All of us at Wing are incredibly pleased to welcome Didi Dayton as our Partner and Head of Market Development. At Wing, she will grow and nurture our enterprise customer network and help our portfolio companies develop scalable routes to market. To do so, Didi pulls from over two decades of channel and sales leadership as well as deep security domain expertise.
I truly got to know Didi when I interviewed her for a prior role – to run Channels and Alliances at Demisto. As a board member, we spent a few meals together as I attempted to figure out what she was all about. It was almost immediately clear that she was different from the rest of the pack. She demonstrated a mastery of both the strategic and tactical aspects of the job at a level few other could hope to achieve. While Demisto was ultimately acquired before they could hire her, I knew I would want to work with her one day. When we decided we needed a market development leader at Wing, we first thought that we should focus our search on professionals in similar roles at other venture firms. However, we had a different vision for what we wanted this role and work product to be than what we have seen elsewhere. As soon as we expanded our horizon to include folks who had both direct and indirect sales experience and could think about go to market at a strategic level, Didi became the obvious choice to us.
Didi has held more sales and channel roles than I can succinctly enumerate. However, in recent years, her time at Cylance and FireEye stand out above the rest. At these companies, Didi served as a core member of the executive team and truly helped build out the channels and alliances functions from inception through to M&A and IPO for Cylance and FireEye respectively. Prior to this, Didi held a number of direct sales leadership roles, including her time at SurfControl where she built the sales organization and grew the company from $15m to $162m. She is held in the highest regard by everyone she interfaces with – from her customers and partners to her teammates and managers.
Wing prides itself on how we partner with entrepreneurs and work alongside them. While we do not aim to be company operators, we do very much aim to support them in a more intensive and complete fashion. Didi greatly adds to our differentiated bench strength. She is rediscovering her love for working directly with customers and is uniquely positioned to give our companies unbiased guidance in developing appropriate routes to market.
Welcome to Wing Didi!
