The Sweeney Agency

About Nilofer Merchant - Speaker on Innovation, Leadership and Business Trends:

Nilofer Merchant is a corporate director, published author, and business strategist. She has earned a reputation for enabling companies to win, if not dominate their markets. Merchant is the author of The New How, a critically acclaimed 2010 book on collaborative work and direction setting that helps organizations act flat to be nimble. She is a Harvard Business Review (HBR) writer on the topics of culture, innovation, and strategy where she transfers lessons from both her successes and failures. She’s been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, and published by BusinessWeek, Forbes, and AdAge. She is a contributing author to three books; two on social media marketing, and one on wisdom leadership. She is ranked and regarded in the top .01% of social media. Nilofer designed a trademarked framework for makingtough decisions, called MurderBoarding.

Her expertise comes from growing companies, small and big. She has served as CEO, Fortune 500 leader, and entrepreneur. She blends strategic models, 20 years of experience in start-ups and multi-billion dollar global enterprises, market insights, and a basic understanding of humans -- to create solutions that work. Merchant founded and served as CEO of a global multi-million dollar services company, selling 80% of business. As VP of a web application start-up, she enabled the German company to do a successful exit. Merchant has profit and loss (P&L) experience at a public Fortune 500 Company. Board of Directors, and CEOs at Global Fortune 1000 enterprises have turned to her to make mission-critical decisions.

Founder and CEO of Rubicon Consulting, her strategic insight was sought after and profitably deployed by Adobe, Symantec, Symbian, HP, Openwave, Logitech, and VMWare. Her firm served four inflection points of growth: finding new markets, go-to-market strategies, defending against competitors, and optimizing revenue. Rubicon created the $200M go-to-market (GTM) strategy for VMware to enter the SMB space, designed the GTM for Adobe’s now $180M Education business, and identified a new $2B mobile data market for Openwave’s pivot, amongst others. And, Merchant is one of the few people who can say they’ve fought a competitive battle against Microsoft and won, for Symantec’s Anti-Virus $2.1B annual business. She has personally launched more than 100 products, netting $18B in sales, with expertise in Europe and US markets. These experiences point to one thing: explosive global growth with superior shareholder value.

Prior to her own start-up, Merchant drove pricing, channel strategy, product launches, vertical segments, and marketing investment decisions for the Americas division of Autodesk (ADSK). She grew the business by nearly 50% from $200M to $310M in 20 months, including a major product diversification strategy. As VP of Sales & Marketing for GoLive, a start-up later acquired by Adobe (ADBE), she grew revenues from zero to $4.5M in 16 months. Merchant received industry recognition for an ingenious channel sales program she developed that grew Apple (APPL) server sales at nearly 900% CAGR over 2 years from $2 to $180M. She’s led start-ups, high-growth performance, and turnaround situations.

Besides serving as a corporate director, she writes for Harvard Business Review, advises entrepreneurs, speaks professionally, and teaches at Stanford & Santa Clara University. She holds an M.B.A. from Santa Clara, and a B.S. in Economics from University of San Francisco.

What Nilofer Merchant Talks About:

Nilofer Merchant’s ability to put business history in context enables her to discern the right future moves. Her writing and ideation abilities have led to syndication with major business publishing entities. At conferences, the energetic, approachable and pragmatic keynote speaking style helps people connect to her vision whether their role is that of a board member, grad student, an engineer, marketer, or a business leader.