Eileen Lannon

I recently stepped back from a Director-level position in BlackRock’s technology unit a year after its acquisition of Preqin, a company at which I’d spent the prior 12 years focusing on scaling it from the 300 person founder run, family owned business I joined in 2014, to the 1,200 person company that was acquired for a headline grabbing $3.2 billion by BlackRock in 2025.
I had a unique role at Preqin, though my formal reporting line remained in Sales throughout. Notable achievements within the sales function included founding and leading the Strategic Accounts Team, which was responsible for renewals, new business, and cross-selling across Preqin%27s ten largest clients. I later took on responsibility for bespoke data integration across the top 150 global accounts. As an individual contributor on a 200-person sales team, I set company records for both the largest net revenue uplift generated on a renewal and the largest new business sale.
In 2016 I received special clearance to dedicate 40% of my time to strategic projects spanning product development, go-to-market strategy, and data acquisition. A short sample of contributions here include:
• Pricing strategy: Designed a novel pricing model that was adopted by an external pricing consultancy and ultimately implemented throughout the company, contributing to 20% growth in renewal revenue over the following 18 months.
• Customer intelligence: Created Preqin%27s first internal customer taxonomy, enabling product and research teams to connect tool and data usage to spend patterns across normalized customer categories & firm type.
• Data innovation: Collaborated with Goldman Sachs%27s XIG technology team to develop a novel data acquisition framework designed to enable mass analysis of the GP ecosystem.
• Product design: Contributed to the design of the S&P Capital IQ–Preqin partnership and originated the core idea for the joint offering representing private market fund series — a concept subsequently adopted on Preqin%27s own platform and replicated by its main competitor, Pitchbook.
Beyond Preqin, in 2022 and 2023 I consulted part-time for Marlinspike Partners, an emerging VC fund manager focused on dual-use technology, supporting their debut fundraise by helping with thought leadership, conference representation, investor presentations, and allocator DDQs. I am now an LP in both their first and second funds and a co-investor in edge-computing startup Armada.