We’re different.
By design.
ESSNTL is your not-so-ordinary strategy lab. We help growth-minded B2B startups navigate growing pains, difficult markets, and shifting investor sentiment – with pragmatic strategies and precise problem-solving. Our team of unicorn-building GTM and finance veterans strives to be your indispensable ally. We know how to deliver enduring impact, fast – equipping you with strategies, data, and tools to achieve sustainable growth on your terms.
Meet our leadership team
Pecan AI – Tel Aviv-based AI startup with $120M in funding
Feedzai – Lisbon-based RiskOps unicorn with $200M in funding
Recurly – San Francisco-based subscription management platform, acquired for 9-figures
dLocal – Montevideo-based nimble fintech startup turned $5B company (NASDAQ:DLO)
Connect with Danielle:
Danielle Gotkis
Founding Partner
San Francisco Bay Area, CA
As Head of Marketing (CMO), Danielle spent her operating career building and scaling the marketing and growth functions for successful Silicon Valley and globally-spread B2B startups, including:
Her experience spans SaaS, Fintech, and AI growing innovative companies from a few million to over $100M in ARR. Hypergrowth, pivots, acquisitions, global expansion, down rounds, and back-to-back rounds – she’s seen it all and enjoys sharing her hard-won lessons to empower founders and their leadership teams.
Loves: Solving GTM and scale-up challenges, opening new markets, building great teams, and delivering measurable value.
Dislikes: Groupthink, quick wins (she prefers big wins), and collecting data for the sake of data.
Founded data analytics software for marketplaces
Migrated $2B EFI legacy business to SaaS as Corp Dev and Partnerships leader
Built finance from the ground up at e-commerce startup VIDA
Led finance, BI and data analytics at a fintech unicorn, Republic
Executed 5 IPOs and over $30B in M&A as a JPMorgan investment banker
Maria Frolova
Founding Partner
San Francisco, CA
Maria’s career in finance and leadership is a study of contrasts – with managing multibillion dollar M&A deals on one side of the spectrum and bootstrapping her own analytics startup on the other. She has worked with some of the largest companies in the world and their exceptional Finance teams – preparing companies for IPOs, taking them public, and leading M&A. She has also built and led Finance/BI in Ecommerce, SaaS, Fintech, Marketplaces, and Blockchain companies.
Loves: Dispelling common knowledge traps, building data-informed culture, and going from red to black.
Dislikes: Solving the wrong problems, silos, too much or too little data.
Over the course of her career, Maria has:
Connect with Maria:
Our expertise
ESSNTL was born from the observation that many startups, regardless of stage (early, growth, or even late), face similar challenges: effectively managing the business complexities of achieving sustainable growth.
We partner with you to devise right-sized sales and marketing strategies fit for winning in today’s market, helping you build an effective finance and data backbone that empowers every team, and advising on improving communications with strategic internal and external stakeholders.
We’re especially skilled at quickly identifying gaps in execution and resolving critical challenges across marketing and finance functions, at the intersection of people, programs, operations, techstack, and measurement.