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Thomas Jensen
SaaS monetization expert and leader
Thomas Jensen is the Vice President of Pricing & Packaging at Freshworks, based in San Francisco, California. He has extensive experience in monetization strategy and operations within the software industry.
Professional Background
- Current Role: As VP at Freshworks, Jensen focuses on pricing and packaging strategies to enhance the company's offerings and revenue streams.12
- Previous Experience:
- Panther: Head of Pricing and Revenue Operations (April 2022 - September 2023).
- Twilio Inc.: Senior Director of Pricing and Monetization Strategy (2021 - 2022), where he led a transformation towards a SaaS-dominant model.1
- Workday: Senior Director of Pricing, where he founded the pricing function and implemented significant changes to improve monetization strategies.1
- Brocade: Director of Pricing for the Software Networking business unit.
- Dell EMC and VMware: Held various roles focusing on pricing and licensing strategies.1
Education
Jensen holds both a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in International Business Administration and Modern Languages from Handelshøjskolen i Århus (now known as Aarhus University) in Denmark.1
Skills and Expertise
He is recognized for his leadership in pricing strategy, change management, and building high-performing teams. Jensen has been instrumental in developing monetization strategies that align with customer needs and market dynamics.12
His approach is characterized by a focus on delivering immediate business benefits through coordinated pricing initiatives across diverse product lines.1
Highlights
I’m excited to share that I have joined the amazing team at Freshworks as VP, Pricing & Packaging
Saturday’s events in Copenhagen reminded me of this slide. I know LinkedIn isn’t the usual medium for discussing football, but bear with me. The slide is from a presentation at Workday’s SKO in March 2020 - a thought-provoking keynote by special guest Rasmus Ankersen.
The “Simon Kjaer problem” refers to the challenge of identifying talent rather than merely selecting it. Simon Kjær’s footballing talent is now well known, but it wasn’t obvious at the time FC Midtjylland was starting its first youth academy, and had he not been the kit man’s son (so goes the story) he might not have been selected and perhaps never gotten the opportunity to develop into the top player he has become. The general point is that most organizations fail to spot some high-potential junior talent in their own ranks.
So Simon Kjær is a lesson in talent management. At the time, I captured the slide just to share it with my Danish friends as a curiosity. How often does a footballer who grew up just outside Horsens get to be keynote fodder in Silicon Valley? Now it comes in handy as I’m moved to reflect further on this almost lost talent.
Today Simon Kjær is also a lesson in leadership. I won’t recount all the individual heroic acts from Saturday (all well documented by your sports media of choice) but under extreme stress he basically checked all the boxes. On a live TV broadcast to the entire world, no less. Awareness. Decisiveness. Forcefulness. Tenderness. Strength. Humanity. It was a demonstration of leading with empathy in all its facets, by a leader in the most ruthlessly competitive field imaginable. Contrast that against Theodoros Theodoridis, the Secretary General of UEFA, a leader in name only, whose response to a crisis situation was to insist on an arbitrary set of rules, processes and timelines without any regard for human beings.
Which one of those leaders would you follow? Which one of them would you want to lead like? The worst “Simon Kjaer problem” you can have is a leader who’s not like Simon Kjær.
