Moments of impact from Peter Zotto's career
Trove · Founder & CEO · September 2026Lead by @Katherine Berman and @Ryan McSweeney, Snyk wanted to showcase the concept that having their colleagues build personal brands could drive impact for themselves and the company as well. @Erin Phinney from Trove worked extensively with our team to make it happen. They asked me, along with @Mike Gutner and @Matt Crane to speak on a panel to discuss how to think about and build a personal brand. The topic was a natural fit for what we're building at Trove, so I was excited to join and share a practical take. I focused my comments on how to show impact rather than just claiming it arbitrarily. And how to use the people around you in a room to help tell your story instead around outcome first. The idea was to give Snyk's employees something they could actually use the next time they wanted to talk about their work credibly, whether internally or externally. It put Trove in front of a room of Snyk who is thinking seriously about how personal brand ties to company impact, exactly the audience and conversation Trove is built around.
Trove · Founder & CEOTrove, an early-stage company, recruited and activated a five-person advisory board composed of experienced people leaders. The initiative aimed to bring in practitioners who oversee large-scale career development within organizations, tasked with shaping the product from a user perspective and supporting go-to-market storytelling. The team built a curated list of candidates and used referrals, networking, and outreach, prioritizing in-depth conversations to assess alignment and long-term commitment over quick sign-ups. The resulting board includes: Mike Gutner (Chief People Officer, Toast), Tessa White (Founder, The Job Doctor), Claude Silver (Chief Heart Officer, VaynerX), Sharon Pollard (VP, Head of People & Culture, CloudZero), and Andrew
Trove · Founder & CEO · February 2026As founder of Trove, I wanted to establish a professional, credible identity from day one that would be critical to earning trust with early customers and investors. To achieve this, we brought in Champion's Design, partnering with their team...including Paulina, Jennifer, Mike, Michael, and others to build Trove's foundational brand identity, encompassing typeface, wordmark, and logo. Emily Privot, our head of experience along with the Champions team and I led the process from the outset, kicking things off with an in-person session in NYC where I articulated Trove's mission, core values, and view of the market. Champion's Design used this input to help define our brand attributes and developed multiple rounds of design concepts. The new brand identity launched alongside Trove's beta debut, and the response was immediate: several people noted that it made Trove feel like a far more established company than its early stage would suggest. The identity quickly became a key asset, featured prominently in our pitch deck and website, reinforcing credibility with investors and early customers alike as we moved into public launch. Trove is more than just a place to document your work, it needed to feel like a collection was being established over time, the crow helped us take this visual home.
PaddleWhen Paddle acquired ProfitWell, the transition posed a significant risk to our existing customer relationships. Acquisitions naturally create uncertainty, and we recognized that without deliberate action, we could lose the trust and confidence our customers had placed in us over the years. The challenge was clear: maintain continuity and service quality during a period of organizational change. To address this, I collaborated closely with team members including Brett Langstaff, Nika Witczak, and Jordan Lieberman to reimagine how we structured our customer-facing operations. We implemented a new pod structure specifically designed to handle the increased demand and complexity that came with the acquisition. This reorganization strengthened our internal team dynamics and ensured we had the capacity and coordination to continue serving our customer base without disruption.
ProfitWell · Cofounder, CRO · May 2022I cofounded ProfitWell to fix a gap in the subscription market. Pricing, retention, and metrics were scattered across tools and vendors, if companies had them at all. We started as Price Intelligently, a pricing optimization platform, and grew into a full suite for any subscription business. As Chief Revenue Officer, I built our go-to-market from the ground up. The core bet was freemium: deliver real value first, then ask for payment. That let us reach thousands of companies organically and earn credibility fast. I also led the sales organization and personally closed our largest enterprise deals. Those deals proved companies would invest seriously in fixing pricing and churn. None of it happened alone. @Evan Grubb, our senior Price Intelligently AE, brought in over $10 million in revenue during his tenure. @Britt Allen, our senior Retain AE, built that sales motion from scratch. @Kyle Hart, one of our early pricing analysts, drove the process that made our pricing work repeatable. @Ben Hillman and @Dan Callahan ran our media studio, which fueled the brand and our freemium enginge with podcasts featuring folks like Patty McCord, and shows like "Pricing Page Teardown". On the product side, @Michael Cox led engineering as VP, @Eric Yu as Director of Engineering, and @Neel Desai as Director of Product made sure we were two steps ahead of where the buyers where going and built strong foundational product to execute for them. @Danielle Messler and @Erin Phinney became responsible for some of our most impactful owned events and content creation during our 10 year run. We scaled ProfitWell to 37,000 customers across three products: our pricing intelligence platform, Retain for credit card dunning, and our free subscription metrics tool. In 2022, Paddle acquired ProfitWell for $200 million. We had no external investors, which made the outcome especially strong. Paddle folded our pricing and retention tools into its payments platform, creating an end-to-end solution for subscription businesses.
Limitr · Advisor · May 2026During Boston's TechWeek, I got a chance to be on Limitr's pricing panel focused on the future of pricing in AI era I participated as a panelist to share lessons from my time scaling ProfitWell with early-stage founders in the Boston startup community who were still figuring out their pricing strategies. I recognized that usage-based pricing remains one of the most challenging areas for founders to get right, and I wanted to share practical insights that could help them avoid costly mistakes. I pulled together a couple of real examples from ProfitWell clients who had initially gotten their pricing wrong, and how they came back to succeed. The core message centered on identifying the right outcome, not just the metric of spend/tokens. Was joined by Chris Conley and Alexa Gjonca two super knowledgeable pricing experts. Awesome to support CJ and Amelia on spreading the pricing gospel!
ProfitWellSaaS and subscription companies were losing 20-30% of their monthly recurring revenue to failed payments—a massive problem causing involuntary churn. Existing dunning solutions required significant upfront fees, making the ROI unclear and adoption difficult for many companies. At the time, credit card dunning was either non-existent or managed through basic payment gateways like Stripe, but these solutions barely moved the needle on recovery rates. I saw an opportunity to solve this widespread problem with a fundamentally different, risk-free business model. I led the product launch by building a demo environment and creating a compelling pitch deck that emphasized our zero upfront cost model. To remove any remaining hesitation, we offered customers a money-back guarantee. Once we validated the offering with early adopters, I scaled our outbound sales motion, coordinating with Brittni and John to handle different customer segments effectively. We worked closely with key early stakeholders including Neel, Patrick Campbell, Eric Yu, Facundo Chamut, and Michael Cox to refine the product and go-to-market approach. Over the course of two years, we signed up hundreds of customers and generated roughly $5 million in annual recurring revenue. The risk-free model proved to be a game-changer, allowing subscription companies to recover significant revenue from failed payments without the barrier of upfront investment.
Trove · May 2026We identified an opportunity to elevate our brand presence in Boston by hosting a public event focused on a topic we kept hearing feedback about from our community. Rather than relying solely on digital channels, we saw the value in creating an in-person forum that would position us as thought leaders while addressing real concerns from people leaders in the market. Working closely with our CMO, Erin, I recruited three highly respected people leaders to participate on the panel: Mike Gutner from Toast, Sharon Pollard from CloudZero, and Kelley Morse from Bullhorn. The caliber of these speakers was critical to drawing the right audience and establishing credibility for the event. The panel drew approximately 60 attendees and generated strong engagement during the Q&A session. The impact extended well beyond the day itself—we saw a meaningful spike in inbound interest following the event, and received feedback from several attendees who told us the panel changed how they're thinking about career development. The event delivered on its core objectives: generating coverage, building brand awareness in the Boston market, and creating authentic connections with potential customers and partners.
ProfitWellBuilt and co-ran a pricing practice from the ground up over 10 years with 200+ projects. Worked with companies like Canva, Intercom, Blue Bottle Coffee, and many more. Over ten years as cofounder of ProfitWell I built and led a pricing advisory practice that served hundreds of subscription businesses. That meant recruiting and managing a team of pricing strategists, analysts, and working with the team of much smarter people to build the methodology we used across every engagement, and personally driving projects for some of the most prominent SaaS companies in the world...from early-stage teams pricing a product for the first time to post-IPO orgs overhauling entire packaging architectures. Every project touched real revenue.
Trove · September 2025After years of recognizing a fundamental flaw in professional hiring - that it runs entirely on self-reported, unverified data - I decided to finally act on the problem and build a solution. The insight was clear: professionals needed a way to capture and validate their real work, backed by the people who actually witnessed their contributions. This became the foundation for Trove, a platform designed to bring credibility and verification to professional accomplishments. I personally drove the launch by recruiting a founding team of four talented individuals who shared the vision. Bringing together the right mix of skills and perspectives was critical to getting Trove off the ground, and I focused my efforts on assembling a team capable of translating this long-gestating idea into reality. Trove is currently in beta and we're in the early stages of building traction. While measurable impact is still developing, the platform represents a foundational shift in how professionals can document and verify their career achievements, moving beyond unsubstantiated claims to peer-validated evidence of real work.
I worked with @Jill to build and launch a new go-to-market campaign targeting the media industry. I partnered closely with Jill on the strategy and execution, aligning on positioning and messaging for media-sector prospects and pulling the campaign together from concept to launch. Details on the specific results and metrics are still being gathered, but the campaign marked a new push into the media vertical as part of our broader go-to-market efforts.
ProfitWell · Cofounder, CROFin, a new AI-powered customer success tool built to replace the slog of traditional customer support, launched with a flat per-resolution fee that was confusing customers and capping revenue potential. I was brought in to redesign the pricing model from the ground up, shifting it to a usage-based structure that more accurately reflected the value the product delivered. I approached this by running pricing research in partnership with sales and customer data teams to identify a usage metric that scaled directly with the value customers received. From there, I worked closely with product and finance to model out pricing tiers, ensuring the structure balanced revenue growth with customer fairness. Recognizing that any pricing change carries churn risk, I partnered closely with the sales team to design a migration path that moved existing customers onto the new model without disrupting relationships or triggering mass cancellations. The results validated the approach: within two quarters of launch, the new usage-based pricing model drove a 30% increase in average revenue per account. Migration churn stayed under 2%, and net revenue retention climbed to 120% — demonstrating that the new model not only preserved the existing customer base but expanded revenue from it significantly. This overhaul turned Fin's pricing from a growth constraint into a genuine revenue driver.
OpenView Venture PartnersI joined OpenView Venture Partners as an analyst on the investment committee during a pivotal moment for the firm's inaugural fund. At the time, OpenView was entirely focused on qualified B2B deals in the expansion stage but faced a significant challenge: limited brand recognition in a competitive venture capital market. The firm needed to establish its unique position and build a pipeline of high-quality investment opportunities while simultaneously developing the thought leadership that would differentiate us from traditional VCs. My day-to-day work centered on aggressive outreach and rigorous pipeline management. I reached out to more than 100 prospects each week, systematically qualifying opportunities within our pipeline alongside associates and partners. This high-volume, high-touch approach required both persistence and discernment—identifying companies that fit OpenView's expansion-stage thesis while building relationships with founders who might not yet know who we were. The impact of this work extended far beyond individual deals. OpenView successfully led the charge into what became known as "value add" venture capital, with our OpenView Labs and augmented operator support becoming a key differentiator. We grew a formidable content brand that not only helped source deals but became instrumental in closing investments with high-profile companies like DataDog. The systematic sourcing and brand-building work I contributed to helped establish OpenView's reputation as a strategic partner for growth-stage B2B companies, positioning the firm as an innovator in the venture landscape.