The 🇺🇸 American Touch of the Spendesk M̶a̶f̶i̶a̶ Family: Stephanie Bowker She taught the🇫🇷 French ecosystem that B2B software companies have to invest in their brand! “Why does software have to be boring?” After leaving Spendesk last summer, she is starting to build another brand: Ourspace. Yes, this post is in English! Steph was one of the first non-french speaking hires, and the first Head of Marketing. That's why Spendesk switched to English as an official language less than 2 years after the company was created. Before Spendesk, Steph worked for Gusto, one of the fastest growing companies in the US. Let’s say the American Version of Payfit. After being the first Product Marketing Manager of the company, she led the Product Marketing & Branding Team. 🇫🇷 3 years later, she made the decision to buy a one-way ticket to Paris, leaving the Silicon Valley to discover French Tech. She joined Spendesk as the first marketing hire and taught us how product marketing was key. She early on decided to hire a brand designer to stop being dependent on a product designer. Spendesk is today one of the rare example of strong branding in B2B. All our competitors switched to boring colors like black and white. 😂 That reminds me of a support ticket that we received from a "successful CEO" of a company using Spendesk. "I just received my card, it's purple. Can you send me a black card? My business lunches are too important. I can't pay with a Polly Pocket credit card...” This "successful CEO" never received a black card and used his Spendesk purple card like all 200,000 users of Spendesk at that time! 💜 💳 Joke aside, the purple card was the best word-of-mouth hack that we had! But let's come back to Stephanie. After building the marketing department to 30 people, she decided to jump on another challenge - her own company. After designing hundreds of org charts at Spendesk (scaling from 24 employees to 500 in 4 years), she realized that the pain point was massive and underserved. Do you remember the last tool you used to redesign your team structure? Right, it's s****. For the last 9 months, Steph and her team have been building Ourspace. 🌟🌟 The product was released last week - give it a try! 🌟🌟 PS: Behind Our.space, there is another Spendesk family member, also from the 🇺🇸. I will introduce you to Meri-Pier L. in another post! - - - - - - - - - - Everyone talks about the Tech Mafia (Paypal, Skype...), I present to you the Spendesk M̶a̶f̶i̶a̶ Family 💜 This post is #5 in a long series. An article is being prepared (Cc. Nicolas Marchais) on the impact of the 26th French unicorn. 🚀 +10 Companies created by former Spendeskers, Our.space is one of them! 🚀 +55 Angel investments made by the founding team 🚀 +27 former Spendeskers are now in a Lead/Head position of an early-stage startup.