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Brennan O'Donnell

Brennan O'Donnell

Partner at Frontline Ventures

Operator

Partner at Frontline Ventures. Formerly built teams at Google, Yammer, SurveyMonkey & Airtable.

I co-lead our Growth fund at Frontline, investing in Series B-D companies. We're the only VC fund focused exclusively on helping high growth startups with European expansion. Our portfolio includes companies such as Vanta, Navan (TripActions), Lattice, MosaicML, Kandji, Attentive and Melio.

Frontline is a multi-stage VC firm investing in B2B companies on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe we invest in early-stage startups across the continent, typically pre-revenue or pre-product. In North America we focus on growth stage companies. We have over $450m under management, with offices in London, Dublin, Palo Alto & New York. In addition to the deep operating experience of our partners, we've assembled a world class group of operating exec LP's including current and former heads of EMEA from Google, Twitter, Facebook, Slack, Stripe, Segment, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Workday, Looker and others.

Angel investor and advisor in numerous early-stage companies, including: Airtable, Mode Analytics, Forethought, Lighter, Superframe, Chorus, Accord, Vibely, Octane AI, Artifact, Bounti and Run The World.

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Career

  1. Now Partner · Frontline Ventures
  2. Earlier · Scale-up Chief Revenue Officer · Airtable
  3. Earlier · Startup Executive (company later acquired by WeWork) · Euclid
  4. Earlier · Scale-up Executive · SurveyMonkey
  5. Earlier · Scale-up Executive (company later acquired by Microsoft) · Yammer
  6. Earlier Led Global Revenue Operations, Google Cloud; part of early G · Google

Sources: frontline.vc

Key moments

Jump straight to the part of How to Pick Your First Market for International Expansion you want.

  1. 3:14 Brennan’s first investment: Mode Analytics and a lawn mowing business in Texas
  2. 6:49 What’s changed at growth stage and why “growth” is a different world
  3. 8:30 Why AI enablement came first and app layer is finally ready for Series B plus
  4. 10:10 The new risk: fast revenue that’s concentrated and not yet durable
  5. 14:22 Frontline’s model: Europe seed plus US growth and why it’s unique
  6. 15:58 What Frontline looks for: category leaders and a line of sight to a 5x outcome
  7. 16:20 The rough revenue range where growth starts paying attention
  8. 23:22 The four pillars of expansion: timing, go to market, talent, location
  9. 26:00 Timing: the 10 percent pull, exec maturity, and why waiting too long is risky
  10. 29:36 Why Europe expansion has to be a CEO level company priority

Heard on

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First Cheque · 5 February 2026 How to Pick Your First Market for International Expansion

Frontline Ventures on Day One

Frontline Ventures Frontline is the venture firm for globally ambitious B2B companies on both sides of the Atlantic. Frontline Seed speeds up ideas at inception across Europe. 1 person · 1 episode →

Connections

Spot something wrong? Suggest a correction Updated 25 September 2026

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