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Chad Horenfeldt 📕 shared thisHonored to be named one of the Top 100 CLG Leaders for 2026 by Base. This one means a lot because of how it was earned. Not through flashy campaigns or vanity metrics. Through a genuine belief that customers deserve more than check-in calls and QBRs that waste their time. At Siena AI, I rebuilt CS from the ground up around that belief. We shifted the conversation toward value. We used AI to surface expansion signals before CSMs even had to think about them. We built a segmentation model that gave every customer the right level of attention, not just the loudest ones. The results came: significant improvements in GRR and NRR, and a repeatable expansion engine that didn't depend on heroics from individual CSMs. None of it happened alone. It happened because of a team that bought into the mission and customers who trusted us to deliver. Customer-Led Growth isn't a framework. It's a commitment to putting customers first, every time, even when it's inconvenient. Grateful to Base AI for recognizing the work and for bringing this community together. Congrats to others on this list, including Dan Ennis, Dannah Vaughan, Kristi Faltorusso, Julie Fox, Marco Carrubba, Kristin Farwell, Amber Monroe, Anika Zubair, Parul Bhandari, Sabina M. Pons, Rachel Provan 🧠, among many, many others. See the full list: https://lnkd.in/eqdQdCCv #TOP100CLG26 #CustomerLedGrowth #CustomerSuccess
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Chad Horenfeldt 📕 shared thisMost customer conversations are still stuck on features. "Here's what's new in the product." "Here's what's on the roadmap." Meanwhile, the customer is wondering what any of it means for their business. The shift from feature talk to outcome-driven conversations is what separates CS teams that retain accounts from ones that truly grow them. On July 8, I'm bringing an interactive session to the Customer Success Festival in New York where we'll actually build the framework together, at your tables, in real time. This festival is just one of the many festivals run around the world by by the Customer Success Collective. You'll walk out with a repeatable conversation playbook your team can use immediately. No theory. Just a practical structure for leading with business impact instead of product updates. AI plays a big role in how we get there. I'll show you how. 👇 Registration link is in the comments. Hope to see you there.
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Chad Horenfeldt 📕 reposted thisChad Horenfeldt 📕 reposted thisToday, I'm excited to share that Avoca has raised over $125M across Seed to Series B at a $1B valuation, backed by Kleiner Perkins, Meritech, General Catalyst, Amplify, and other top Silicon Valley investors to build AI agents for the services economy. See our comments for the Fortune exclusive and our blog post. Having grown up answering phone calls as my part-time job in Michigan, it was very clear to me that AI was going to have an outsized impact on the services world. That experience led me to founding Avoca with my brilliant cofounder, Tyson Chen with one mission: build AI for the trillion-dollar services industry. The services economy never got its generation-defining software company. There was no Salesforce, no Github, no Databricks. And for good reason. Traditional software never provided enough value for a 30-person HVAC business that depends on a call center, a marketing agency, a team of great techs. The economics just didn't work. AI changes the math. For the first time, every contractor in America can have a concierge-grade revenue operation: every call answered, every customer followed up with, every marketing dollar tracked from ad click to dispatched job. We believe the most value will accrue at the application layer, where the real work happens. While frontier labs have cracked into the app layer for data-heavy use cases like coding, the battle for complex, workflow-driven industries has yet to be won. This is the first chapter of a generational company. The reason we are winning is because we have the best product and a world-class team which includes multiple former YC founders and engineers from MIT, Stanford, Google, Meta, and many other top institutions. If this resonates, come build with us. We're hiring across all roles. I’m deeply grateful to our customers for betting on us, and to our investors and partners for backing the vision from day one. Thank you to our investors for your support: Leigh Marie Braswell from Kleiner Perkins Vedant Suri and Hemant Taneja from General Catalyst Alex C. from Meritech Capital Dalton Caldwell and Diana Hu from Y Combinator Mike Dauber and Grace Ge from Amplify Partners Jishnu B. and Arjun Gandhi from Nexus Venture Partners Jack Altman from Alt Capital Gregory R. from BoxGroup And many other investors/friends including: Krishna (REMUS Capital), Ansaf (Latitude Capital), Nakul (Audacious Ventures), Ian and Andy(TCP), Cem and Burak (Formus Capital), Todd Breeden (Jefferies), Manraj (Vicus Ventures), Charley and friends (Pathlight Ventures), and helpful friends such as Sudhanshu Mishra
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Chad Horenfeldt 📕 reposted thisChad Horenfeldt 📕 reposted thisFour years ago, I embarked on a mission with my best friend Apurva Shrivastava to bring intelligent, empathetic, and reliable AI agents to every service-based business across America. This was a deeply personal mission for both of us having grown up in immigrant households answering the phones for our moms’ small businesses in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Today, I’m thrilled to announce Avoca has raised over $125M across Seed to Series B at a $1B valuation, backed by Kleiner Perkins, Meritech, General Catalyst, Amplify, and other top Silicon Valley investors to fuel that mission. From the start, our belief has been that AI will have the most impact not on the F500 companies but actually the blue collar services economy that serves as the foundation for the entire country. This funding is a testament to that belief. This is the first chapter of a generational company. Our revenue has grown over 8x YoY for the past two years and our AI is driving tremendous results for our customers having booked over $60M+ in jobs just last month. Incredibly grateful to our customers for betting on us from day 1 (shoutout to Josh and Michael from Rescue Air) even when the product wasn’t perfect, and to our investors and partners for backing the vision from day one. Leigh Marie Braswell from Kleiner Perkins Alex C. and Cathy Choi from Meritech Capital Vedant Suri and Hemant Taneja from General Catalyst Grace Ge and Mike Dauber from Amplify Partners Dalton Caldwell and Diana Hu from Y Combinator Jishnu B. and Arjun Gandhi from Nexus Venture Partners Jack Altman from Alt Capital Gregory R. from BoxGroup And many other investors/friends including: Ian Feeney and Andy Linder (TCP Venture Capital), Krishna K. Gupta (REMUS Capital), Ansaf Kareem (Latitude Capital), Nakul Mandan (Audacious Ventures), Cem Garih and Burak Karahasan (Formus Capital), Todd Breeden (Jefferies), Manraj Singh Sandhu (Vicus Ventures), Charley Ma (Pathlight Ventures) We're growing exponentially and hiring across all teams! Fortune exclusive and blog post from me and Apurva in the comments below:
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Chad Horenfeldt 📕 shared thisBig news. Avoca just raised our Series B at a $1B valuation, bringing total funding to over $125M. Meritech and General Catalyst led the round, with continued support from our Series A investors, Kleiner Perkins and Amplify Partners. When I joined Avoca, I made a deliberate bet. After years building customer success teams, I wanted to work on a real, tangible problem. Avoca builds AI for home service businesses. Plumbers, HVAC companies, electricians, roofers. Every missed call is lost revenue and a customer who calls the next name on the list. Our AI answers those calls, books the jobs, and gives owners their nights and weekends back. That's a problem worth solving. What's inspired me most is the team. Tyson Chen, Apurva Shrivastava, and the entire crew move fast, hold a high bar, and genuinely care about the trades. Our customers feel it. So does the market. This raise is fuel, not a finish line. The trades have been underserved by software for decades. We're just getting started. Thank you to Meritech, General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, and Amplify Partners for backing this mission. And to every Avoca customer who trusted us early. You made this possible.
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Chad Horenfeldt 📕 posted thisIn The Strategic Customer Success Manager, I talk a lot about a simple equation: Trust + Value = Customer Success. Most teams focus on the “value” side. But trust is one or lost on the frontlines and in the place that gets the least amount of fanfare. Trust is often won or lost in Support. We celebrate sales leaders and customer success leaders. But support leaders? Too often, they get treated like back-office operators. Your support leader can have a bigger impact on retention than anyone in your company. Because when something breaks or if there is an issue of any kind, customers are not thinking about what my ROI is or their next QBR. They are asking: Can I trust you to help me solve this? Support is where friction shows up first. Support is where product gaps get exposed. Support is where renewal risk often begins. A great support leader doesn’t just manage tickets. They protect retention. They improve product feedback loops. They create confidence at scale. They help the rest of CS stay strategic instead of becoming escalation managers. Customers don’t separate support from the rest of customer success. They judge the entire experience. Strong post-sale organizations don’t treat support as secondary. They treat it as a strategic advantage. It's why I'm looking for an experienced support leader to lead our support team. Interested? See the comments. 👇 I've also linked to a passage in my book about how CSMs can best work with the support team. See the comments as well. 👇
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Chad Horenfeldt 📕 shared this🥑 The Avoca CS team went head-to-head in The Great Guac Off last week. Recipes were debated. Cilantro was harshly judged. Trash was talked. We've been growing fast and shipping wins for customers as they head to their busy season. Felt right to step out for a few hours and just be in a room together having fun. A few things I was reminded of: - The best teams compete with each other, not against each other. Watching people who normally collaborate on making clients successful argue about lime ratios was the good kind of chaos. - You can't fake chemistry. Either it's there or it's not. Ours is. - Small rituals matter more than big offsites. Ninety minutes of guacamole did more for team cohesion than most planning docs I've ever written. - Shoutout to teambuilding.com for running it. Easy to book, zero lift on our end, and the facilitators were great. We're hiring across the NYC office, including roles on the CS team. Link in comments. What's the best team event your company has done this year? Always looking for ideas. #CustomerSuccess #Avoca #TeamBuilding
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Chad Horenfeldt 📕 posted thisI took a screenshot of my Slack sidebar and handed it to AI. That one action turned Slack from a confusing mess to something I can actually handle. My first use case was tackling client Slack channels and it turned my hate for Slack into something slightly better. I follow hundreds of client Slack channels. Every day, issues surfaced, celebrations happened, decisions were made, and blockers appeared in those channels. Most of them I never saw. I took a few screenshots of these channels and pasted them in Claude. I then asked it to build a prompt that reads every channel each morning and tells me what I need to know. No manual setup. No listing channels one by one. The screenshot was enough. Now a digest lands in my designated Slack channel every morning. It reads every channel, identifies what happened in the last 24 hours, and flags every risk. Thirty seconds to read and I have full visibility across my entire portfolio. I show up to every internal conversation already knowing what's happening in key accounts. Conversations start at a higher level because I'm not burning the first ten minutes on status updates. I wrote up the full breakdown and linked it in the comments: the prompt, the format, and why every CSM and every CS leader should have something like this running. 👇 I still have a love-hate relationship with Slack, but I now have a better handle on it, so I can spend my time on the most important items.
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Chad Horenfeldt 📕 posted thisWe killed the CSM role at Avoca. Here’s why we did it. It's not because the CSM doesn’t matter. It's because the old model couldn’t keep up. At an AI-native company, “learn the product and grow the account” isn’t a job description anymore. It’s a starting point. The product changes by the minute. The problems are harder to diagnose. And the opportunity to build things that don’t exist yet isn't just a future roadmap item. It becomes an idea that can be can be scoped, built and pushed that afternoon. The divide between customer success and product management becomes fuzzy. So we replaced the role with the Technical Account Manager (TAM). This person is hands-on, technically fluent, and obsessed with customer outcomes. They can diagnose whether a problem is a bug, a config issue, or a model hallucination. TAMs partner with forward deployed engineers (FDEs) to unlock integrations and customizations that would’ve taken months before. And they have the vision to see what’s possible before the product team builds it. The commercial motion lives elsewhere. Intentionally. Because asking one person to go deep technically AND carry a number is often how you get mediocrity at both. The result: customers get someone who actually understands their problems at a technical level — and can do something about it. AI has changed what’s possible in CS. It’s time the roles reflected that. We’re building this at Avoca and hiring for it now. See comments for details. #CustomerSuccess #AIFirst #TAM #CSLeadership
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Chad Horenfeldt 📕 reacted on thisChad Horenfeldt 📕 reacted on thisThis week I had the pleasure of sitting down with my friend Paul Kelly to reflect on what he'd do differently and what he wouldn’t change if he were operating in today’s market. Paul is an industry GOAT who helped scale Parker & Sons into the one of the largest single-market HVAC business in America (doing $260M+ in revenue). He shared insights on brand identity, operations, scaling past your current stage, and how technologies like AI would have helped him scale even faster. If you want to see the recording, DM me or comment “Paul.”
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Chad Horenfeldt 📕 liked thisChad Horenfeldt 📕 liked thisCome work with our incredible team! 🚀🌖 Hiring for roles across: 🤝 Customer success 🎈 People ops 🏔️ Sales 🤠 Recruiting 🍓 Marketing 🛠️ Engineering Link in comments
Experience & Education
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Avoca
View Chad’s full experience
See their title, tenure and more.
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Licenses & Certifications
Volunteer Experience
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Member
Pavilion
- Present 2 years 10 months
Pavilion, formally Revenue Collective, is a private membership organization for commercial growth operators. Our community is designed to support the professional development of revenue leaders at high-growth companies, facilitate the sharing of best practices, and serve as a trusted private community.
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Founding Member
CS Angel
- Present 3 years 4 months
Selected by peers and top influencers to create the world’s first syndicate of Customer Success and Customer Experience experts ready to invest in and advise startups providing tech that improve Net Revenue Retention (NRR).
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Featured Thought Leader
Sales Assembly
- Present 5 years 1 month
Create materials and deliver lectures on Customer Success to Sales Assembly members.
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Customer-Led Growth Advisor
Catalyst Software
- Present 3 years 4 months
Invited by CEO Edward Chiu and COO Kevin Chiu to participate in a private community of 100+ executives from CEOs, VPs of CS/Sales, CROs/CCOs, and more to discuss the future of revenue generation through a more cost-effective and powerful growth engine; your customers.
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Customer Success Coach
Catalyst Software
- Present 5 years 10 months
Invited to be a founding member of the Catalyst Coaching Corner as a Customer Success Coach; an application-based program that pairs individuals who are seeking CS careers with experienced industry leaders for monthly coaching sessions. Apply here: https://catalyst.io/coaching-corner
Each month I spend time coaching a CS professional in customer-facing roles. My purpose is to help others achieve their goals and improve my own coaching skills and customer success knowledge.
Publications
Courses
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Gainsight Admin 100
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Honors & Awards
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2025 Top 25 Customer Success Influencer
SuccessHACKER
Selected for leading the CS industry through exceptional thought leadership, mentorship, and community impact.
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2023 Top 25 Customer Success Influencer Judge
SuccessHACKER
One of the judges for SuccessHACKER's Top 25 Influencers in Customer Success
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Top 25 Customer Success Influencer 2020
SuccessHACKER
Recognized on the Top 25 Customer Success Influencers list for 2020
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Top 25 Customer Success Influencer 2018
Mindtouch
Mindtouch identified today’s leading TOP 25 Customer Success Influencers (those active in the public eye) within the industry from 1000's of candidates. https://enlightenedcustomer.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/2018-top-customer-success-all-stars-_-a-mindtouch-list.pdf
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Top 40 Customer Success Influencers
Tenfold
Featuring the brightest and most innovative minds in Customer Success today.
https://enlightenedcustomer.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/tenfold_top40customersuccessinfluencers-1.pdf -
Top 25 Customer Success Influencer 2017
Mindtouch
Mindtouch identified today’s leading TOP 25 Customer Success Influencers (those active in the public eye) within the industry from 1000's of candidates. https://enlightenedcustomer.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/top25_100_cs_2017.pdf
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Top 100 Customer Success Influencers 2016
Mindtouch
https://enlightenedcustomer.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/top100-customer-success__mindtouch_sml.pdf
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Top 100 Customer Success Influencers 2015
Mindtouch
Organizations
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PulseLocal NYC
Organizer
-The goal of PulseLocal NYC is to strengthen the Customer Success community in NYC and provide a forum to share ideas and knowledge.
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NY Toastmasters
Member
-New York Toastmasters (NYTM) is a popular public speaking and leadership training program that meets weekly in midtown Manhattan. The NYTM Club belongs to Toastmasters International. The International mission is to provide a mutually supportive environment where members can practice their leadership and speaking skills.
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Southern Ontario Customer Success
Co-Organizer
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