Why the Best Sales Leaders Shake the Nest: Lessons from Braze's Ed McDonnell

Ed McDonnell was three weeks into ninth grade at an all-boys Catholic high school in New York when his mother told him they were moving to Denver. She'd taken a new role as director of nursing education. Ed left behind every friend he'd ever known, enrolled in another all-boys Catholic school in Colorado, and started over. He made new friends. He figured out a new culture. He found his footing. Then, midway through junior year, his mother took a VP of nursing job back in New York — and they moved again. Three high schools. Four years. Two cross-country relocations. And a 14-to-17-year-old learning in real time how to walk into a room full of strangers and build relationships from scratch. That ability to lead through change didn't just become a skill for Ed. It became his operating system. Today, Ed is the Chief Revenue Officer at Braze, where the company recently posted an $821 million quarterly revenue run rate with nearly 30% year-over-year growth and rising net dollar retention. Before Braze, he held the CRO seat at Asana, spent more than a decade helping build the marketing practice at Salesforce, and cut his teeth in enterprise software at Eloqua before its acquisition by Oracle. But this conversation isn't about a résumé. It's about a leadership philosophy forged in disruption. Ed talks about the advice his father — a New York police officer — gave him before college that still guides how he builds relationships today. He shares the career moment where getting let go became the catalyst for reinventing himself. And he walks through the 6P's, the framework he uses to run every quarter: People, Pipeline, Programs, Process, Performance, and Possibilities. In this episode: The "Be the USA Today" advice from his father that changed how Ed connects with people How getting let go became the most important inflection point of his career The 6P's framework Ed uses to run the revenue engine at Braze Why the best performance cultures start with leadership being in the work, not above it How Braze maintains a performance mindset while celebrating wins at every level The operating rhythm that keeps Ed's organization accountable quarter after quarter This episode is for sales leaders who believe that resilience isn't something you learn in a workshop, it's something that gets forged every time the nest gets shaken.