Business Development with Fexingo: Partnerships, BD, and Strategic Growth Conversations

In this episode, Lucas and Luna unpack Snowflake's controversial decision to build its own data-sharing protocol rather than rely on existing industry standards — and how that bet created a partner ecosystem worth over a billion dollars in revenue. They trace the story from Snowflake's early days as a cloud data warehouse to its current position as an interoperability gatekeeper, examining the str...

In September 2022, Porsche AG went public in one of Europe's largest ever IPOs — but the real story was the partnership structure Volkswagen engineered to keep key stakeholders aligned. Lucas and Luna break down how the IPO used a dual-class share structure, a cornerstone investor pact, and a carefully managed Porsche-Piech family relationship to pull off a $9 billion listing without losing contro...

Lucas and Luna unpack the quiet $4.2 billion partnership between SAP and IBM that has been running for over a decade but rarely makes headlines. They walk through how the deal was structured, why it survived multiple leadership changes, and what other enterprise software companies can learn from its 'co-opetition' model. Lucas shares specifics: the revenue split on joint cloud deals, the governanc...

In this episode, Lucas and Luna unpack HubSpot's rocky transition upmarket — how the CRM darling's aggressive push into enterprise sales between 2020 and 2023 alienated its core SMB base and nearly fractured its engineering culture. They focus on one concrete turning point: the messy rollout of the 'Enterprise Hub' bundle in early 2022, which forced CEO Yamini Rangan to publicly walk back pricing...

In this episode of Business Development with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna dissect the $13 billion partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI. They explore how Microsoft went from an early $1 billion investment in 2019 to a strategic stake that redefined its cloud business. The conversation covers the structure of the deal—including the unique profit-share caps and exclusivity clauses—and what it means fo...

Lucas and Luna break down the specific negotiation and integration strategy behind Salesforce's $27.7 billion acquisition of Slack in 2021. Lucas reveals the three key moves Marc Benioff made to win the deal against rival bidders, including the unusual all-stock structure and the cultural integration playbook that avoided typical post-merger friction. Listeners learn why Salesforce paid a 46% prem...

In this debut episode of Business Development with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna dive into one of the most notorious partnership failures in recent tech history: Stripe's failed deal with Amazon in 2022. Stripe walked away from a potential contract worth over a billion dollars annually because Amazon demanded exclusivity and deep integration that would have limited Stripe's growth with other merchants....