Michael Day

Chief Marketing Officer | Managing Partner

Michael is a seasoned marketing executive with 20+ years of experience driving growth across demand generation, brand strategy, and full-funnel execution. Known for blending strategic vision with creative agility, he’s helped scale high-growth SMBs, venture-backed startups, and global brands in AI, Machine Learning, Education, AdTech, MarTech, SaaS, e-commerce, and wellness.

He specializes in building investor-aligned foundations that unlock scalable growth. His passion lies in helping startups and SMBs expand across the U.S., UK, Ireland, Scandinavia, and GCC markets—especially in AI, Education, and SaaS.

Michael co-developed the B2B SaaS Success Blueprint, a GTM playbook used by 15+ companies to accelerate toward T2D3 growth. He partners with private equity-backed startups, mid-market firms, and Fortune 500s to build high-performing teams and design sustainable brand strategies that drive top-line results.

Clients consistently evolve from average to standout brands, often acquisition-ready. Michael frequently joins leadership teams for 18–36 months, working alongside founders and investors to elevate marketing, culture, and operational performance.

Global by nature, he’s lived in six countries, trained in five languages, and worked across cultures—from scrappy startups to billion-dollar multinationals. He splits his time between Washington State, California, and Greater Lisbon, Portugal.

Startups & Fast-Growth Companies:  

iHeed (Cambridge Education Group), Zeiierman Trading, SwissDecode, Imagenica SA, Robosavvy, Truewind

Global & Fortune 500 Brands:  

Meta, Salesforce, OutSystems, Microsoft, HP, Nintendo, Boeing, AT&T Wireless, CheckPoint Software, RSA Security, Symantec, BD Biosciences, Teledyne Lecroy, LifeWave

Gopal Rajguru

Senior Partner Sales Leadership

Gopal is an international sales leadership educator and coach, university professor, as well as an investor and entrepreneur based in Geneva, Switzerland.

He has more than 30 years experience in international sales and leadership positions, and has since '2000 been helping organizations transform their sales process into a competitive advantage.

With the ability to work in many of our clients' languages, he can help them design and implement a comprehensive business-to-business sales process and supporting tools, build channel sales, help sales leaders become more effective at creating a high-performance culture, consult on strategy, develop and implement customer-centric, innovation programs, facilitate workshops and provide one-to-one and group coaching.

Gopal works on a global basis with clients of all sizes from multinational to local small-to-medium-enterprises across a variety of industries ranging from software and Internet to electronics, telecommunications  and higher education.

John Gale

Senior Partner Corporate Development

John is a senior commercialization and corporate development executive from Silicon Valley.  His consulting business is now based in London. 

John has a stellar track record in venture funding and M&A, opening and growing markets, new business development and direct sales and client/partner relationship management for startup and Fortune 500 companies in software, Internet/content, semiconductors, social networking, and hardware devices. 

Brands he's served:

Silicon Valley startups, marketing and venture capital units within the Global 500 including Apple, IBM, Lockheed Martin, NEC, Toshiba and others.

Christopher Hermann

Senior Partner Creative and Design

Christoper is a senior creative and design executive, entrepreneur, design thinker and investor originally from Germany.  He's started, owned and operated more than ten companies with diverse interests ranging from digital marketing agencies to an e-book aggregator and vintage car trading.

Christopher has an established track record developing successful multi-million euro/dollar ad, brand, PR and advertising client campaigns. He's got a knack for turning struggling brands back into strong performers.

Brands he's served:

Red Bull, Nintendo, Sony, Universal Music, Nike, P&G, Suzuki, Samsung, DFB, Electronic Arts and other well known brands in the entertainment and film industry.

Paul Haugen

Senior Negotiator | Technology & Real Estate Leader

Paul is a senior level negotiator with a 25 year established career track record of leadership in technology and real estate based in Seattle. 

Before joining GVG, Paul spent three years as a private real estate investor and startup advisor. Prior to that, he spent 20 years at Microsoft leading global software procurement and asset management, overseeing licensing, cloud services, SaaS, hardware, and the company’s internal SAM program.