INDUSTRY INSIGHTS YOUR PEERS ARE READING
A strong brand grows your moat Companies invest in building their brand as it creates familiarity, credibility, and trust, which further down the line leads to increased brand recognition, so people are more likely to buy a product or service. MORE
Over the last couple of weeks and months we spent some time putting our investment thesis on paper. The purpose of this exercise was to challenge and discuss our implicit assumptions and to get everyone on our team aligned on what kind of investments we seek. MORE
His insights are directly applicable to running software at scale, and those observations informed our latest investment in Gremlin. Richard Cook, formerly an associate professor at the University of Chicago, published a paper in 1998 entitled How Complex Systems Fail. In his paper, Dr. Cook lists 18 observations from his research in medicine about failure of complex systems. MORE
Here’s how I might think about it: $50,000 invested at say $1m valuation = 5%. The post How much equity is fair for my co-founder that is leaving after 2 years and $50,000 invested in the company? Stock contracts aside, the best you can do is what is fair. 10 year commitment as founders; he did 2 years of it. So vis-a-vis the 2 of you, she/he might get 20% x 40% (if your equity ratios are 40 you:40 her/him: 20 others), or 8%. So 5% + 8% = 13%. That’s a lot. It may be too much. MORE
100 Without a serious investment in your company’s customer success , your customers will inevitably grow frustrated with the customer experience. A higher CLV enables you to invest more in customer success, which increases your CLV. MORE
Kesha Cash founded Impact America Fund in 2013 with a goal of investing in software and tech enabled companies that have a positive benefit on underserved communities in America. More specifically we were looking for entrepreneurs of color, and we made a number of investments together. MORE
If your sales team is toying with the same idea, you need to know that investing into a predictive dialers should be a decision that’s taken after much consideration. Wondering when you should invest into one? in other words, it takes them away from the time they should be investing in talking to prospects, making follow-up calls and closing deals. If not, it’s not a wise investment. A predictive dialer makes selling so much more exciting, doesn’t it? MORE
The seed stage investment market feels like it’s changing quickly. These firms raised between $5 and $75M to invest in seed stage companies. In addition, VCs have been participating in the seed stage market as well, making 2013 a banner year for seed investment. Year Number Total Invested, $M Average Round Size, $k. 2014 saw 18% fewer investments, but an equal amount of investment at $1.3B. MORE
In the last six months, VCs have invested more than $57B according to Mattermark data , which puts 2015 on pace to exceed 2000 as the year the most venture capital will be deployed, ever. The chart above contrasts the top 12 sectors receiving venture funding in the US, and plots the relative share of dollars invested by month. Sectors receiving an increasing amount of investment include biotechnology, financial technology, healthcare, and social networking. MORE
Yesterday, I showed the increasing share of venture capital investments consumer companies represent. So, I’ve created two charts: the first is a bar chart of consumer investment by segment and the second is a heatmap of of sector and stage. Early stage consumer investment is bustling. MORE
We’re thrilled about the investment. The decision to invest in ChartMogul , which has developed an analytics solution for subscription businesses, was a very easy one. MORE
We interviewed some of the smartest minds in search to discuss what investments companies should make in the upcoming year if they want to grow their search traffic. Content pruning is a surprising technique most great SEO’s are investing in to grow traffic to their site. MORE
Its partners boast diverse venture experience and have previously invested in more than 70 companies. SaaS Investments: Pipefy, HeyDoctor. SaaS Investments: Gupy, idwall, meetime, Qulture rocks, Social Miner, and Teravoz. SaaS Investments: Meetime, Aegro, GoCache, and Movidesk. MORE
Earlier this week, we examined the trends in the major categories of startup investment including eCommerce, Software, Social Networking and Education. Each year, starting in mid-2012 through mid-2015, these sectors have grown their investment dollars by more than 145%, according to Mattermark data. Others, like transportation and hospitality, fueled by Uber and AirBnB fundraising efforts, command more than 6% of the billions invested in the last 12 months. MORE
The slowing of venture investment more broadly across the US serves as a backdrop to San Francisco’s particularly strong correction. Because of the varying behavior of Series C and D investors across geographies, (invest less in San Francisco but invest more in the valley), I can’t argue that late stage investors have pulled out of the market broadly. Bloomberg published a post this weekend called San Francisco’s VC Boom is Over. MORE
As Zendesk grew and invested in people, the business and processes became complicated. This isn’t a perfect world, but the question was – how could they invest in customer success from a product-first perspective? MORE
Investment is for this very reason, and in my experience, VCs get excited about the prospect of hiring big because they know that proven and seasoned winners really move the needle. The post Why Hiring Senior Leaders Early Is Worth the Investment appeared first on OpenView Labs. MORE
Fred Wilson’s perspectives on trends in consumer web investment created a big brouhaha over the weekend. Is the drought of consumer investment capital experienced by the internet monoliths common to earlier startups? What fraction of investment dollars have moved to enterprise? MORE
I began investing in women over a decade ago. It was a major part of my investing thesis. And I invested. I invested in businesses that I believed had a huge opportunity that could grow to be worth $100M or more. Many of the companies I have invested in have done it. MORE
Since then, we have made over 73 investments and our fund is nearly fully invested. . While our Impact Portfolio is still young, our 73 investments have given us a unique vantage point into emerging trends in the impact startup ecosystem. Total Investments – Impact Fund. MORE
One of our core values has always been Investing in Relationships and it has done its part in shaping our philosophy of the lifecycle of employment in Silicon Valley. Today the investment in WePay engineers begins long before an engineer is ever hired. MORE
These SaaS companies are raising the table stakes for business software by leveraging the power of brand experience. So what does it take to build a standout B2B brand in 2018? MORE
We’re excited to announce our partnership with and investment in Kustomer. Kustomer is a New York City-based company building the next-generation of customer support platform. In my first role at Google, I provided account management and customer support to internet publishers. I remember trying to understand the context around a particular customer case. How large is the customer? What recent interactions have we had with the customer? How satisfied are they? MORE
Reading through the tech press since the Facebook IPO, you might get the impression venture capitalists are still reeling from that apocalyptic offering, believe no further successes can be had in the consumer web, and so are fleeing the consumer web in droves to pursue enterprise investments. MORE
Marketing investments are unlike any other investment a startup. They are the least-tangible, least-measurable investments and that’s why they are perceived as the riskiest investments. After raising a round of capital, a startup’s management team has a pool of capital to invest. All of the aforementioned products have long-term value and the benefit of the investment can be seen immediately. MORE
I’ve been asked a few times whether there is consumer investment fatigue as a result. It would be foolish for any investor to write off consumer investing as a category because of the massive opportunity consumer internet companies offer. Option 1: pursue a contrarian growth strategy investing in a few consumer Internet companies at similar prices to the previous several years. Invest much earlier and much more broadly, expecting a lower average outcome. MORE
In response last week’s post on The Fastest Growing Areas of Startup Investment in 2015 , in which Bitcoin topped the list, I received many questions about the underlying dynamics of this startup segment. Using Crunchbase data, I analyzed BTC investment patterns over the past 4 years. The chart above shows that Bitcoin investment started in earnest in 2013. This data implies 2015 should be the best year ever for Bitcoin investment. MORE
Following my post about electronic signing I'd like to describe another area that we'd like to invest in. clio ideas we'd like to invest in jobber saas software as a service verticalsIt's not a specific idea this time, rather a category of startups that we're very interested in: Industry-specific SaaS solutions I talked about the topic before when I wrote about "The land of a thousand niches" and touched on it in my "1st DO for SaaS startups". MORE
Q1 venture capital investment remains steady relative to Q4 2015 at about $15 billion, but down from the near records attained in 2015. So, on a historical basis, venture capitalists are still investing at rates substantially above average. In Q1 2015, venture capitalists invested $17.5 Seed investments in dollar terms have fallen by about 30% in the last two quarters. Series As are flat at roughly $2 billion invested per quarter. MORE
BYOD ideas we'd like to invest in mobile saasFollowing my posts about electronic signing and vertical SaaS , here's another area that we're very interested in: SaaS solutions with a mobile-first approach While my first two posts of this series were fairly specific, this one is pretty fuzzy as I don't have a good sense for what I'm looking for. I just have a feeling that there are huge opportunities ahead for startups which rethink how people will use business applications in the future. MORE
I was lucky enough to invest in Mixmax , Pipedrive, Salesloft and HelloOffice after I was already a user/customer. Also, while I did not use Talkdesk or Logikcull or Rainforest QA as a customer before I invested, I had deployed/worked with legacy versions of similar products. MORE
I’m talking about product-led growth as an investment strategy, but really my background is 10 years of operating experience in the product-led growth world. Now I’m investing in that. We actually invest in this company. MORE
As the product team talks to customers, they are likely to hear feedback encouraging more investment in MMRs and neutralizers. The startup must invest in that differentiation to sustain their market lead. Defending differentiation, investing in it, and reinforcing the startup’s competitive advantage. There are three types of product features, a seasoned head of product told me recently. MMRs, neutralizers, and differentiators. MORE
Investment round led by SVB Financial Group to speed Techstars global expansion and continued growth. Techstars’ investment activity now includes 49 accelerator programs in 35 cities across 16 countries, deploying $80 million into nearly 500 startups on an annual basis. MORE
How much of this trend is due to greater participation of venture capitalists investing in the seed market? The withdrawal from the seed market in number of rounds seems to be broad-based, in that both traditional seed investors and venture capitalists, are investing less frequently. But when they do invest, they concentrate their dollars. Starting in late 2015 through the first quarter of 2016, founders have shifted their seed fundraising strategies toward a single investor. MORE
How much should a SaaS startup invest in sales and marketing at different stages of the business? Sales and marketing investment depends on many different factors including establishing product market fit, the business’s sales model (inside, field, freemium), and not least, cash balance and fundraising capacity. The chart above shows the sales and marketing investment of publicly traded software companies at different revenue levels. MORE
” I wondered, are we investing enough in our managers? Talent is the largest investment of an early stage company. This is why investing in each creates a competitive advantage. That’s a quite an investment for an early stage company. How should startup invest in improving its management? I met a seasoned executive recently. He made a bold claim. “Management is an art, and one that is overwhelmingly undervalued in Silicon Valley.” MORE
A blockchain industry alliance has released a guide and list of use cases for deploying the technology to enable, among other things, the purchase of fractions of real estate property as digital securities on an open marketplace. MORE
And increasingly I find myself telling Founders that they should seriously consider NOT investing in content marketing. But everybody invests in content marketing! They've committed to content marketing as a long term investment that they won't see a return on for a long time. MORE
With 11 Techstars mentorship-driven accelerator programs in Europe and the Middle East, Techstars has a portfolio of close to 350 companies and invests in nearly 110 startups in EMEA annually. About Techstars Announcements Declan Kelly EMEA investment team investments investors MORE
After researching the space for more than a year, we are thrilled to announce our investment in and partnership with Chorus , a pioneer in speech analysis for sales. Advances in machine learning are transforming the software world. Two of the most exciting applications of machine learning are speech recognition and natural language processing. MORE
That’s why we invested. Big data technologies like Hadoop, HBase, Redshift, Vertica and others store ever greater quantities of data. As the capacity to store this data increases, so does the importance of extracting value and insight from it. MORE
Investment Related Topics TechStars
SEPTEMBER 17, 2019
With 11 Techstars mentorship-driven accelerator programs in Europe and the Middle East, Techstars has a portfolio of close to 350 companies and invests in nearly 110 startups in EMEA annually. About Techstars Announcements Declan Kelly EMEA investment team investments investors
TechStars
FEBRUARY 19, 2019
I began investing in women over a decade ago. It was a major part of my investing thesis. And I invested. I invested in businesses that I believed had a huge opportunity that could grow to be worth $100M or more. Many of the companies I have invested in have done it.
TechStars
SEPTEMBER 12, 2019
Since then, we have made over 73 investments and our fund is nearly fully invested. . While our Impact Portfolio is still young, our 73 investments have given us a unique vantage point into emerging trends in the impact startup ecosystem. Total Investments – Impact Fund.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 13, 2018
We’re excited to announce our partnership with and investment in Kustomer. Kustomer is a New York City-based company building the next-generation of customer support platform. In my first role at Google, I provided account management and customer support to internet publishers. I remember trying to understand the context around a particular customer case. How large is the customer? What recent interactions have we had with the customer? How satisfied are they?
Speaker: Hope Gurion, Product Coach and Advisor
TechStars
JUNE 18, 2019
Kesha Cash founded Impact America Fund in 2013 with a goal of investing in software and tech enabled companies that have a positive benefit on underserved communities in America. More specifically we were looking for entrepreneurs of color, and we made a number of investments together.
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The Angel VC
AUGUST 25, 2017
Over the last couple of weeks and months we spent some time putting our investment thesis on paper. The purpose of this exercise was to challenge and discuss our implicit assumptions and to get everyone on our team aligned on what kind of investments we seek.
SaaStr
SEPTEMBER 12, 2019
I’m talking about product-led growth as an investment strategy, but really my background is 10 years of operating experience in the product-led growth world. Now I’m investing in that. We actually invest in this company.
wepay
OCTOBER 8, 2018
One of our core values has always been Investing in Relationships and it has done its part in shaping our philosophy of the lifecycle of employment in Silicon Valley. Today the investment in WePay engineers begins long before an engineer is ever hired.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 28, 2018
” I wondered, are we investing enough in our managers? Talent is the largest investment of an early stage company. This is why investing in each creates a competitive advantage. That’s a quite an investment for an early stage company. How should startup invest in improving its management? I met a seasoned executive recently. He made a bold claim. “Management is an art, and one that is overwhelmingly undervalued in Silicon Valley.”
The Angel VC
JANUARY 15, 2015
We’re thrilled about the investment. The decision to invest in ChartMogul , which has developed an analytics solution for subscription businesses, was a very easy one.
SaaStr
FEBRUARY 17, 2019
I was lucky enough to invest in Mixmax , Pipedrive, Salesloft and HelloOffice after I was already a user/customer. Also, while I did not use Talkdesk or Logikcull or Rainforest QA as a customer before I invested, I had deployed/worked with legacy versions of similar products.
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Close.io
AUGUST 27, 2019
If your sales team is toying with the same idea, you need to know that investing into a predictive dialers should be a decision that’s taken after much consideration. Wondering when you should invest into one? in other words, it takes them away from the time they should be investing in talking to prospects, making follow-up calls and closing deals. If not, it’s not a wise investment. A predictive dialer makes selling so much more exciting, doesn’t it?
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 31, 2016
Q1 venture capital investment remains steady relative to Q4 2015 at about $15 billion, but down from the near records attained in 2015. So, on a historical basis, venture capitalists are still investing at rates substantially above average. In Q1 2015, venture capitalists invested $17.5 Seed investments in dollar terms have fallen by about 30% in the last two quarters. Series As are flat at roughly $2 billion invested per quarter.
Chart Mogul
APRIL 3, 2018
These SaaS companies are raising the table stakes for business software by leveraging the power of brand experience. So what does it take to build a standout B2B brand in 2018?
Tom Tunguz
JULY 8, 2015
In the last six months, VCs have invested more than $57B according to Mattermark data , which puts 2015 on pace to exceed 2000 as the year the most venture capital will be deployed, ever. The chart above contrasts the top 12 sectors receiving venture funding in the US, and plots the relative share of dollars invested by month. Sectors receiving an increasing amount of investment include biotechnology, financial technology, healthcare, and social networking.
IT World
MAY 24, 2019
A blockchain industry alliance has released a guide and list of use cases for deploying the technology to enable, among other things, the purchase of fractions of real estate property as digital securities on an open marketplace.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 19, 2018
As the product team talks to customers, they are likely to hear feedback encouraging more investment in MMRs and neutralizers. The startup must invest in that differentiation to sustain their market lead. Defending differentiation, investing in it, and reinforcing the startup’s competitive advantage. There are three types of product features, a seasoned head of product told me recently. MMRs, neutralizers, and differentiators.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 25, 2018
His insights are directly applicable to running software at scale, and those observations informed our latest investment in Gremlin. Richard Cook, formerly an associate professor at the University of Chicago, published a paper in 1998 entitled How Complex Systems Fail. In his paper, Dr. Cook lists 18 observations from his research in medicine about failure of complex systems.
OpenView Labs
FEBRUARY 20, 2019
We interviewed some of the smartest minds in search to discuss what investments companies should make in the upcoming year if they want to grow their search traffic. Content pruning is a surprising technique most great SEO’s are investing in to grow traffic to their site.
TechStars
JULY 30, 2019
Investment round led by SVB Financial Group to speed Techstars global expansion and continued growth. Techstars’ investment activity now includes 49 accelerator programs in 35 cities across 16 countries, deploying $80 million into nearly 500 startups on an annual basis.
OpenView Labs
APRIL 12, 2019
Investment is for this very reason, and in my experience, VCs get excited about the prospect of hiring big because they know that proven and seasoned winners really move the needle. The post Why Hiring Senior Leaders Early Is Worth the Investment appeared first on OpenView Labs.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 28, 2012
I’ve been asked a few times whether there is consumer investment fatigue as a result. It would be foolish for any investor to write off consumer investing as a category because of the massive opportunity consumer internet companies offer. Option 1: pursue a contrarian growth strategy investing in a few consumer Internet companies at similar prices to the previous several years. Invest much earlier and much more broadly, expecting a lower average outcome.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 16, 2017
How much should a SaaS startup invest in sales and marketing at different stages of the business? Sales and marketing investment depends on many different factors including establishing product market fit, the business’s sales model (inside, field, freemium), and not least, cash balance and fundraising capacity. The chart above shows the sales and marketing investment of publicly traded software companies at different revenue levels.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 18, 2016
How much of this trend is due to greater participation of venture capitalists investing in the seed market? The withdrawal from the seed market in number of rounds seems to be broad-based, in that both traditional seed investors and venture capitalists, are investing less frequently. But when they do invest, they concentrate their dollars. Starting in late 2015 through the first quarter of 2016, founders have shifted their seed fundraising strategies toward a single investor.
Tom Tunguz
MAY 21, 2013
Reading through the tech press since the Facebook IPO, you might get the impression venture capitalists are still reeling from that apocalyptic offering, believe no further successes can be had in the consumer web, and so are fleeing the consumer web in droves to pursue enterprise investments.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 26, 2012
Fred Wilson’s perspectives on trends in consumer web investment created a big brouhaha over the weekend. Is the drought of consumer investment capital experienced by the internet monoliths common to earlier startups? What fraction of investment dollars have moved to enterprise?
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 1, 2015
The seed stage investment market feels like it’s changing quickly. These firms raised between $5 and $75M to invest in seed stage companies. In addition, VCs have been participating in the seed stage market as well, making 2013 a banner year for seed investment. Year Number Total Invested, $M Average Round Size, $k. 2014 saw 18% fewer investments, but an equal amount of investment at $1.3B.
Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth
JUNE 5, 2017
A strong brand grows your moat Companies invest in building their brand as it creates familiarity, credibility, and trust, which further down the line leads to increased brand recognition, so people are more likely to buy a product or service.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 15, 2017
The slowing of venture investment more broadly across the US serves as a backdrop to San Francisco’s particularly strong correction. Because of the varying behavior of Series C and D investors across geographies, (invest less in San Francisco but invest more in the valley), I can’t argue that late stage investors have pulled out of the market broadly. Bloomberg published a post this weekend called San Francisco’s VC Boom is Over.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 5, 2014
Marketing investments are unlike any other investment a startup. They are the least-tangible, least-measurable investments and that’s why they are perceived as the riskiest investments. After raising a round of capital, a startup’s management team has a pool of capital to invest. All of the aforementioned products have long-term value and the benefit of the investment can be seen immediately.
OpenView Labs
JUNE 13, 2019
Without a serious investment in your company’s customer success , your customers will inevitably grow frustrated with the customer experience. A higher CLV enables you to invest more in customer success, which increases your CLV.
The Angel VC
APRIL 14, 2013
Following my post about electronic signing I'd like to describe another area that we'd like to invest in. clio ideas we'd like to invest in jobber saas software as a service verticalsIt's not a specific idea this time, rather a category of startups that we're very interested in: Industry-specific SaaS solutions I talked about the topic before when I wrote about "The land of a thousand niches" and touched on it in my "1st DO for SaaS startups".
SaaS Growth Strategy
AUGUST 28, 2018
And increasingly I find myself telling Founders that they should seriously consider NOT investing in content marketing. But everybody invests in content marketing! They've committed to content marketing as a long term investment that they won't see a return on for a long time.
The Angel VC
MAY 17, 2013
BYOD ideas we'd like to invest in mobile saasFollowing my posts about electronic signing and vertical SaaS , here's another area that we're very interested in: SaaS solutions with a mobile-first approach While my first two posts of this series were fairly specific, this one is pretty fuzzy as I don't have a good sense for what I'm looking for. I just have a feeling that there are huge opportunities ahead for startups which rethink how people will use business applications in the future.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 28, 2015
In response last week’s post on The Fastest Growing Areas of Startup Investment in 2015 , in which Bitcoin topped the list, I received many questions about the underlying dynamics of this startup segment. Using Crunchbase data, I analyzed BTC investment patterns over the past 4 years. The chart above shows that Bitcoin investment started in earnest in 2013. This data implies 2015 should be the best year ever for Bitcoin investment.
Totango
SEPTEMBER 6, 2017
As Zendesk grew and invested in people, the business and processes became complicated. This isn’t a perfect world, but the question was – how could they invest in customer success from a product-first perspective?
Tom Tunguz
JULY 13, 2015
Earlier this week, we examined the trends in the major categories of startup investment including eCommerce, Software, Social Networking and Education. Each year, starting in mid-2012 through mid-2015, these sectors have grown their investment dollars by more than 145%, according to Mattermark data. Others, like transportation and hospitality, fueled by Uber and AirBnB fundraising efforts, command more than 6% of the billions invested in the last 12 months.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 27, 2012
Yesterday, I showed the increasing share of venture capital investments consumer companies represent. So, I’ve created two charts: the first is a bar chart of consumer investment by segment and the second is a heatmap of of sector and stage. Early stage consumer investment is bustling.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 12, 2013
That’s why we invested. Big data technologies like Hadoop, HBase, Redshift, Vertica and others store ever greater quantities of data. As the capacity to store this data increases, so does the importance of extracting value and insight from it.
SaaStr
APRIL 13, 2019
Here’s how I might think about it: $50,000 invested at say $1m valuation = 5%. The post How much equity is fair for my co-founder that is leaving after 2 years and $50,000 invested in the company? Stock contracts aside, the best you can do is what is fair. 10 year commitment as founders; he did 2 years of it. So vis-a-vis the 2 of you, she/he might get 20% x 40% (if your equity ratios are 40 you:40 her/him: 20 others), or 8%. So 5% + 8% = 13%. That’s a lot. It may be too much.
SaaStock
JANUARY 30, 2019
Its partners boast diverse venture experience and have previously invested in more than 70 companies. SaaS Investments: Pipefy, HeyDoctor. SaaS Investments: Gupy, idwall, meetime, Qulture rocks, Social Miner, and Teravoz. SaaS Investments: Meetime, Aegro, GoCache, and Movidesk.
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