Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I am Sonal. Today's episode is all about analyst relations,

which is different from public relations, the topic we covered on another recent podcast.

Where should analyst relations sit inside a startup or vendors as they're referred to in this episode?

What if you're trying to create a category? Do analysts really matter anymore, especially in the age of the

internet with all of the internet,

with all of the information we have available online? Or given trends like the rise of developers as buyers? This episode answers these questions and more. Moderated by product marketing veteran

Sharon Chang on the A16C and Z market development team, the conversation also features

Stacey Diameco from the market development team,

who prior to joining the firm was a client director at Gartner for over 10 years, Anil Lacani,

who has been in both the product engineering and marketing worlds for almost 20 years, and is also

a former analyst. And finally, we have Michael King, head of enterprise product marketing at GitHub,

who besides being an analyst

for 11 years, has also worked at a number of startups doing analyst relations.

The conversation begins with Michael very basically and briefly defining what an analyst

does.

I think at the core, the analyst is talking to the people that you want to sell to.

The analyst is talking to the people that are

buying your technology or that are going to buy your technology every single day.

Analysts, we know them today really came about because there was a point in time in history

where IBM was a firm that moved the markets the largest. And there was no information

about what IBM was doing outside of IBM. And financial analysts couldn't get to that information.

So Gartner started a practice around deriving information about IBM's actual position in the market

...