"Connectd really helped me to reaffirm that I wanted to work with startups and scale-ups, and not go back to larger corporates like Google or Oracle."
Eanna Cunnane, Advisor, Onboardly: Connectd arrived at an interesting time in my life. I'd just finished up at Google and I wanted to move out of critical path technology roles by 2027. I've always done a little bit of business coaching and part-time consultancy, even when I was working at big tech companies, and I wanted to explore that on a more professional basis.
What I got with Connectd was a learning path, but the bit that was really good was connecting with mentors and with the network of founders on the platform.
I always think that if you want to explain something to yourself, you describe it or write about it. If you want to explain it to others, you teach it. And teaching really forces you to get clear about things you've been doing instinctively. Getting to a point where I was actually advising and coaching a business startup was really valuable for clarifying my own thinking. Today's founders are much younger and moving a lot faster, and this was a real opportunity to reconnect with that.
Eanna Cunnane: The learning journey was good. It helped me connect with other people in the Connectd network and understand that there is a big ecosystem of fractional advisors, founders, and so on.
I'll be honest, I felt I'd lost touch a little with the startup scene. It's easy in big companies to forget what life is like when you're literally one person, or twenty people, trying to win business and chase working capital. The key thing for me was reconnecting with that agency and energy, the reality that when you're a solo founder in a startup, you've got to do a bit of everything.
I'll say quite frankly that when I was looking at what was next, I'd decided that fractional advisory wasn't going to be a full-time play for me. But when I looked back at roles in tech, Connectd really helped me reaffirm that what I wanted to work with was a startup or a scale-up, and not go back to the likes of Google or Oracle.
Eanna Cunnane: Two things about Onboardly. Number one, Alex is a force of nature, and for two reasons. It's really good to see a female founder, and a solo founder at that, because tech can be a bit of a sausage factory. There are a lot of guys. It tends to attract people from a particular background, and it was good to see someone who broke the mould.
But the second thing is that Alex's idea is a genuinely important one. The real urgency these days is on the early-stage customer journey. The quicker you can get people activated, the quicker you can enable them. It's all about: how do we get them to value within the first two months? Everything after that is secondary. So it was the power of the person and the power of the business idea that attracted me.
Eanna Cunnane: I committed to a weekly meeting with Alex. The cadence stayed the same, but we transitioned focus several times throughout the relationship, which is a good sign. The early stages were about product fit and the post-sale journey. That transitioned after a few months into how I could better support with go-to-market, and that's actually still the stage we're at now.
The other key thing is that for any fractional, giving an hour of your time really needs to count. That means coming prepared and following up properly afterwards. Alex has been amazing in that regard. One of the things I really commend her for is that any time I've given her feedback, she doesn't just act on it, she takes it to the next level. She internalises it and goes further with it. I've often felt that she's challenged me to be a little sharper myself as well.
Eanna Cunnane: Be specific but open about the type of business you want to work with. And in particular, be mindful of the personality styles you can work most closely with. I've really appreciated Alex because she doesn't take no for an answer. If you've worked in large corporates where a lot of people say no, working with someone who says yes is genuinely enlivening.
Working with Connectd turned my interest in fractional work into a different way of looking at business coaching and interacting with people operating in the tech world. It helped reaffirm my interest in the startup and scale-up scene, and quite aside from the fractional role itself, it's given me an energy and a slightly different philosophy that I'm even taking into my daily work now.
Eanna Cunnane, Advisor, Onboardly
Fractional work is it the career model senior leaders have been waiting for - learn how to make the shift yourself
