At Crane, our mission is to redefine the enterprise work experience. This is a passion we share with every founder that we partner with. To make the biggest potential impact, we love getting involved at the seed stage when the future success of a business is still far from clear. You could say we’re fanatical about supporting our founders every inch of the way — from closing their first customer all the way to their first few million in revenue.
Crane’s Founders have funded >50 B2B companies over the last 10 years and have learned first hand, just how pivotal the role that marketing plays in a startup’s success. Focus on the wrong buyer? Dead. Target too broad of a customer base? Dead. No compelling reason to buy? Dead. Concise messaging, but not memorable? Good luck driving growth. From the way founders tell the story of how they came across the problem, to how they convince their first employees to join, to running customer discovery and closing your first customers — this is all driven by storytelling, one of the most important tools of any marketer — whether B2C or B2B.
More specifically, once a company has found product market-fit with a subset of buyers who all share the same problem, product marketing and messaging drives more initial revenue than adding SDRs or spending money on demand gen.
With this deep understanding of storytelling and bringing products to market, we are thrilled to announce that Richard Snee is joining Crane as an Advisor. Richard brings to Crane over 25 years of success as a technology company marketing executive. The foundation of his background is that of a creative: a filmmaker, producer, musician and writer. He is passionate about the value of authentic messaging, impactful storytelling and brand consistency in the work he does. His track record includes meaningful outcomes for companies both large and small and most recently, the successful IPO of Pivotal Software, where Richard was the Chief Marketing Officer and to now ARM, where Richard works across their IoT and automotive teams.
Richard is fuelled by a competitive drive to support founders in a way that helps them win. He has become a highly trusted partner to Crane in the time that we have known him, and we are privileged to add Richard’s expertise as we continue to build our Go-To-Market offering for founders focused on building entirely new software categories.