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Marco Vaanholt
Global Head Customer Community @ Google Cloud at Google
Professional Background
Marco Vaanholt is a highly accomplished professional renowned for his ability to scale products and teams globally by employing non-linear problem-solving strategies. His journey in the tech industry has seen him play pivotal roles across various esteemed organizations, particularly in leadership positions involving innovation, customer engagement, and digital transformation. Currently, he serves as the Global Head of Customer Community at Google Cloud, where he leverages his expertise to enhance customer experiences and foster strong community ties across the Google Cloud ecosystem. Marco's extensive experience and robust insights allow him to effectively bridge the gap between technological advancements and customer needs, ensuring that both innovators and users can thrive in an ever-evolving market.
Over the years, Marco has co-founded Modern Wine Group, illustrating his entrepreneurial spirit and passion for innovation in diverse industries. His commitment to social causes is evident from his role as a Global Ambassador for the Peduli Anak Foundation, where he advocates for the welfare of children in Indonesia. Marco has also contributed to education and mentorship through positions like Board Advisor for digital transformation at the Academy of Art University and as a mentor at BASES, Stanford School of Entrepreneurs, nurturing the next generation of leaders and innovators.
Education and Achievements
Marco Vaanholt’s educational background is as impressive as his professional career. He has pursued extensive studies, including an Executive Leadership program at Leader Quest focusing on innovation and sustainability—a crucial area in today’s rapidly changing business landscape. Furthermore, he has completed the Executive Experience program at Leaderpoint, which equips him with advanced leadership skills tailored to drive high-performance teams. With a Bachelor’s degree in International Business Administration from HZ University of Applied Sciences and an MBE in Business Economics from Tilburg University, Marco's academic credentials provide him with a strong foundation in both business theory and practical application.
His qualifications enhance his capability to lead in various sectors, from product management to customer community engagement. At SAP, where he held multiple global vice president roles, Marco was at the forefront of several pivotal initiatives, including the SAP Community Network and the SAP Premier Customer Network, both of which emphasize his dedication to enhancing user engagement and community building within tech environments.
In addition, his role as Senior Director of Community Innovation at SAP underscored his ability to merge product management with community needs, reflecting his holistic approach to leadership that prioritizes user experience.
Notable Achievements
Marco's impressive career includes numerous accolades due to his strategic thinking and innovative approach. As the Global Vice President of Research and Development for Social Business at SAP, he played a crucial role in transforming how companies engage socially and economically with their customer bases. He adeptly navigated the intersection of technology and social dynamics, establishing pathways for companies to connect meaningfully with users. His experience at leading tech giants like Yahoo and Oracle has further solidified his status as a thought leader in product development and business strategy.
In his capacity as President and Founder of BootUP Ventures, he not only fostered investment opportunities but also helped budding entrepreneurs turn their visions into realities. His insight as an angel investor has equipped him with a keen sense for identifying innovative startups and promising business models—contributions that drive economic growth and job creation.
Through all his varied roles, Marco Vaanholt continues to demonstrate a profound commitment to harnessing the power of technology to improve business performance and customer satisfaction. His journey reflects a blend of leadership, innovation, and a passion for making a significant difference both in corporate structures and wider communities.
Highlights
A New Chapter: Recharged and Focused on Impact
Last week, I met with my inspiring friend Andy Zain https://lnkd.in/g8_DchXS , a successful investor and entrepreneur. He's tackling a critical issue: improving healthcare access and outcomes for low-income families in Indonesia. His approach is promising, and with the right team and execution, it could have a significant long lasting impact on 1 billion people.
This meeting marked a turning point for me. After leaving Google, I took a gap year to reset, recharge, and refocus on my next professional chapter and worked on adding a more complete mind, body spirit approach to my arsenal. It was also a time for personal fulfillment: spreading my father's ashes in Nepal, living with the Maasai tribe in Kenya, raising funds for the expansion of Peduli Anak children welfare centers to Sumbawa, becoming a decent pickleball player,, and cherishing moments with my children and mom, whose health has been a concern. Throughout, my love for travel remained a constant and I added many more amazing stories and places to my life.
I now return feeling energized, balanced, and super focused – mind, body, spirit, and energy. I'm excited to reconnect with old work friends and build new connections as I explore opportunities to make a meaningful contribution. The universe has a way of presenting paths, and I cant wait to see what's next.
Are you working on impactful projects? I'm ready to listen and see if we can collaborate and build something new and extraordinary together! Thanks for the support during my time off. Let's reconnect and see if we can impact the world, people and lives for good.
Just landed back from from an amazing C2C Customer event in #SãoPaulo that showcased various aspects of Data Power! Our Customers shared stories about their experiences with Data Cloud, and added their Brazilian flavor ! Thank you to our speakers #Ritika Gunnar, #Alberto Oppenheimer, #Ricardo Buffon, #Cristian A. Townsend, #Uhilian Djeimen Finger, #Marcio Lebrao, and #André G.! And our internal team #Igor Curi, #Ana Paula Pereira, #Karla Nobre, #Maurilio Damasceno Pereira, #Renato Gomes, #Glauco Barros, #Luiz Souza, #Talita Mariano , #Luana Del Rey, #Marco Bravo
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Mesh is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Mesh centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
- Smart Search: Allows you to search using natural language like "People I know at the NYT" or "Designers I've met in London"
- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Mesh is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Mesh as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Mesh offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Mesh's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Mesh's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Mesh has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Mesh a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Mesh's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Mesh as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Mesh eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.