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Carlos Mendoza
I grew up in Miami, the child of Cuban immigrants who ran a small import/export business. Watching my parents negotiate with suppliers, navigate customs, and build relationships across cultures was my first education in business development. I didn't realize it at the time, but the skills I absorbed (reading the room, finding mutual value, knowing when to push and when to wait) are exactly the skills that make partnerships work.
I studied business at Georgetown and then joined Stripe in 2017 as a BD associate. Stripe's partnerships team was small and scrappy at the time, maybe eight people covering the entire world. My territory was Latin America, which meant I was flying to São Paulo, Mexico City, and Bogotá every month, trying to convince banks, payment processors, and e-commerce platforms to integrate with Stripe. The pitch was simple: we'll handle the complex parts of payments so you can focus on your product. The execution was anything but simple. Every country had different regulations, different banking infrastructure, and different cultural expectations for how business relationships should work.
The deal I'm most proud of at Stripe was a partnership with one of Brazil's largest e-commerce platforms (I can't name them) that took 14 months to close. Fourteen months of meetings, technical reviews, legal negotiations, and relationship building. The deal eventually drove $200M in annual payment volume through Stripe. That experience taught me that meaningful partnerships aren't signed; they're built, slowly, through trust and delivered value.
In 2020, I moved to Shopify as Head of Partnerships for the Americas. Shopify's partnership ecosystem is enormous (thousands of app developers, agencies, and technology partners) and the strategic challenge was different from Stripe's bilateral deals. At Shopify, I was managing a platform ecosystem where the partnerships team's job was to create the conditions for value creation, not to create the value directly. We built the partner programs, incentive structures, and marketplace dynamics that enabled 10,000+ partners to build businesses on top of Shopify.
The insight I keep coming back to: the best partnerships aren't about distribution. They're about building something neither company could build alone. Distribution partnerships (you promote me, I promote you) are table stakes and usually underwhelming. Integration partnerships (we build something together that creates new value for both customer bases) are where the real leverage is. And ecosystem partnerships (we create the conditions for an entire market to flourish) are the highest form of the art.
I left Shopify in 2024 to write and advise. I joined Signal because partnerships and BD are among the most impactful and least understood functions in tech. There's almost no rigorous writing about how partnerships actually work: the negotiation dynamics, the internal politics, the measurement challenges, the art of managing relationships that span years.
I live in Coconut Grove, Miami. I kiteboard, I cook Cuban food every Sunday for my extended family, and I maintain that the handshake is still the most underrated technology in business.
Experience
- Head of Partnerships (Americas), Shopify
- BD Lead (Latin America), Stripe
- BS Business, Georgetown University