Welcoming Martina Lauchengco to Costanoa

I cannot be more pleased to announce that Martina Lauchengco has joined Costanoa as an Operating Partner. She is a supremely talented marketing (especially product marketing) leader, an insightful mentor and advisor, and an energizing, positive presence. She is already bringing incredible insight and tools to our portfolio.

Helping companies understand, build and maintain product market fit is a central part of what we do at Costanoa. Martina is uniquely positioned to help us deliver on the market side of product market fit, including:

• understanding the customer through qualitative and quantitative means
• segmentation and understanding how product capabilities affect different cohorts
• positioning and messaging in the language of your audience
• providing key tactics to drive early demand generation, especially inbound activity (PR, content marketing, SEO)
• aligning marketing with sales to create and optimize the “smarketing” funnel

Martina and I go back to the early days of Netscape where we were both product managers. I was focused on server infrastructure products where she was focused on the client. She followed Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen to Loudcloud/Opsware where she led the marketing team before becoming the CEO’s Chief of Staff. She has been teaching and consulting since then, including teaching marketing to engineers at UC Berkeley and working with the Silicon Valley Product Group as its product marketing expert.

Martina is one of those rare souls who improves the performance of everyone around her. She is also the only person I know who is both a bi-athlete and a tri-athlete…I’m sure there is a word for that. She is already contributing to our portfolio, having run a day long seminar last year and working closely with our friends at Quizlet.

I was able to sit down with Martina and discuss her new role, what she’s been up to at Costanoa recently, and understand where marketing fits in finding product market fit.