From acquiring their first app that already had ecosystem presence to learning that you can't just copy-paste solutions between platforms, Julia reveals the investment required to enter new ecosystems properly. We explore why platform-native development matters, how trust between partners and vendors is fragile (one social media leak can ruin it for everyone), and why vendors can't always communicate early... because not all partners have proven trustworthy with confidential information.

Julia pulls back the curtain on the reality of running an ecosystem business: herding squirrels from Slack and a dozen other places, managing teams across time zones, and relying on a heavily customised personal Trello board to "get her shit together" when everything else fails. She emphasises that whilst the commercial opportunities are real, the relationships and community connections are what make ecosystems truly special... even when you're celebrating Christmas together in Sweden.

Whether you're considering building in an ecosystem, already generating revenue from one, or managing partner relationships at a platform company, Julia offers hard-won wisdom on balancing dependency with opportunity, investing in ecosystem knowledge before rushing in, and why understanding the humans behind the business models matters just as much as the commercial metrics.

Meet Asher Mathew, co-founder and CEO of Partnership Leaders, the platform that's become the connective tissue for thousands of partnership professionals worldwide. In this episode of The Ecosystem Experience, we trace his journey from supporting a 500,000-strong channel ecosystem to building communities that have fundamentally reshaped how partnership professionals connect, learn, and advance their careers.

Asher reveals how a simple email to 13 competitors during COVID sparked a movement that would define an entirely new professional identity. We explore the emergence of the Chief Partner Officer role (now 1,100+ globally), why this matters for the industry, and how Partnership Leaders evolved from a hobby into a Forrester-style platform offering benchmarks, research, and talent development alongside its vibrant community roots.

From the trenches of scaling Avalara's 1,600 integrations to hosting 420 people at the first Catalyst event in Miami, Asher shares hard truths about what it takes to elevate partnerships from an art to a science. We unpack why partnerships teams are adopting AI at twice the industry rate, the critical gap in P&L fluency that holds partnership leaders back from CRO roles, and why explaining the value of partnerships must become a daily discipline, not an annual exercise.

We discuss the skills that will define the next generation of partnership professionals, why understanding business models matters more than mastering go-to-market tactics, and how partnership thinking is expanding beyond B2B SaaS into healthcare, airlines, and retail ecosystems.

Whether you're a frontline partner manager fighting for resources or a senior executive trying to unlock the full potential of your ecosystem, Asher offers evidence-based insights on building programmes that drive measurable business outcomes whilst staying true to the relationship-first principles that make partnerships powerful.

Meet Kelly Sarabyn, Director of Technology Partner Programs at HubSpot, where she orchestrates relationships with over 1,600 technology partners. In this episode of The Ecosystem Experience, we explore an unconventional pathway into tech partnerships - from legal fellow to book community founder, creative agency leader, and now ecosystem architect at one of the world's leading CRM platforms.

Kelly reveals how the fundamentals of building reader-author communities translate into managing enterprise partner ecosystems at scale. We dive into the inflection point where individual relationships must evolve into systems, exploring when personal connection gives way to structured programmes and what gets lost (or gained) in that transition.

From the inside of a company built on relationship management, Kelly shares how HubSpot approaches its own partnerships - the metrics that matter beyond revenue, the challenge of fostering genuine partner-to-partner collaboration, and the systems required to make 1,600 partnerships feel personal rather than transactional.

We unpack war stories where human relationships trumped technical integration, discuss how AI is reshaping ecosystem management, and examine what it takes to build partner success that extends beyond simple attachment rates into advocacy and retention.

Whether you're managing your first handful of partners or scaling to thousands, Kelly offers hard-won insights on building the relationship muscle that makes ecosystems thrive - plus her essential principle for anyone starting their ecosystem journey from day one.

Meet Dan Faulkner, CEO of SmartBear, the quiet giant powering software quality for millions of developers worldwide. In this inaugural episode of The Ecosystem Experience, we dive deep into how SmartBear has built its empire around API lifecycle management, application testing, and observability whilst navigating the complex world of ecosystems.

Dan shares candid insights about SmartBear's recent strategic collaboration with AWS, revealing what it really takes to cut through the noise of thousands of partners vying for attention from hyperscale cloud providers. We explore the delicate balance between nurturing massive open source communities (with hundreds of thousands of weekly downloads) and building sustainable commercial products.

From coaching product managers to think beyond end-user features to the art of ecosystem thinking, Dan unpacks the leadership challenges of scaling a developer-first company into enterprise markets. We discuss the emergence of AI agents, the shift to answer engine optimisation, and how communities are becoming the new battleground for customer discovery.

Whether you're a product leader trying to build ecosystem DNA into your team, a startup exploring cloud partnerships, or simply curious about the connective tissue that keeps modern software running, this conversation offers rare insight into the strategies and philosophies driving one of the industry's most influential yet understated companies.

Plus, Dan reveals his one indispensable tool and shares why transparency beats clever positioning every time when building lasting ecosystem relationships.