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 🔥 "How many engineers does it take to replicate Docusign as a software product in 2026?" Sarah Guo dropped this thought-provoking question at last week’s panel. Answers from the eng/product leaders at top companies were eye-opening: Scott Densmore: 10 engineers Romain Huet: 5 engineers Ainsley Escorce-Jones: Just 1 Lee Robinson: 1-2 engineers Say hi to a future where rewriting major software might be simpler than you think. Reach out to me if you are planning to do that! 🙋🏻‍♂️ PS: Take a look at what Gil Arditi is working on at Morph.ai 💡 #software #sdlc #softwaredevelopment #llm #ai #ml #largelanguagemodel #copilot #gpt4

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My conversation with Leo Polovets is live! Leo is a co-founder and General Partner at Susa Ventures and Humba Ventures. He writes $1m-$3m checks via Susa, mostly in B2B SaaS companies, and $250k-$500k checks via Humba, mostly in deep tech and in critical sectors (manufacturing, energy, defense, etc). Some of Susa Ventures' notable investments include Robinhood, Flexport, and Stord. In our conversation, we dig into: → Founding story of Humba Ventures → Portfolio construction → How to successfully raise capital from LPs → Biggest Lies Told in the VC Industry → Importance of Diversifying deal Sourcing Channels → Hardest part about building a Venture Capital Fund → How much of investing is random and luck? → Who is he outside of work And much more! Listen now 👇 Youtube: https://bit.ly/45oAn2l Spotify: https://bit.ly/4b8BLr5 Chad Byers Seth Berman

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If you're building a fintech startup, you likely know of this investor, but just in case... This week's findfunding.vc spotlight is on Neil Kapur from TTV Capital. He: 🛫 Is based in SF & Atlanta 💲 Has spent time at Google in consumer-facing payments & at two fintech startups  🏔️ Loves alpine mountaineering and has climbed Kilimanjaro, Denali, Rainier, and more!! Amongst founders, Neil and the team at TTV Capital , including Gardiner Garrard, Mark Johnson, Sean Banks, Lizzie Guynn, and Laney Lewis are known for saying “lift, not lean.” They believe that their job as investors is not to create work for founders, but instead ask the right questions and help navigate to the best outcomes. Knowing Neil well personally, he's not only my go-to person for anything related to fintech but I can also highly recommend having him on your cap table - he's the kind of human you want to have in your corner during both good times and bad. Make sure to: ✉️ Pitch him at nkapur@ttvcapital.com ➡️ Follow TTV Capital on LinkedIn For more, check out our funder spotlight card below along with TTV Capital's profile on findfunding.vc (link in comments).

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Founders: Series A (and later) growth is proving HARD right now. VCs have pulled back, but stellar growth expectations are still here. Most CEOs and founders are hurting. Founders, this event is for you: learn about your funding options, what's going on in the capital markets, how it impacts you, and get clarity in this sea of noise. It's short and focused on YOU, not investors. No pitches or long presentations, stage and other standard VC-focused theatre. Listen, learn, and interact over (good) drinks with other peers. FREE but limited capacity, so register or miss it. > https://lu.ma/2erp1va7 #funding #event #founders #capital #growth

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This Sequoia Capital article is easily the best article I have read on product-market fit. (link below) Its very relevant to (disruptive) deep tech startups, a category I often feel is ignored in these articles. 3️⃣ There's three methods to get to PMF, and the largely depend on the nature of the product and the perception of the market: 🔥Hair on Fire: Customers are acutely aware of the problem and actively looking for solutions. Success hinges on delivering the best-in-class solution through differentiation. [Smartphone market, after the iPhone] 🪨Hard Fact: Customers acknowledge the problem as an inevitable fact of life and haven't actively sought solutions. The challenge lies in convincing them that there's a better way and overcoming inertia. [Uber/ AirBnB] 👀Future Vision: Customers are either unaware of the problem or believe a solution is unrealistic. The entrepreneur needs to create a new paradigm and win over customers to this vision. [Apple iPhone/ OpenAI] Each of these have different approaches, as the nature of problem to be solved is different. 🔥Hair on Fire: Act fast and prioritize a great product with a strong go-to-market strategy, usually with a unique insight, because if its a hair-on-fire problem, there are likely existing competitors. [Rippling, the HR software did it unified HR Database for businesses] 🪨Hard Fact: Educate the market about the problem and how your solution offers a better approach. [Square had to do this to overcome the cash-only mentality] 👀Future Vision: Be prepared for a long journey, focus on attracting top talent, and find strategic pit stops for commercial traction along the way. [Nvidia did this with gaming chipsets] So which type of problem is your startup solving?

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We're launching the inaugural edition of Beyond Benchmarks, a deep dive into the metrics and trends observed across the early-stage enterprise cloud market. This is the first look at some of the business data around GenAI in SaaS. Some initial observations: 1) 60% of SaaS companies have already integrated GenAI into their offerings (60% of these as part of their current product and 40% as a new product), and an additional 20% are planning to do so this year. Almost half aren't monetizing these features. Those that are are primarily experimenting with both usage-based and flat fee pricing models. 2) Most companies are utilizing OpenAI as their primary LLM, but many are experimenting with multiple models - and we are noticing an early trend towards intelligently routing GenAI inference requests to different models based on cost, performance, and security. 3) Though we are in the initial innings of GenAI, we are seeing some positive signals - companies that implemented GenAI had 7% higher NDR than those that did not. Still early days, but we'll be doing this benchmarking report regularly to track and share how things progress in this new era. Link to report in comments.

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B2B Enterprise VC firms list. Find #EnterpriseVC firms. Access 850 #B2B #Enterprise venture capital firms list. https://lnkd.in/dWnMzNNy #startup #startups #vc #venturecapital #funding

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B2B Enterprise VC firms list. Find #EnterpriseVC firms. Access 850 #B2B #Enterprise venture capital firms list. https://lnkd.in/dWnMzNNy #startup #startups #vc #venturecapital #funding

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Drop In Venture Funding To Black-Founded Startups Greatly Outpaces Market Decline Chris MetinkoGené Teare February 27, 2024 Venture funding to Black-founded U.S. startups last year totaled only $705 million — marking the first time since 2016 that the figure failed to even reach $1 billion, Crunchbase data shows. The decline in capital to Black-founded companies greatly outpaces the overall decline in startup funding. While total venture dollars in the U.S. fell 37% last year, funding to Black-founded startups dropped a staggering 71%, according to Crunchbase data. Last year’s total investment in Black-founded startups in the U.S. marks the lowest amount since such startups raised only $582 million in 2016. The drop in total dollars also meant Black-founded startups received their lowest share in the venture market since at least 2016, per Crunchbase. Black-founded startups received less than 0.5% of the $140.4 billion in venture funding all U.S.-based startups received last year. In 2021, Black-founded startups received 1.4% of all U.S. venture funding. In 2022, it was 1.1%.

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Key takeaways from VC Goat - Vinod Khosla podcast. - The firm cares more about working on interesting problems with large technical solutions rather than just maximizing IRR. The team is there because they believe in the mission. - Khosla assumes they've lost the money the day they invest, and then maximizes for the upside opportunity. He calls it "option value investing" rather than IRR investing. - Khosla has contrarian bets in AI (neuro-symbolic computing, probabilistic approaches), biotech, robotics, crypto, and more. - He believes aviation fuels, fusion energy, new transit systems, and other contrarian areas ignored by most investors will be huge opportunities. - Most large innovations come from outsiders, not industry insiders. Khosla looks for founders who can learn a business rapidly rather than have deep domain expertise. The Future Impact of AI - AI will be deflationary and increase productivity growth to 4% annually vs the typical 2% forecast. This will cause great abundance but also increasing income inequality. - Bipedal robots will take over most manufacturing and manual labor jobs within 20-25 years. This will free humans to be more creative and pursue their passions. - Education will shift from job training to creativity. Uniquely human elements like taste and curation will be most valued in an AI-enabled world. https://lnkd.in/gqBsmbks

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Allocate's Beyond Summit Key Takeaways for LPs Every VC & LP needs a framework for responsible innovation that incorporates metrics beyond financial alignment, e.g., alignment with society. - Hemant Taneja @ General Catalyst in conversation with Samir Kaji @ Allocate LLMs are in a race to the bottom, middleware & developer tools are risky, but a lot of opportunity in the application layers of AI. AI is being used to offer "service as a software," e.g., outbound call automation, AI recruiters, etc. Also being used to fight cybercrime, e.g., J.P.Morgan receives 45B cyber attacks per DAY! - Conversation moderated by Nakul Mandan @ Audacious Ventures and Tomasz Tunguz @ Theory Ventures The venture capital business is all about believing early in the potential of people. Key founder attribute to look for: what is their learning / growth curve, i.e., where they are vs. where they started. - Panel discussion with Alex Pall @ Mantis Venture Capital, Lance Armstrong @ NEXT Ventures, Lan Xuezhao @ Basis Set, Pejman Nozad @ Pear Tree Ventures Fund diligence (advice from LPs) - Are they good humans & think about societal impact? - Off-record reference checks - GP-fund strategy fit, e.g., do they have enterprise SaaS network? - Is track record repeatable? - What is their diligence process, e.g., do they have information rights? This generation of founders is most battle-tested having lived through COVID, ZIRP, WFH, & AI. Advice for VCs & LPs: important to support your partners particularly when things aren't going well. - Panel discussion with Mark Suster @ Upfront Ventures, Peter Hebert @ Lux Capital, Somesh Dash @ IVP, Will Kohler @ Lightspeed Special thanks to Samir Kaji, Hana Yang, and the entire Allocate team for an exceptional gathering with an amazing group of humans at #AllocateBeyondSummit. 🎷 LPs: Meet other global LPs @ hyphah.com/events.

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A new Data-Driven VC report, released this week by Dr. Andre Retterath, is packed with insights from 190+ data-driven VC firms and serves as a great indicator of the VC industry's trajectory. 🧭 🚀 Based on the report, boosting work efficiency and spotting high-return opportunities are the main drivers in adopting a data-driven approach among VCs. 🏄 The YoY increase in reported data-driven VCs is just 26%. There is still time to catch the wave! ⚙️ Currently, VCs gain the most value from LLMs in their Screening, Due Diligence, and Sourcing processes. 🌎 Most data-driven VCs are based in the US and Western Europe. I am proud to say Vestberry (tag) is trusted by 4 of the largest DDVCs in Europe.And the report contains much more; definitely worth a read! Huge kudos to Dr. Andre Retterath for compiling the report and shoutout to Affinity.co, VESTBERRY, Deckmatch, Harmonic, and People Data Labs for their support on the project. #venturecapital #ddvc #datadrivenvc #portfoliomanagement

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There are two interesting and relatively new/emerging revenue models in hardware space. (1) Software Enabled Hardware Hardware is sold at lower but slowly improving gross margins (eg 20-40%), and software recurring revenues layered on top. Software sells at higher margins, enabling blended margins to appear in 50%+ category. These are applied in situations where hardware is not expected to be replaced or greatly improved upon in deployment for a significant number of years to come. Consider your car, or military equipment, or even infrastructure equipment. As always, there are often multiple business/revenue models utilized by different players in the same industry. (2) Hardware As A Service Hardware and software are bundled and sold with annually recurring revenues. Often multi-year contracts are signed to be able to amortize hardware over time, and enable blended gross margins over the length of the contract to be high (approaching 60-75%). This is more common in situations where vendor takes responsibility to upgrade hardware as needed along the way to provide maximum and highest functionality to the customer. Hardware inventory costs are, over time, passed on to suppliers or third party financing parties in lieu of few gross margin points. Consider robots as a service in factories (ala Formic), or AI-enabled equipment (eg Evolv, Lumafield etc). Hardware innovation will require deeper investigation, experimentation, and understanding of business/revenue models to fit customer needs as well as to maximize value for the innovating company. Strong and experienced management teams work hard to minimize sales friction, inventory costs etc, but also maximize gross margins, customer stickiness, and ability to upsell during the life of a contract.

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The emergence of a large number of small venture funds may indicate that the venture industry is transitioning to a new stage of development. I believe this is an encouraging signal for micro-startups: they are more likely to catch the attention of these micro-funds, increasing their chances of securing early-stage funding and support.

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A few spots left for this awesome workshop with Justin Gray of In Revenue Capital. Every successful founder I know learns to develop and maintain high performing relationships. This is a skill like anything else and can be developed. Founders, if you want to build a high-growth company, learn to build high-performing relationships. This workshop will help you do that. Hope you can join us.

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How Long Does it Take to Raise Venture Capital for a Company? https://buff.ly/3zBLKbd Raising venture capital for a company is a crucial process that can significantly impact its growth and success. The time it takes to secure this type of funding can vary widely depending on various factors such as the company's industry, growth stage, and the investor's due diligence process. On average, it can take anywhere from a few months to over a year to successfully raise venture capital. It's essential for companies seeking this funding to have a clear and compelling business plan, a strong management team, and a scalable business model to attract potential investors. #VentureCapital #FundingProcess

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