John Gleeson / Success Venture Partners

John Gleeson is the Founder and General Partner of Success Venture Partners (SuccessVP), a $10M fund investing in founders with customer success at their core, from pre-seed to seed.

John’s background is in customer success. He moved from Canada to NYC and scaled Customer Success at Motive (now valued at $3 billion) from $1M to $300M in ARR. During this time, he made strategic investments as a scout for Index Ventures. Before that, he built the world’s largest Customer Success professional communities through SF and NYC Customer Success Meetups. Those meetups connected him with industry professionals, founders, and eventually VCs.

Our conversation gets into why customer success is more critical than ever, particularly in vertical AI. Horizontal solutions can’t match the depth of understanding that vertical-focused products bring. In a world where technology enables faster software development, understanding and prioritizing customers has become the true competitive advantage.

John’s path to building SuccessVP came from being the person VCs turned to when portfolio companies needed customer success support. “It was really because I was passing along strong deal flow and quickly becoming the person they turned to when portfolio companies needed support with customer success.”

SuccessVP has 87+ LPs, many of whom are Chief Customer Officers from companies like Toast, Slack, GitHub, Braze, MuleSoft, Notion, and Aurora Solar. John’s thesis: knowing what to build, rather than just how to build it, will be the key to success.

Full episode below, or on Spotify / Apple Podcasts