Maxim Edelman
Founder
Twelve years at Google as Director, Head of Global Partnerships. Before that, product at Kiala, a logistics startup acquired by UPS. MBA from Stanford. Based in Zürich.
Built by people who did this job for a living
Why Partnex exists, who is behind it, and where it is going.
The story
Partnex began with something its founder, Maxim Edelman, watched for twelve years.
After his MBA at Stanford, Maxim spent those years at Google running product partnerships across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific. His teams worked on Search and Ads, took Google Pay to fifteen countries, and brought Shopping, Smart Home and the Assistant to new markets. Every launch needed partners, and his job was to find them, win them and sign them. Before Google, he had been the first product manager at Kiala, a logistics startup that grew on partnerships and was acquired by UPS.
He led some of the most experienced partnership professionals in the business, and he kept telling them the same thing: spend your time with the partner. Build the relationship, pitch the collaboration, negotiate the terms. They did. But most of their week went somewhere else.
It went where every partnership team’s week goes. Research on which companies to approach and what would interest them. Working out the proposal and what to offer in return. Emails rewritten until they were right, decks, internal sign-offs. Term sheets. Contracts that took months with the lawyers and months more with the partner, then back to the lawyers for every change.
Ten percent of the time with the partner, ninety percent at the desk. And that was with highly qualified people and the best legal teams behind them. In the startups and smaller companies Maxim worked with before and after Google, it was worse: nobody had the people, the skills or the time, so the partnerships didn’t happen at all. One of the strongest levers a company has for growth, and most companies can’t pull it.
Partnex is the answer. Not a chat assistant that knows something about partnerships, but the whole way of working the best teams use, from the first question, “which partnerships would get us there?”, to the signed agreement. Everything Maxim learned about how partnerships get done is built in, and open to any company that wants to grow this way.
Who we are
Partnerships are the only thing we work on.
The team
Partnership professionals with many years at Google and other companies, who have opened markets, built channels and closed deals on both sides of the table.
Between us, decades of partnerships. Now one product: the one we wish we had had.
Where this is going
Today Partnex is an assistant to the partnership professional. It prepares the work, you make the calls, and that will always be the heart of it. What it prepares will keep growing.
Soon every company on Partnex will have its own agent, one that knows what the company wants to achieve and what it can offer. Those agents will find each other on Partnex, explore a partnership and prepare the proposal before anyone writes an email. You and your counterpart meet with the ground already covered, build the trust a partnership depends on, and decide.
Start now, and Partnex grows with you. The objectives, prospects and agreements you build today are the ground your agent will stand on tomorrow.
See it on your own company.
Get a free assessment of your partnerships against your competitors’, with the first new one already started: the partner named and the first email written.