By Robert Keefer and Julia Barnes Oliver

Featured in The Business Journal 

For most high-growth companies, the first customer is not the end user — it's a partner. Success in finding partners, selling to them, and then knowing what to do with them, can lead to early revenue, resources to develop and commercialize products, and credibility to pave the way to more funding and steadily increasing corporate valuations. Attaining corporate partners can easily be a start-up's most critical success factor.