Podcasts about Matrix Partners

How do you disrupt an entire industry and transform customer experience? Together with his team, TJ Parker, Co-Founder and former CEO of PillPack, did just that.During our conversation, TJ shares the journey of building PillPack, from their early vision and startup team, to navigating through extremely tense dynamics with very large incumbents, to ultimately selling PillPack to Amazon, and continuing to build for a much bigger market. He reflects on the biggest lessons learned, and also the most critical decisions that shaped the company's success.It was a treat to have TJ's big brother, Dan Parker, in the audience. When it came time for QA, Dan helpfully asked what percentage of college classes TJ actually attended.We also dive into the power of community, the importance of work ethic, and what's next for TJ in his new(er) role as an investor at Matrix Partners.Please like, rate, subscribe, or review our show if you've liked what you've heard! We'd love to hear your thoughts. If you're interested in joining our community, please visit www.breakline.org. If you're interested in exploring partnerships with BreakLine, please visit https://breakline.org/partners/partner-signup/.

Sean (Xiang) Ren, CEO and Co-Founder of Sahara AISean is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sahara AI, a decentralized AI blockchain platform for a collaborative economy. Backed by top investors in AI and Crypto, including Binance Labs, Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital, Sequoia Capital, Samsung Next, Matrix Partners, and many more, Sahara AI has raised over $40 million to advance decentralized AI. Today, Sahara AI is trusted by 35+ leading tech innovators and research institutions, such as Microsoft, Amazon, MIT, Character AI, and Snapchat. Additionally, Sean is an Associate Professor in Computer Science and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair at the University of Southern California, where he is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Intelligence and Knowledge Discovery (INK) Research Lab. At Allen Institute for AI, Sean contributes to machine common sense research. Prior, Sean was a Data Science Advisor at Snapchat. He completed his PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. Sean has received many awards recognizing his research and innovation in the AI space including the WSDM Test of Time Paper Award, Samsung AI Researcher of 2023, MIT TR Innovators Under 35, Forbes 30 Under 30, and more.  Personal Site: https://www.seanre.com/ Twitter: @xiangrenNLP LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xren7

Sean (Xiang) Ren, CEO and Co-Founder of Sahara AISean is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sahara AI, a decentralized AI blockchain platform for a collaborative economy. Backed by top investors in AI and Crypto, including Binance Labs, Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital, Sequoia Capital, Samsung Next, Matrix Partners, and many more, Sahara AI has raised over $40 million to advance decentralized AI. Today, Sahara AI is trusted by 35+ leading tech innovators and research institutions, such as Microsoft, Amazon, MIT, Character AI, and Snapchat. Additionally, Sean is an Associate Professor in Computer Science and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair at the University of Southern California, where he is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Intelligence and Knowledge Discovery (INK) Research Lab. At Allen Institute for AI, Sean contributes to machine common sense research. Prior, Sean was a Data Science Advisor at Snapchat. He completed his PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. Sean has received many awards recognizing his research and innovation in the AI space including the WSDM Test of Time Paper Award, Samsung AI Researcher of 2023, MIT TR Innovators Under 35, Forbes 30 Under 30, and more.  Personal Site: https://www.seanre.com/ Twitter: @xiangrenNLP LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xren7

Sean Ren is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sahara AI, a decentralized blockchain platform built for AI. Backed by top investors in AI and Crypto, including Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital, Sequoia Capital, Samsung, Matrix Partners, and many more, Sahara AI has raised over $40 million to advance decentralized AI. Today, Sahara AI is trusted by 35+ leading tech innovators and research institutions, such as Microsoft, Amazon, MIT, Character AI, and Snapchat.In this conversation, we discuss:- The Future of AI and Crypto- Knowledge Agents (KAs)- Complexities of Data Collection- Operational Hurdles- Ethical Considerations- AI Across Leading Institutions- Generative AI- Autonomous Systems- DeepSeek Open Source AI- The Issue of Copyright in AI- AI-based Revenue Streams and MarketplacesSahara AIWebsite: saharalabs.aiX: @SaharaLabsAILinkedIn: Sahara AISean RenX: @xiangrenNLPLinkedIn: Sean (Xiang) Ren ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------  This episode is brought to you by PrimeXBT.  PrimeXBT offers a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders that demand highly reliable market data and performance. Traders of all experience levels can easily design and customize layouts and widgets to best fit their trading style. PrimeXBT is always offering innovative products and professional trading conditions to all customers.   PrimeXBT is running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the podcast. After making your first deposit, 50% of that first deposit will be credited to your account as a bonus that can be used as additional collateral to open positions.  Code: CRYPTONEWS50  This promotion is available for a month after activation. Click the link below:  PrimeXBT x CRYPTONEWS50

Aakash Kumar is a Managing Director at Z47 & DeVC. Aakash likes to partner with founders in that early stage to enable them to generate maximum momentum. In the past, as an active angel investor, he has enabled 100+ founders to start and build compelling businesses. In this episode, we talk about - - Aakash's operator experience at companies like Housing(dot)com & Hotstar - The investment thesis at Z47 - Why did they rebrand from Matrix Partners to Z47? - The thinking behind investing in companies like Ola Electric, Razorpay, OfBusiness in the early stages? - The massive India opportunity - Common mistakes founders make in the early stages of the business & lots more Links: ⭐Sponsored by Podcast10x - Podcasting agency for VCs - https://podcast10x.com Z47 - https://www.z47.com/ DeVC - https://www.devc.com/ Follow Aakash on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kumaraakash Follow Aakash on X - https://x.com/RTinkslinger

Welcome to Top of the Morning by Mint, your weekday newscast that brings you five major stories from the world of business. It's Monday, September 16, 2024. My name is Nelson John. Let's get started.India's antitrust watchdog, the Competition Commission of India, just made it easier for companies to get their hands on up to 25% of another company's shares without asking for permission first. This tweak in the merger and acquisition rules is a big deal, especially for those looking at hostile takeovers. Before, you'd have to pause and get a nod from the CCI before buying shares off the market, which wasn't exactly speedy. Now, as long as you're not trying to take control right away, you can go ahead without waiting on that green light. This change means businesses can move faster during the initial buying phases without getting tangled up in red tape, Gireesh Chandra Prasad reports. It's all part of a bigger push to cut down on the hassle and make doing business a bit smoother in India.In India, where tradition meets tech, there's a rising star sector: faith-tech. It's catching the eye of big-time investors like PeakXV Partners, Blume Ventures, and Matrix Partners. Just recently, AppsForBharat bagged $18 million in a round led by Fundamentum, highlighting the surge in interest. This year alone, the faith-tech sector saw its funding leap to more than $50 million from just $4.3 million last year. This booming sector offers everything from virtual pilgrimages to digital pooja bookings and astrological services, targeting both young Indians and the global diaspora craving a slice of home. However, the sector is not without its challenges. The seasonal nature of religious activities and the necessity to establish trusted partnerships with religious institutions are hurdles these companies continue to navigate. Samiksha Goel takes a deep dive into a sector which is possibly unique to India and has carved a niche for itself.Family businesses are usually well-oiled machines, as there is a clear hierarchy and established workflows. But when it comes to succession, things get murky. That's exactly what happened with Bharat Forge and its promoter family. A dispute between the managing director Baba Kalyani and his sister Sugandha Hiremath ended up in court after the brother refused to transfer shares to another pharma company. Now, a new court affidavit has come to light that might rule the verdict in favour of Sugandha. Priyanka Gawande and Anirudh Laskar report that this affidavit goes against the claims made by Baba Kalyani, who has allegedly diverted significant assets away from his father. The Reserve Bank of India has been cautioning the Indian banking industry about the ever-growing amount of loans being disbursed. Finally, the banks are listening: the gap between the credit and deposits is finally narrowing, reports Shayan Ghosh. RBI now wants banks to get innovative in its ways to hold more deposits. It has also come down hard on unsecured loans, fearing a fracture in India's vast financial systems. Crude oil prices have been crashing, and currently cost around 70 to 75 US dollars. Naturally, expectations of a cut in the price of petrol and diesel have risen. These rates were last revised prior to the general election. Sumant Banerji explains why crude prices have fallen,  the various factors involved in making such a decision, and how likely a price cut is. That's all for today. Thank you for listening. We're eagerly looking forward to our next Top of the Morning episode, which will be packed with fresh business news. Until then, have a great day!CCI greenlights secondary share purchases, opens the door for hostile takeoversBigger than food delivery? Investors rush to bless faith-tech startupsKalyani family feud could take a fresh turn as a crucial will surfacesCredit, deposit rates converging on the back of RBI cautionGlobal crude prices at 3-year low. Will petrol prices see a cut?

Great news - Season 6 Episode 146 Pulse of AI Podcast is live!  Luma AI's founding team member Sam Sinha joins podcast host Jason Stoughton to talk about Luma AI's growth from a team of 5 to the juggernaut behind the Dream Machine video creativity tool, the essence and future of creativity in an AI powered and co-piloted world, the types of people they are looking to hire and so much more! To be notified about future conversations with the leaders of the AI revolution sign up for our newsletter at www.thepulseofai.com   

Chris Feng is a co-founder and COO of Chainbase, the world's largest omnichain data network designed to integrate all blockchain data into a unified ecosystem. Chainbase is building a decentralized data economy with advanced AI capabilities where anyone can participate, contribute, and be incentivized. Why you should listen Chris Feng, co-founder and COO of Chainbase, discusses the importance of data in the blockchain era and the role of Chainbase as a data protocol. He explains that Chainbase aims to create a new data stack for the next generation of blockchain, where all data is interconnected and accessible.  The Chainbase mission is to become developers' interface for interacting with on-chain data, offering reliability, accuracy, and openness. Currently, Chainbase attracts over 15,000 developers and 8,000 project partners, managing over 500 billion data calls within the network. Now growing beyond Series A funding, they are backed by prominent funds including Tencent Investment Group, Matrix Partners, Hash Global, Folius Ventures, JSquare, DFG, Mask Network, Bonfire Union Ventures, and BODL Ventures. Chris highlights the key use cases of Chainbase, including providing real-time on-chain data, offering a comprehensive structure for developers, and enabling easier interaction with on-chain data for end users.  Supporting links Stabull Finance Chainbase Andy on Twitter  Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

Chief Operating Officer of Matrix Partners Kristy Boulos answers the question, "What is the importance of conducting market research throughout the branding process?"

Matrix Partners renames Chinese unit to stress its independence, Russia detour hinders revival of European carriers' China flights. Subscribe to a bundle deal now to unlock all coverage by Caixin Global and The Wall Street Journal for only $200 a year. That's a 66% discount. Group access and applicable discounts are available. Contact us for a customized plan.

In this Episode, I speak with the Co-Founder of Dezerv (AUM of INR 5000 CR) - Sandeep Jethwani. Dezerv is a technology-enabled wealth management Fintech Startup, which has been backed by prolific institutional funds such as Matrix Partners, Elevation, Accel in India and others. We uncover a bunch of interesting aspects about the wealth management business and how Dezerv is being built. Tune in for a fascinating conversation. 00:00 - Recap 00:35 - Introduction 01:52 - Should Founders start for Money? 04:05 - How Dezerv manages wealth? 07:59 - Traditional vs New-Age Wealth Management 09:55 - Scale to 5000 Cr 13:30 - CACs & Margins in this Wealth Management 16:50 - Switching Cost for Clients 19:10 - Business Model for Dezerv 22:17 - Trust 25:55 - Tactical Learnings for Trust 28:09 - Founder Led Content 33:20 - Regulations & Market Cycles in Fintech 37:25 - How does India invest its Wealth? 41:40 - The Operations behind the Scenes at Dezerv 44:25 - Talent at Dezerv 46:45 - Leadership Talent 48:10 - Culture at Dezerv 52:18 - Storytelling 53:25 - Prioritisation for Sandeep and How it has evolved 57:50 - Founder Market Fit 1:01:50 - Mistakes 1:04:30 - Thoughts Before Starting Dezerv 1:09:51 - How should Operators think about building a company? 1:12:05 - How would friends define Sandeep? 1:12:40 - Core Insight 1:14:30 - What does Wealth mean for Sandeep? 1:16:12 - What matters to Sandeep and Why? 1:17:22 - Core Learnings in Wealth Management Cheers!

Razorpay, a leading fintech name in India, providing a payments platform and banking-as-a-service software to some 10 million businesses, in the country, yesterday elevated Rahul Kothari to the position of chief operating officer for India and Malaysia. Kothari was previously chief business officer at the company. He will report to founder and CEO Harshil Mathur, the Bengaluru company said in a press release yesterday. This appointment sharpens Razorpay's focus on the Southeast Asia region, where it's looking to expand. The company also aims to implement a deeper integrated strategy to step up growth by improving customer experience across its different lines of business and products. In January, I wrote that Razorpay was at an inflexion point. About a month before that Shashank Kumar, the other founder, and Murali Brahmadesam had spoken about sustaining the culture of engineering at the company as it became bigger. Brahmadesam came in from AWS, earlier last year, and he'd taken on the CTO's role from Kumar, who was looking to free himself up from day-to-day engineering to focus on products strategy. The company has about 1,000 engineers among its 3,500 staff, or “Razors” as they're called internally, including several senior engineering leaders. Kumar had talked about how over the next five years, Razorpay would seek “tremendous scale.” And imports such as Brahmadesam will be playing a critical role on the engineering front.  Razorpay is stepping up its expansion into a broader financial services platform, from its flagship payments business—it accounts for most of its revenues and is making money on a standalone basis—to facilitating loans, and banking software. The company is expected to go deeper into the emerging hot area of ‘banking as a service,' which accounting giant Deloitte defines as provisioning of banking products and services through third-party distributors. This opens up the possibility that a large number of new niche finance startups can partner large, established banks and financial services companies, and help each other tap a significantly larger market than they could individually. Razorpay could emerge as a facilitator of this growth, and benefit from it. To throw the story forward, while Razorpay has made a name for itself in India, “We want to see how we can create a global engineering brand while we are working out of Bengaluru and India,” Kumar had told me a year ago. Organizational changes such Kothari's appointment are important incremental steps in that direction on the business front. Kothari has a degree in chemical engineering from IIT Kanpur, and an MBA from Indian School of Business.  Over the last 20 years or so, he's worked in the US, Europe and Australia. Currently based in Pune, he's into his fifth year with Razorpay. Previously, Kothari played a critical role in making the payments business profitable at PayU, according to Razorpay's press release. He's also worked at security software company Symantec, BPO company WNS, and Boston Consulting Group. Next year, Razorpay will be 10 years old. Technically, it was started in 2013 in Jaipur, but Mathur and Kumar, alumni of IIT Roorkee, moved base to Bengaluru quickly, and the company is widely considered to be founded in 2014. They were one of the first Indian startup founders to be part Y Combinator. Investors including Lone Pine Capital, Alkeon Capital, TCV, GIC, Tiger Global, Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India), Ribbit Capital, Matrix Partners, and Salesforce Ventures have invested a total of $741.5 million in the company in six rounds of funding. In December 2021, the company was privately valued at $7.5 billion, making it one of India's most valued startups. The company reported close to Rs. 1,500 crore in FY22 revenues, a 75 percent growth over the previous fiscal, and it was profitable on a standalone basis, for the flagship payments business.

Maex Ament is a founder and partner of Crane Earth. In conversation with Matthew Monahan. Watch this episode on video: https://youtu.be/lzZOz9tGIy4 Crane Earth: https://craneearth.vc/ Maex's website: https://maex.us/ THE REGENERATION WILL BE FUNDED Ma Earth Website: https://maearth.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@maearthmedia Community Discord: https://maearth.com/community Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/theregeneration/feed.xml EPISODE RESOURCES Centrifuge: https://centrifuge.io/ Toucan Protocol: https://toucan.earth/ Flow Carbon: https://www.flowcarbon.com/ Open Forest Protocol: https://www.openforestprotocol.org/ FENCE: https://fence.finance/ Matrix Partners: https://matrix.vc/ RELATED INTERVIEWS Philip Stehlik (Crane Earth): https://youtu.be/dUXerT7xiNo This interview took place during ReFi Summit 2023: https://refisummit.org SOCIAL Farcaster: https://warpcast.com/maearth X / Twitter: https://twitter.com/maearthmedia Lenstube: https://lenstube.xyz/channel/maearth.lens Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maearthmedia/ Mirror: https://mirror.xyz/maearth.eth LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/maearth/ Lenster: https://lenster.xyz/u/maearth Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maearthcommunity TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@maearthmedia

In today's episode we take a quick look at Zoho's latest milestone, with the Indian SaaS leader crossing 100 million users, but first a few headlines. Headlines HeromotoCorp will invest up to Rs. 550 crore in a rights issue of Ather Energy Private Limited, the Indian two-wheeler giant told stock exchanges on Sep. 4 in a statement. Atomicwork, a cloud software provider of productivity software, has raised $11 million in seed funding led by Blume Ventures and Matrix Partners, TechCrunch reports. Richard Lobo, an executive vice president and former head of human resources at Infosys, has resigned, marking the latest in a series of top-level exits at the company, Moneycontrol reports. One thing today Zoho, India's biggest cloud software company, has surpassed 100 million, the Chennai-to-California company said in a press release. Zoho says it is the first bootstrapped SaaS company to reach this milestone. Last year the company hit $1 billion in revenues, and Zoho is one of a handful of SaaS companies in India that are profitable. Started more than 25 years ago, the company's growth over the last 15 years, with the rise of the cloud computing model, has taken it from 1 million users in 2008 to 100 million today. The latest 50 million users were added within the past five years. And the company sells more than 55 products to over 700,000 businesses in some 150 countries, according to its press release. “We are not done yet,” co-founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu said in the release. The company has an innovation pipeline covering the next 10 years and it is investing in deep technologies to serve billions of users around the world, he said. Zoho defines midmarket customers as companies with 250 employees each and those with a thousand or more workers as classic enterprise, or the upmarket segment. India shows a significant presence of enterprise customers adopting Zoho, CMO Praval Singh had said in an interview with Forbes India in June this year. In the SaaS business, larger customers mean more users and increased complexity, resulting in higher revenue per customer. The upmarket segment contributes over half of Zoho's business in India, and a third of its entire business. As its products matured, larger businesses adopted its solutions. This led Zoho to establish dedicated teams with expertise in serving large companies. “We also developed an interoperable ecosystem, enabling easy integration with third-party applications through APIs, connectors, and partnerships,” Praval said in that interview. To cater to larger enterprises, the company launched the Zoho Marketplace, which has more than 1,800 extensions and garners 30,000 monthly installations. In 2018, Zoho introduced an enterprise business solutions team as trusted partners, offering assistance in digital transformation projects, from consulting to implementation and training. Zoho has focused on helping large enterprises streamline and optimise their technology stacks, addressing challenges such as integration, data silos, scalability, and flexibility. By helping customers overcome these obstacles, Zoho has played a meaningful role in supporting their growth and progress over the years, Praval says. India is one of the fastest-growing markets for Zoho, where the company has witnessed three year compounded annual growth of 65 percent in its upmarket segment. Customers in India include IIFL, Bigbasket and Tata Play Fiber. Zoho's upmarket growth in India is led by sectors such as banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), manufacturing, retail, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), pharmaceuticals, and IT. The company has collaborated with government departments and public sector units (PSUs) to support their digitalisation efforts and contribute to the modernisation of the public sector.

In the latest episode of Matrix Moments, Sudipto Sannigrahi, and Anurag Srivastava, delve deeper into the existing B2B landscape and cover why Matrix Partners continues to be bullish on the segment and the fundamentals that make a good B2B business This episode covers: 1. Is B2B still an attractive segment to build in 2. Fundamentals of a good B2B business 3. Sustainable, defensible moats in a good B2B business 4. Pitfalls for B2B founders to be aware of in their 10 – infinity journey 5. Importance of good corporate governance Traditionally centered on distribution, B2B investments are now shifting toward core IP-led manufacturing. We consider ourselves fortunate to witness the inner workings of a diverse range of B2B businesses, spanning from well-established companies like OfBusiness, FarMart, Captain Fresh, and VEGROW to upcoming innovative product companies like ZippMat, XIMKART, and bijnis among others.

Welcome to #112th episode of The Startup Operator Roundup. The Roundup is our weekly views on the news from the Indian Startup Ecosystem. Connect with Us: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/startup-operator​Twitter: https://twitter.com/OperatorStartup In this episode Roshan and Gunjan discuss:00:00 Introduction02:32 Digital India Act - AI Regulation06:30 Ola Electric IPO09:47 Mining startup summit 12:50 Matrix Partners' 4th fund16:30 Other FRAs17:00 Talk of the Town 17:53 Closing comments If you liked this episode, let us know by hitting the like button and share with your friends and family. Please also remember to subscribe to our channel and switch on the notifications to never miss an episode!

This Week Meet Shivam Ginglani, Founder of Woodsmen Whisky. A whisky brand looking to disrupt the legacy players in spirits. Will he impress the equity seekers Shantanu Deshpande (CEO & Founder, Bombay Shaving Company) and Rahul Chaudhary (Founder, Treebo Hotels and Venture Partner at Matrix Partners)? _____________________________________________________ 00:00:00 - 00:01:15 Coming UP 00:01:15 - 00:03:17 Introduction to the Equity Seekers 00:03:17 - 00:06:46 How Shivam's Naivety Got Him Into The Spirits Industry 00:06:46 - 00:13:09 Understanding India's Alcohol Market & Consumption 00:13:09 - 00:15:18 Woodsmen has set out to do something different 00:15:18 - 00:20:09 Breaking down the Whiskey Market 00:20:09 - 00:22:42 Can one parent company sell products across price points? 00:22:42 - 00:26:28 Value Proposition for an Aspirational Brand 00:26:28 - 00:30:00 A typical whiskey journey for a consumer 00:30:00 - 00:33:20 Aspirational V/s Utility: What does whiskey invoke? 00:33:20 - 00:35:35 The psychology of drinking alone and signalling? 00:35:35 - 00:37:11 Why should good design & quality cost more? 00:37:11 - 00:45:00 Taste Testing Woodsmen 00:45:00 - 00:48:00 The Wine Experience v/s Whiskey's easy consumption 00:48:00 - 00:49:09 Reason Behind Choosing a simple value proposition 00:49:09 - 00:51:00 Packaging and its psychology 00:51:00 - 00:59:35 Tenets of Woodsmen's Branding & India's Missing Whiskey Identity 00:59:35 - 01:03:28 Understanding The Revenue and Margins 01:03:28 - 01:06:50 The challenges of alcohol distribution 01:06:50 - 01:08:27 Shivam's personal Superpower 01:08:27 - 01: 13:24 Projections, Gross Margins and Investment Ask 01:13:24 - 01:20:49 Strategic Timeout 01:20:49 - 01:23:53 What The Equity Seekers Love About The Business 01:23:53 - 01:25:32 The Concerns About The Business 01:25:32 - 01:27:00 Rahul's Take on Woodsmen and The need For A Wider Unique Proposition 01:27:00 - 01:28:00 The Barbershop Offer 01:28:00 - 01:31:44 Shivam's Appreciation of TBWS, His Response and final thoughts _____________________________________________________ ABOUT OUR CHANNEL My name is Shantanu and I am the founder of Bombay Shaving Company and Bombae. I LOVE entrepreneurship. Personally, I would rate myself as an average (at best) entrepreneur, but I love great ones. The BarberShop with Shantanu S2: Raiser's Edge goes beyond our conversations from S1 on our podcast to tangible help. With the help of our sponsors at BSC and Bombae we have put together a season which brings together a corpus of 50+ equity seekers looking to support 20+ start-ups in their growth and success. We will be releasing an episode every Friday at 9 pm. Tune in and hope you enjoy. :) _____________________________________________________

Nitin Jain is a well-known name in the Indian startup ecosystem as the co-founder and Chief Business Officer of OfBusiness, a tech-enabled platform that provides raw material procurement and credit solutions to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India. With a strong background in structured solutions trading, Nitin has played a key role in OfBusiness' success, helping the company raise over $875M from top investors like Tiger Global, SoftBank Vision Fund, and Matrix Partners, among others. Today, OfBusiness is valued at around $5B and has become a leading player in the Indian SME ecosystem. Nitin Jain is an alumnus of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and has had a successful career prior to his entrepreneurial journey. Episode Notes: Nitin Jain discusses his journey into entrepreneurship (2:10) Discovering Co-Founders and Creating the OfBusiness Idea (3:55) Nitin Jain shares his perspective on what's more critical: the team or the idea (6:30) The Early Days of OfBusiness: A Look Back at the "Aha Moment" (9:15) Coping with the Struggles and Insecurities of Being a Founder (12:30) Understanding the Composition of Winning Founding Teams (16:30) Nitin Jain's Unique Leadership Style and Approach (23:10) Fostering a People-First Culture at OfBusiness (27:10) Developing a Strong Company Culture as Companies Grow (29:18) How to Maximize the Benefits of Your Investors (32:22) Overcoming the Toughest Days as a Founder (39:20) Nitin Jain's Biggest Lesson as an Entrepreneur (41:57) Advice to His Younger Self: What Nitin Jain Would Have Done Differently (46:03) . . . Social Links: OfBusiness on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ofbusiness_com Abhishek Goyal on Twitter: https://twitter.com/njain351 Podcast on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedesi_vc Akash Bhat on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bhatvakash Podcast on Instagram: https://instagram.com/thedesivc Akash Bhat on Instagram: https://instagram.com/bhatvakash

Matt Brown is a venture capitalist and Partner at Matrix Partners.   Matt is a founder and operator turned investor, having started two software companies, both backed by Matrix, and then led product for AfterPay in the US in the lead-up to its acquisition by Square, now Block.   Matt's second company, Bonsai, is a vertical SaaS company for micro businesses which evolved from a pure software company into a fintech through the incorporation of financial products, before embedded finance was a household term.   Matt is strategic and thoughtful, writing regularly on fintech market dynamics, with a specific focus on payments, credit and vertical SaaS.   In this conversation, we discuss Matt's approach to seed and A-stage investing, BNPL and the implications for digital commerce more broadly, Matt's analysis of payments market dynamics, opportunities for early-stage fintechs in an increasingly saturated market and more.   Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Matt Brown.

DrinksWithAVC swings into the new year spotlighting Anoushka Vaswani of Lightspeed Venture Partners, the 'OG of PLG'. With accolades spanning from her lauded academic journey at Columbia and Harvard to shaping strategies at McKinsey and Matrix Partners, Anoushka brings a wealth of experience to the table. Settle in with your preferred vintage as she dissects her favorite SaaS metrics, discusses the impact of her global upbringing on investment perspectives, and debates the growth vs. profit paradigm for SaaS startups in economic downturns. A toast to insights and intellect in this much-anticipated return episode.Links:www.lsvp.comwww.twitter.com/anoushkavaswani

Sheila Lirio Marcelo sold her previous tech business for a cool $500 million in 2020, and has now embarked on a Web3 adventure as cofounder and CEO of learn and earn Web3 platform Proof of Learn. Sheila has had an incredible career so far, founding Care.com in 2006, starting as an online marketplace for childcare before offering senior care, pet care, housekeeping and more. Before starting Care.com she was VP of Product Management and Marketing at Upromise, a service that helped families save for college, and she was Entrepreneur in Residence at Matrix Partners. We talk about her mission to unlock accessible, high quality blockchain education, as well as women's perceived role as ‘Chief Household Officer' and how we can welcome more diversity in the Web3 space. LINKS: Sheila Lirio Marcelo on Twitter: https://twitter.com/smarcelo Proof of Learn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/proofoflearn Metacrafters on Twitter: https://twitter.com/metacraftersio Follow Women of Web3 for the latest job posts, learning resources and events: https://twitter.com/womenofweb3co Women of Web3 website: www.womenofweb3.co JOBS IN WEB3: Get a role in web3 on the Women of Web3 jobs board, or apply to be in our Talent Collective: www.womenofweb3.co/jobs CREDITS: Host: Lauren Ingram Producer: Alex Lane

Microsoft is in talks to invest $10 billion into OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, the AI app that has gone ultra-viral, Semafor reported yesterday, citing people familiar with the matter. OneWeb yesterday confirmed the successful deployment of 40 satellites launched by SpaceX, taking it to a total of 542 low-earth-orbit satellites and a step closer to offering “global” connectivity. Also in this briefing, Infosys Foundation is seeking submissions for its Aarohan Social Innovation Awards 2023. Notes: Microsoft is in talks to invest $10 billion into OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, the AI app that has gone ultra-viral, Semafor reported yesterday, citing people familiar with the matter. The funding, which would also include other venture firms, would value OpenAI at $29 billion, including the new investment, according to Semafor. OneWeb yesterday confirmed the successful deployment of 40 satellites launched by SpaceX from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This launch is OneWeb's 16th to date, with only two more launches remaining to complete its first-generation constellation for global connectivity in 2023, the company said in a press release. With 542 satellites now in orbit, OneWeb, backed by investors including India's Bharti Enterprises, has more than 80 percent of its first-generation constellation launched. ReNew Power, yesterday announced the installations of India's first-ever 3x platform Wind Turbine Generators in Gadag, Karnataka. The WTGs have what is called a “nameplate capacity” of 3.3-3.465 MW and are 128-140m in height. They offer significantly improved capacity over models installed in India to date, which typically have a nameplate capacity of 2-3 MW, the Nasdaq-listed company said in a press release. The new wind turbine generators will be a part of the country's first ‘Round The Clock' renewable energy project, combining wind, solar and a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS). This project will produce enough energy to power more than 1 million households in India annually, according to the release. Toddle, a teaching and learning platform provider for schools worldwide, has raised $17 million in Series A led by Sequoia Capital India. The round also saw participation from Tenacity Ventures and Trifecta Capital along with existing investors Matrix Partners, Beenext, and Better Capital, according to a press release. Infosys Foundation, the philanthropic and CSR arm of Infosys, yesterday announced the launch of the third edition of its Aarohan Social Innovation Awards. The Foundation is inviting innovators and social entrepreneurs from across the country to participate in the awards. The awards are open to individuals, teams and NGOs developing unique technology-based solutions that have the potential to bring about a significant difference to the underprivileged across India, at scale. The Infosys Foundation will commit up to Rs. 50 lakh per winner, with a total award purse of Rs. 2 crore. The Aarohan Social Innovation Awards 2023 will accept submissions in the categories of education, healthcare and women empowerment. The awards opened for submission yesterday, and the last date for submissions is March 12, 2023.

Connie & Alex talk tech news, and then Connie chats with Antonio Rodriguez of Matrix Partners about the firm's focus on software infrastructure and why it pays to bet early. 

In the first and second part of ‘How Bengaluru became India's Silicon Valley', we discussed the journey from Bengaluru's early history, to setting up of Indian Institute of Science, and then finally the post dot-com bubble burst scene. In this video, we take a look at how Amazon's arrival into India changed Bengaluru's entrepreneurship scene forever. Amazon hired best talent in India and focussed obsessively on customer satisfaction, and this was adopted by two of it's employees, Sachin and Binny Bansal with their own E-commerce startup, Flipkart. A month before Flipkart was started, Infibeam launched their own Amazon-inspired e-commerce platform. The company's founder, Vishal Mehta, had been working for Amazon in Seattle for 5 years before moving back to India in 2007 after realising that Amazon had put their plans to launch in India on hold. Meanwhile, Binny and Sachin were struggling financially. They'd approached Sequoia, Matrix Partners, IDG Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, but without any luck. In 2010 when Flipkart raised their headline-grabbing Series B, but they weren't the only game in town. Fabmart.com had been around since 1999, and by 2010, they had rebranded to indiaplaza.com and then there was also Myntra as well. Then, in Mumbai, Flipkart had an indirect competitor in eBay India, and there was also Naaptol, which is still around to this day. In 2010, Flipkart's real competition wasn't in Ahmedabad or Bengaluru - it was in NCR, where a number of companies were vying for a piece of the e-commerce pie. One of the earliest was Snapdeal, which got its start in 2008 as a coupon service in Delhi called MoneySaver, which was pivoted into Snapdeal in 2010, and at that time they weren't selling products, they were selling discounts, so they weren't a huge threat yet. Besides Snapdeal, you also had Homeshop18LIST starting out in 2008 in Noida, Letsbuy came onto the scene in 2009 as eTree Marketing in Gurugram and was selling items like mobile phones, cameras, laptops and home appliances, and then in 2011, Gurugram-based startups like Jabong and Shopclues appeared too. Jeff Bezos was excited by the burst of e-commerce activity in India, and finally decided to put their limited presence in Bengaluru to good use. But instead of trying to re-enter India under their own name, Amazon instead approached Flipkart in 2011 to talk about a potential acquisition13, and in response, Sachin Bansal told Amazon that he would only sell at a 1 billion dollar valuation. This deal didn't happen and Flipkart ended up raising 20 million dollars from Tiger Global, this was their Series C round, later on in 2011, at a 200 million dollar valuation. This was the single-biggest round of funding secured by an e-commerce startup in India. Flipkart would go on to raise 150 million dollars in their Series D round, then 200 million, then 160 million, then 210 million, and then a billion dollar Series G round in 2014. And they weren't the only ones raking in the capital here - in 2014, Snapdeal raised a massive round too: 600 million dollars from Softbank, and this is just e-commerce we're talking about here. There were multiple other industries being fought over by startups at around this time, like Ola and TaxiForSure, both of which were based in Bengaluru, and then Uber showed up, with Bengaluru being its first city as well. And then towards the end of 2014 and into 2015, India saw its first startup food fight, where companies like FoodPanda, TinyOwl, Swiggy, and Zomato raised hundreds of millions of dollars to capture India's food delivery space.

Notifications North Star, sponsored by Courier!Guest: Patrick Malatack is a partner at Matrix Partners, early stage investment firm. Prior to that, he spent 7 years at Twilio, leading product and launching messaging. He also spent 4 years at Microsoft, managing the MS Project program.Questions:What things did you build, or attempt to build, at Twilio around the messaging problem?Why does notifications as infrastructure make sense?Tell about your perspective on Notifications being a layer of user experience.What did you see in Troy based on your experiences, to indicate he gets it?How strongly do you advise your portfolio companies to use a solution like Courier?Linkshttps://matrixpartners.com/https://www.courier.com/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Patrick Malatack, Partner at Matrix Partners and Kyle Poyar, Partner at OpenView. Is the end of subscription pricing near? Research from OpenView states that companies with usage-based pricing grow 38% faster... Of the IPOs over the last three years, seven out of nine that had the best net dollar retention all have a usage-based model. Welcome to a new era of software buying, where customers pay for the value they receive from the products. Leveraging a successful career as VP of Product with the disruptive tech giant Twilio, Patrick shares inside knowledge for how startups can create long-term customer loyalty and profitability with usage-based pricing models. Specifically, Patrick and Kyle will dive into: 3:02 - The most attractive thing about usage based pricing 11:30 - Which businesses aren't right for usage based pricing 15:49 - How to advise companies on picking the right metric for usage based pricing 21:26 - Handling strategic operational and financial challenge 33:53 - Accommodating customer spending patterns 38:16 - How Patrick evaluates usage based companies as an investor 41:13 -  When to flip the switch from usage based to subscription based 46:48 - Usage based metering and investments 50:37 - Managing conversations with investors who only care about MRR 57:15 - How to measure KPIs specifically for a usage based model Learn more at https://tractionconf.io Connect with Patrick Malatack: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickmalatack/ Learn more about Matrix Partners at https://matrixpartners.com/ Connect with Kyle Poyar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-poyar/ Kyle Poyar's (new) Substack, where he'll go deeper on topics like SaaS pricing - https://kylepoyar.substack.com Learn more about OpenView at https://openviewpartners.com/   This episode is brought to you by: Each year the U.S. and Canadian governments provide more than $20 billion in R&D tax credits and innovation incentives to fund businesses. But the application process is cumbersome, prone to costly audits, and receiving the money can take as long as 16 months. Boast automates this process, enabling companies to get more money faster without the paperwork and audit risk. We don't get paid until you do! Find out if you qualify today at https://Boast.AI.   Launch Academy is one of the top global tech hubs for international entrepreneurs and a designated organization for Canada's Startup Visa. Since 2012, Launch has worked with more than 6,000 entrepreneurs from over 100 countries, of which 300 have grown their startups to seed and Series A stage and raised over $2 billion in funding. To learn more about Launch's programs or the Canadian Startup Visa, visit https://LaunchAcademy.ca    Content Allies helps B2B companies build revenue-generating podcasts. We recommend them to any B2B company that is looking to launch or streamline its podcast production. Learn more at https://contentallies.com

Dray Alliance is a venture-backed startup that is focused on building a container trucking platform to deliver shipping containers from ports to warehouses. Its technology connects container shippers with a network of vetted truck drivers through a mobile app. By leveraging API integrations with the ports and data from the mobile app, Dray Alliance's platform allows container shippers to manage and track all container deliveries in a single web portal and make truckers more efficient. The company has raised a total of $55M in venture capital (Matrix Partners, Craft Ventures) and working capital financing, and is already working with over one hundred enterprise customers, delivering thousands of containers a month. Give it a listen and let us know what you think? Podcast Guest Steve Wen Co-founder and CEO Dray Alliance drayalliance.com  Podcast Hosts Jeff Roster Twitter https://twitter.com/JeffPR LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-roster-bb51b8/ Website https://thisweekininnovation.com   Brian Sathianathan Twitter  https://twitter.com/BrianVision Website https://www.iterate.ai Podcast Website https://www.podbean.com/pu/pbblog-f8asf-af2782 https://thisweekininnovation.com Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-week-in-innovation/id1562068014 Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/2QDqTUnt6jebdRHbRzSTJN  LaunchPadOne https://www.launchpaddm.com/pd/This-Week-in-Innovation?showAllEpisodes=true Listen Notes https://lnns.co/2QPSfnizE5K         #innovation, #innovation, #Startup, #Startups,#Retailers, #retail, #thisweekininnovation, #DigitalTransformation, #retailtechnology, #retailtech, #futureofretail , #retailtrends, #emergingtechnologies, #podcast, #retailpodcast, #VentureCapital, #VC,  #Founders, #Entrepreneurs, #Gartner,#5ForcesOfInnovation, #ArtificialIntelligence , #AI, #cloud, #InternetOfThings, #IoT, #Blockchain, #computervision,  #Robots, #dronedelivery, #lastmiledelivery, #lastmilelogistics, #lastmile,

In today's Episode of Figuring Out with Raj Shamani, we have Ayush Jaiswal. He is currently building Pesto.tech.Pesto is on a mission to turn global software engineering wages into a meritocracy, regardless of where someone is born. Today they are focusing on upskilling India's 5 million software engineers and pairing them with the world's top tech companies.They are backed by Matrix Partners, Ryan Hoover, Sahil Lavignia, Hiten Shah, Ankur Nagpal, and some others.Developers outside India can easily get a job with a salary of about $1000k, but this isn't the situation in India. Ayush explains why India is still lagging behind and what we can do to overcome this.He talks about top must-read books for entrepreneurs like Venture deals, Make Your Bed, etc.Bitcoin was developed to decentralize the power and provide an alternative payment system that would operate free of central control. Ayush shares his insights on this.To learn more about building a business, industries, and skills to focus on the future, watch the video till the end!Follow me and my content on other social media handles:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rajshamani/​LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajshamani/​Twitter: https://twitter.com/rajshamani​Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shamaniraj

Kojo Osei is a partner at Matrix Partners. A Little More On Kojo (from the Matrix website)I grew up in Accra, Ghana's commercial capital known for its bustling street markets. My mother was an entrepreneur who ran a small retail business. She was the first entrepreneur I worked with. From her, I learned that doing what you love leads to persistence and ultimately, success.In college, I fell in love with math and computer science. I was drawn to programming as a way to turn imagination into reality. I bought in fully to the promise of technology as a tool to solve hard problems. Espresso-fueled late-night coding sessions were common. That and squash round robins were the twin pillars of my college years.After college, I turned down a corporate job to join a startup called Sirona as the first employee and founding engineer. After building our initial product and early engineering team I took on the challenge of building out a product organization as Head of Product. At Sirona, we built managed cloud infrastructure and machine learning workflows for radiology clinics. Building critical infrastructure and innovating with our users every day was a highlight of my career.My startup experience at Sirona gave me a deep appreciation for the founder journey and influenced how I approach investing. I look for founders who radically challenge the status quo and have the self-awareness to chart a practical path to their vision.★ Support this podcast ★

Neeraj Gunsagar is the CEO and President of byte®, a direct-to-consumer aligner company that is revolutionizing the orthodontic industry.  Byte was recently acquired by Dentsply Sirona for $1.04 billion to expand its DTC Aligner business to dentists across the world. Prior to joining byte®, Neeraj was the Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Revenue Officer and SVP of Finance & Operations at TrueCar, Inc (NASDAQ: TRUE). In his various roles, Neeraj was responsible for the Company's overall marketing strategy, corporate communications, consumer acquisition, research, finance and business operations (BizOps). Neeraj helped the Company go public in 2014 and played a significant role in profitably scaling the business from $70M of revenue in 2012 to over $350M in 2018. Prior to joining TrueCar, Gunsagar spent the first 15 years of his career as a Private Equity/Venture Capital Investor. He was Vice President at both Matrix Partners' India and Garnett & Helfrich Capital, and a Financial Analyst with Qualcomm Ventures.   Gunsagar started his career on Wall Street at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ), where he advised companies such as Worldcom and Iridium on complex restructurings and acquisitions. Gunsagar holds a B.S. in Business Administration from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Gabriela Ariana Campoverde sits down with Ram Palaniappan, Founder and CEO of Earnin, which gives people access to their pay directly from their smartphones. No hidden fees, no penalties, no waiting—just access to your hard-earned cash right when you need it. With each transaction users are given the opportunity to pay what they believe is fair. In this episode, you will learn all about how: - Ram started Earnin by lending his own money to his colleagues - Earnin addresses the Earned Wage Access gap - 66% of users see an increase in their ability to pay bills with Earnin' - The lending landscape is changing - And so much more! About Ram Palaniappan Ram Palaniappan, is the Founder and CEO of Earnin. He is passionate about building a financial system for the people, by the people. He is a graduate of the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, where he earned his MMS, and Purdue University Krannert School of Management, where he earned his MBA. About Earnin Earnin gives people access to their pay directly from their smartphones, whenever they need it. Launched in 2014, Earnin is driving consumer-empowered finance through mobile technology by breaking open more than $1 trillion held up in America's pay cycle. Current funding partners include Andreessen Horowitz, Matrix Partners, Ribbit Capital, Felicis Ventures, March Capital Partners, Trinity Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Camp One Ventures. To learn more about Earnin, visit earnin.com. For more FinTech insights, follow us below: Medium: medium.com/wharton-fintech WFT Twitter: twitter.com/whartonfintech Gabriela's Twitter: twitter.com/byGabyC Gabriela's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/gcampoverde

This week in Indian startup news, Pine Labs files for confidential IPO in the US, Edtech startups looking to self-regulate the edtech sector and GlobalBees acquire three more D2C brands. In funding news, Lead School raises $100 million to become a unicorn, Refyne raises $82 million, FPL Technologies raises $75 million, and Curefoods raises $62 million. Pine Labs files for confidential IPO in the US: Indian fintech giant Pine Labs, which offers an end-to-end payment solution for merchants, has filed for a ‘confidential' IPO in the US - planning to raise around $500 million which would value the company anywhere between $5.5 to $7 billion. Unlike traditional IPOs, while filing a confidential IPO – a company does not need to disclose any details or their DRHP to the public until it is approved by the regulatory body. Edtech startups looking to self-regulate the edtech sector: A few weeks back, the Indian government had issued an advisory for parents and students - cautioning them against misselling done by some edtech companies. Amid all this, 15 edtech companies which include some of India's biggest edtech startups like Byju's, Unacademy, Vedantu, and upGrad have come together to set up an autonomous body called ‘India EdTech Consortium' under the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). With this, these companies want to create a self-regulatory code for the industry and adhere to a ‘common code of conduct'. GlobalBees acquires three more D2C brands: Thrasio-style D2C house of brands unicorn GlobalBees has acquired three more D2C brands this week - including The Butternut Company (a healthy snacks brand), Mush (a sustainable clothing brand) and Strauss (a sports and fitness equipment brand). With these acquisitions, GlobalBees already has 11 brands in their portfolio. The startup plans to acquire more than 100 brands within the next three years - across categories like FMCG, sports, lifestyle and home organisation. Lead School raises $100 million to become a unicorn: Edtech startup Lead School, which is focused on providing technology solutions to schools enabling them to conduct online classes via virtual classrooms, has raised $100 million in a round led by GSV Ventures and WestBridge Capital – making them India's 3rd unicorn this year. Refyne raises $82 million: Early wage access platform Refyne, which allows employees to access their salaries on-demand without waiting for the end of the month, has raised $82 million in a round led by Tiger Global Management. FPL Technologies raises $75 million: Fintech startup FPL Technologies, which operates credit scoring platform OneScore and issues its own credit card called OneCard, has raised $75 million from QED Investors, Janchor Partners, Sequoia Capital India, Matrix Partners and Hummingbird Ventures at a $750 million valuation. Curefoods raises $62 million: Cloud kitchen startup Curefoods has raised $62 million from Iron Pillar, Chiratae Ventures, Sixteenth Street Capital, Accel Partners and Binny Bansal (Flipkart co-founder).

On this founder journey, we speak to Rohit MA, co-founder and CEO of Cloudnine Hospitals. It is a chain of maternity hospitals that's spread across 9 cities and has 20+ hospitals. We speak to Rohit about his journey, how he raised capital for the business, how he scaled and the focus on customer experience. Join our No-Spam WhatsApp GroupHere's an episode outline: (03:39) - The Thesis behind starting a Speciality Maternity Hospital(10:05) - The Pros & Cons of having experience in the industry you start your business. (14:29) - The Business & Economics of running a hospital(22:24) - The Genesis of the idea of building a chain(30:24) - The Investment required to setup hospitals and how Cloudnine raised capital for it(43:21) - The Journey of Scaling Up & Building Processes (01:07:09) - Rohit's relationship with Money and how that's evolved Hello and Happy New Year! Hope 2022 is 100x better than 2021 for each one of us! At The Indian Dream, we're excited to bring you business content that's worth your time. And we're kicking off 2022 with an amazing founder! We have Rohit on the show today, the Co-Founder of Cloud Nine Hospitals. For those of you who don't know, Cloud Nine is a chain of Maternity hospitals. In fact, they were the pioneers of dedicated pregnancy hospital when they first launched in 2007. Since then, they've expanded to 9 cities and built more than 20 hospitals. Along the way, they've raised close to 500 Crores from investors like Matrix Partners, Sequoia, and True North!We speak to Rohit about how they came up with the idea to build a speciality hospital when Multi-speciality hospitals were the norm, the economics of a hospital, their customer focus and the innovations that have come out of that. Here's an example of one such innovation: If you've been a parent, you would know that back in the day, the cost of delivering a child through natural birth process vs a C-section were different with the latter being more expensive. This resulted in mis-aligned incentives where hospitals often pushed for C-Section, if when not needed, because they made more revenue. Cloudnine was the first hospital to standardize rates and improve the experience for the to-be parents. Just like this, they've done a bunch of innovations across the process of pregnancy as well as scaling operations. We talk to Rohit about his entire journey, inflection points and the learnings from building a large business in the healthcare industry! 

On today's episode, Dana Stalder shares lessons on company building from his time as an early executive at Netscape, Ebay & Paypal. Dana is also a General Partner at Matrix Partners and shares the fintech investment themes he is most excited about.

Join us in The BreakLine Arena for an insightful conversation with Guy Guy, tech entrepreneur, innovator, and angel investor.Guy is the CEO and Co-Founder of Side, the only real estate brokerage that exclusively partners with top producing agents to create, grow, and power their businesses. Prior to Side, he founded 3 successful companies, including Kingmaker, Biz, and Kognitive. Guy is an advisor to companies like Vidyard, a YCombinator top 100 company. He also served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Matrix Partners, one of the best venture capital tech funds in the world. Today, Guy is dedicated to transforming the best real estate agents into market-leading businesses. He believes that the future of real estate is local, boutique, specialized, and agent-owned.If you like what you've heard please like, subscribe, or rate The BreakLine Arena on your preferred streaming platform! We would also love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or recommendations on the content we are creating. Feel free to reach out to us at questions@break-line.com.To learn more about BreakLine Education visit us at breakline.org.

On today's episode we have Ilya Sukhar (Partner at Matrix Partners) in conversation with Vikram Vaidyanathan (MD at Matrix Partners India). Through this conversation, we uncover Ilya's journey from founder to VC, learnings & insights gained from his journey at Parse.com, YC, Facebook and Matrix. They then dive deep into Ilya's investment in Fivetran -  leading provider of automated data integration. He takes us through the thought process behind the investment and much more. Tune-in 

On today's episode we have Dana Stalder, Partner at Matrix Partners. Dana is in conversation with Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India. They cover Dana's journey into the venture capital world, his learnings from his investments in Afterpay  and much more. Tune – in.

In today's episode we talk to Patrick Malatack, former VP of Product at Twilio and General Partner at Matrix Partners. Patrick started his career at Microsoft. He then joined Twilio as the second product hire and rose through the ranks to VP of Product. We discuss lessons from big tech that apply to startups and those that don't. We also talk about the importance of customer segmentation in the early days, why you sometimes have to say no to customers and why usage is more important than revenue for early-stage startups. Patrick shares lessons from his time at Twilio on product-led growth and some surprising tactics for creating a culture of customer obsession. You can find Patrick on Twitter @patrickmalatack.

In this Episode, I (@Jivraj Singh Sachar) speak with Shashank Kumar, Co-Founder of Razorpay. Razorpay is one of India's most successful FinTech Startups, providing a full-stack solution to businesses to accept, process and disburse payments. Founded in 2014 by Shashank Kumar & Harshil Mathur, Razorpay has come a long way in leading the financial services market in India and is backed by some of the most marquee investors across the globe including Y-Combinator, Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capita, Ribbit Capital, and Tiger Global Management. Through the Episode we discuss the following: 1. (1:57) : What does "Utilising your complete potential" mean? 2. (6:18) : What is the Importance of Market & How to deliberately go after Large Markets? 3. (12:43) : Early Days of building Conviction with Razorpay! 4. (16:45) : Shaping the Culture of Razorpay & building a long term Org 5. (19:45) : How do you find the right team members early on? 6. (22:51) : Maintaining the Principle of Staying Focused & Saying No! 7. (27:35) : "I do not trust an Entrepreneur who cannot tell a good story" ~ Why is storytelling important for Founders? 8. (32:58) : "What you do not know, you learn" ~ How can Founders leverage the skill of Learnability? 9. (37:14) : Building Networks ~ Creating Serendipity! 10. (41:19) : How has Shashank evolved from Leaving Microsoft, Starting Razorpay and building a 3Bn+ Org, which is only just getting started!? 11. (45:05) : Diving deeper into Shashank's love for Building! 12. (48:26) : Conclusion Here is the 64th Episode of the Indian Silicon Valley Podcast - Make Something People Want! That was it from this Episode, thanks again for tuning in! :) We're available on Instagram & Twitter. Feel free to drop in your feedback! Do not forget to Subscribe to our WhatsApp Newsletter. Do share the Episode with your friends if you liked the content :) I, Jivraj, am reachable on LinkedIn & Twitter! "If you never try, you never know" Stay Tuned, Keep Building.

João Graça is the Co-Founder and CTO of Unbabel, the Portuguese AI-driven translation platform that raised € 83 million from a.o. Notion Capital and Matrix Partners to overcome language barriers for teams.   In today's episode of Leaders of Growth, João shares some of the main tech-engineering challenges, the importance of structure for an organization, and quality of mind for founders.  Discussion topics: 0:50: Background of João Graça 2:48: Can you share some of the challenges you faced while scaling Unbabel? 7:08: Was there a specific period in time where documentation became more relevant? 9:25: What were some of the challenges at Unbabel from a tech-engineering perspective? 13:00: What would be your advice to smaller startups now? 18:07: Did you have certain mentors or support along the founder journey? 20:17: How do you keep quality of mind as a founder?

 About Tarun Davda: He is the Managing Director of Matrix, India. Prior to joining Matrix, Tarun was the Co-founder, India CEO and Board Member at StepOut.com, a venture-backed startup. StepOut became India's #1 online dating site with over 5 Million users. Before that, Tarun established BigRock.com (incubated by the Directi group) - India's #1 provider of domain name registration and other web services. Tarun started his career at Infosys as an IT consultant. He has an MBA from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad and an Engineer from VJTI, Bombay. 

About Tarun Davda:My next guest on The One Percent Project is Tarun Davda. He is the Managing Director of Matrix, India. Prior to joining Matrix, Tarun was the Co-founder, India CEO and Board Member at StepOut.com, a venture-backed startup. StepOut became India's #1 online dating site with over 5 Million users. Before that, Tarun established BigRock.com (incubated by the Directi group) - India's #1 provider of domain name registration and other web services. Tarun started his career at Infosys as an IT consultant. He has an MBA from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad and an Engineer from VJTI, Bombay.Join our No-Spam WhatsApp groupIn this conversation he talks about:His journey building Matrix India, or rather, reviving and strengthening a brand that was established when venture capital was still in its infancy in the nation. He discusses the opportunities and problems that he confronted while also delivering relatable anecdotes making the conversation all the more captivating.His perspective on how to define disruptive ideas/pitches & highlights how the way venture capitalists think and analyse has changed over time. With a deeper understanding of the matter, he now believes that the most disruptive ideas are the ones that are easiest to dismiss, and that it is only right to hold onto them.How the Indian Founder has evolved over the last decade, and how the crowd has changed radically. Says it's one of the best things that's happened in the last decade; people are more prepared and aware, and Tarun thinks it's just going uphill from here.His thoughts on improvisation and innovation. He believes it is subjective to each individual's interpretation of the terms, but in his opinion, no two marketplaces are the same because innovation is always breaking grounds.What VCs look for in a pitch/ deck: Product, Team, and Market. He believes in a country like India, where everything appears to be a vast market on the surface; coursing through it just serves to highlight how narrow the market is in fact.He discusses the influence of Chinese investments on the progression of entrepreneurship in India. He stresses on how the Chinese have been able to open our minds to accommodate the nuances in the market place. This is because they are benefitted from hindsight and a better outlook on what has worked for the companies in their nations.Key Take-AwayEvery investment is a learning opportunity.The most disruptive ideas are the ones that are the easiest to dismiss.An entrepreneur that can change your predisposed view in one, single meeting is the one you need to back.Rapid Fire:The hardest thing about your job? the toughest one is to be proven wrong.One book or a blog that has influenced you personally and professionally?Super Forecasting and 5 AM ClubYour most favourite superhero?Spider-Man.Three ways to support the podcast:#1 Share the episode with family and friends on social media with #OnePercentProj using the share button on the site.#2 Take a few seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts. This helps new folks find us organically. Rate#3 Leave a review if you feel inclined. We read every single message and love feedback. Review

Tarun is a Managing Director at Matrix Partners India. He is an intrapreneur turned VC who has had the unique opportunity to build and lead two successful Internet businesses in India. With over 12 years of experience in the trenches, he enjoys partnering with promising entrepreneurs and uses his experience to help them nurture, grow and flourish their business. He has backed companies such as Ola Cabs, DealShare, Stanza Living, Dukaan, Captain Fresh and many more.

In this episode of China Money Podcast, listen to all the news headlines in the China venture investment and tech sector for the week ending March 5. So this was another great week for startups and growth companies eyeing China's venture capital and private equity coffers. We saw over 60 documented investment deals close this week, and those deals totaled more than US$1.5 billion. True, this was a 50% drop from last week's massive US$3.2 billion, but this was a week of quality, not quantity, with deals done by firms like Matrix Partners, Centurium Capital, Cedarlake Capital and China Unicom. Plus a bunch of Clubhouse clones are popping up in China while the automotive sector sees new investments in electric vehicle services. Be sure to subscribe to China Money Podcast for free in the iTunes store, or subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

This is The Founders' List - audio versions of essays from technology’s most important leaders, selected by the founder community. Alongside our latest NFX Essay "The Hidden World of Pricing: Uber, Trulia, Etsy, Superhuman & More with Madhavan Ramanujam", we decided to release multiple supplemental pricing articles on The Founders' List. David Skok joined Matrix Partners as a General Partner in May 2001. He has a wealth of experience running companies. David started his first company in 1977 at age 22. Since then David has founded a total of four separate companies and performed one turn-around. Three of these companies went public. This post looks at how to create scalable pricing using multiple pricing axes, and discusses the different types of axes that can be used. David's featured article in this episode: - Scalable Pricing: A Key Tool For SaaS Success Read the full NFX pricing essay here - https://www.nfx.com/post/the-hidden-world-of-pricing/

Harshil is the Co-Founder and CEO of Razorpay. He started Razorpay after discovering the dismal state of online payments in India. He graduated from IIT Roorkee in 2013 and started working at Schlumberger. With an idea to change the way online payments functioned in India, Harshil quit his full-time job and founded Razorpay with his co-founder, Shashank Kumar in 2014 to simplify online payments for India. Razorpay was one of the very few India-focused companies to be selected for the prestigious Y Combinator (YC) programme in 2014. Along with 33 reputed investors, the company is also backed by GIC, Sequoia Capital India, Tiger Global Management, Y Combinator, Matrix Partners and Mastercard with a funding of $207M across Series A, B, C and D rounds.

Episode #46 of SlatorPod sees Florian and Esther welcome a very special guest and true linguist, 2M CEO Tea Dietterich joins the pod from Sunshine Coast in Australia.aStay tuned for our discussion with Tea on the language market in Australia: from the country's biggest translation clients in the private sector, and Cultural and Linguistic Diversity (CALD) communities to the emergence of remote interpreting, and everything in between.First off, Florian discusses Smartcat's Series B funding: the US-based language technology provider raised USD 14.6m earlier in the summer, led by Matrix Partners, continuing the run of investment in the core language technology space...Intento, Memsource, the list goes on; and there's now even a company advertising for investment.Esther talks about the promising earnings updates from language service providers Straker Translations in New Zealand, and Honyaku Center in Japan, and from LanguageLine's parent company, which said the interpreting unit was maintaining strong growth from June. She also shares the latest figures from the language industry job index, which climbed for a fourth consecutive month in November.

The guest on this episode is Anand Ayyadurai, Co-founder and CEO of Vogo. Abbreviated for 'Vehicle On the Go', Vogo is an IOT based bike-sharing platform backed by Hero MotoCorp, OLA, Stellaris, and Matrix Partners. In this episode, Anand shares his journey of building Vogo, his vision for Vogo as a last-mile connectivity service, the evolution of EV two-wheelers, how India can adapt to it, and the need for a stronger network among the EV players to drive India there!

In today's episode we chat with our first female partner on the show, Anoushka Vaswani, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners in the Bay Area. Anoushka talks to us about enterprise software, diversity at the decision table, the importance of self-advocacy in career progression and fundraising amid COVID.At Lightspeed, Anoushka focuses on growth-stage companies within the enterprise software and infrastructure ecosystems. She has years of investing experience, having previously worked on the investment teams of Softbank Investment Advisers and Matrix Partners. She also has startup experience as a product manager at MasterClass. Anoushka started her career in banking at Goldman Sachs before moving to consulting at McKinsey. She double majored in Economics and Psychology at Columbia and went to Harvard for her MBA.

Sacha Labourey is the co-founder and CEO of CloudBees which develops an end-to-end automated software delivery system that allows companies to balance governance and developer freedom. The company has raised over $100 million from investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, Verizon Ventures, HSBC, Delta-v Capital, Blue Cloud Ventures, Unusual Ventures, and Golub Capital to name a few.

Sacha Labourey is the co-founder and CEO of CloudBees which develops an end-to-end automated software delivery system that allows companies to balance governance and developer freedom. The company has raised over $100 million from investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, Verizon Ventures, HSBC, Delta-v Capital, Blue Cloud Ventures, Unusual Ventures, and Golub Capital to name a few.

In today’s episode we cover the importance of inculcating a strong and health culture in your company right from the early stages. Joining us to dicuss this is Ahana Gautam, ( Co Founder & CEO, Open Secret ), along with   Avnish Bajaj, (Founder  & MD, Matrix Partners ) and Rajinder Balaraman, (Director, Matrix Partners  India)

Produced by Foundersuite.com, "How I Raised It" goes behind the scenes with startup founders who have raised capital. This episode is with David Hassell of 15Five.com, a cloud-based software platform that analyzes and improves employee performance. In this episode, David talks about why you should bootstrap as long as possible, tips for getting to cash flow breakeven, pitching onstage at Jason Calacanis' LAUNCH Festival, why he religiously sends a monthly investor update, the value of being both contrarian and disciplined, and more. The Company most recently raised a $30.7 million Series B venture round in a deal led by Next47. Chaifetz Group, Bling Capital, Point Nine Capital, Matrix Partners, New Ground Ventures, Origin Ventures and Launch fund also participated in the round. Previous investors include Structure Capital, Slow Ventures, Jumpstart Ventures, New Ground Ventures, Christoph Janz, Lord Rothschild, Dave Morin, Zac Zeitlin, Clark Landry, Michael Liou and Michael Walsh, 500 Startups, David Sacks, John Ham, Jason Calacanis, Ben Parr, Matt Brezina, Ben Ling and others. This series is produced by Foundersuite, makers of software to raise capital and manage investor relations. Foundersuite users have raised over $1.5 Billion since 2016. Create a free account at www.foundersuite.com.

Fivetran, a startup that helps companies move data from disparate repositories to data warehouses, announced $44 million Series B financing today, less than a year after collecting a $15 million Series A round. Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) led the round with participation from existing investors Matrix Partners and CEAS Investments. As part of the deal, Martin Casado from A16Z will join the Fivetran board.

Gene Berdichevsky is the CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies Inc. which is a chemicals and materials company making next-generation Li-ion battery materials. The company has raised $295 million from investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, Next47, and 8VC. Prior to Sila, Gene was also employee number 7 at Tesla. In this episode you will learn: The essential ingredients for raising money Gene's top piece of advice for his younger self and new founders How to grow as a leader when your team is growing at 92% in two years His approach to solving strategic problems SUBSCRIBE ON: iTunesGoogle PlayStitcherTuneInRSSSoundCloudSpotify For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) that I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash. .alg-cta-consulting { grid-template-columns: minmax(-webkit-min-content,-webkit-max-content) 1fr; grid-template-columns: minmax(min-content,max-content) 1fr;; } .post-719 .wp-block.alg-cta-consulting.book .title { font-size: 40px !important; margin-bottom: 30px; } .post-719 .wp-block.alg-cta-consulting.book .red { font-size: 24px; color: #ff5e00; font-weight: 600; } .post-719 .wp-block.alg-cta-consulting.book p.btn-w { margin: 20px 0; } .sumo-wrapper .sumo-form .btn.btn-wrr { background-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Montserrat", sans-serif; font-weight: 700; font-style: normal; font-size: 28px; line-height: 1.5; text-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 0px 0px 0px; padding: 15px 0px; margin: 25px 0 0; display: block; width: 100%; height: 100%; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 0px 0px 0px inset; cursor: pointer; color: #fff; letter-spacing: 0; border-radius: 0; } .sumo-form .wpcf7-form-control-wrap.email input { color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-size: 25px; text-align: left; border-width: 1px; border-color: rgb(218, 218, 218); border-style: solid; border-radius: 4px; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 0px 0px 0px, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 0px 0px 0px inset; text-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 0px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 7px; margin: 0px; display: block; width: 100%; max-height: none; height: 64px; transition: none 0s ease 0s; } .sumo-form .wpcf7-form.init .wpcf7-form-control.wpcf7-submit { color: rgb(255, 255, 255); background-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Montserrat", sans-serif; font-weight: 700; font-style: normal; font-size: 25px; line-height: 1.5; text-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 0px 0px 0px; padding: 10px 0px; margin: 0px; display: block; width: 100%; height: 100%; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 0px 0px 0px inset; cursor: pointer; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); text-transform: uppercase; } #left-area .entry-content .sumo-form p { padding-bottom: 10px; } .sumo-wrapper .content-block .sumo-form { padding: 0px 5px; } .sumo-wrapper .sumo-form-wrapper.listbuilder-popup-embedded { position: relative; margin: 20px 0; } @media screen and (min-width: 992px) and (max-width: 1199px){ .sumo-wrapper .content-block h3 { font-size: 38px; } .sumo-wrapper .content-block h4 { font-size: 35px; } } @media screen and (min-width:768px) and (max-width:991px){ .sumo-wrapper .content-block { width: 55%; } .sumo-wrapper .content-block h3 { font-size: 38px } .sumo-wrapper .content-block h4 { font-size: 36px; } } @media screen and (max-width: 767px){ .sumo-wrapper .content-block {

Gene Berdichevsky is the CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies Inc. which is a chemicals and materials company making next-generation Li-ion battery materials. The company has raised $295 million from investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, Next47, and 8VC. Prior to Sila, Gene was also employee number 7 at Tesla. In this episode you will learn: The essential ingredients for raising money Gene’s top piece of advice for his younger self and new founders How to grow as a leader when your team is growing at 92% in two years His approach to solving strategic problems SUBSCRIBE ON: For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) that I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash. Moreover, I also provided a commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400 million (see it here). Remember to unlock for free the pitch deck template that is being used by founders around the world to raise millions below. About Gene Berdichevsky: Gene Berdichevsky is the Co-Founder & CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies. Prior to co-founding Sila, Gene was the seventh employee at Tesla Motors where he served as Principal Engineer on the Roadster battery, leading the development of the world’s first, safe, mass-produced, automotive lithium-ion battery system. Gene holds two degrees from Stanford University; an MS in Engineering with a focus on energy and materials, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering. He has co-authored 42 patents and 4 academic publications. Gene has been named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list, the MIT Technology Review 35 Under 35, and was a recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. Connect with Gene Berdichevsky: Website Linkedin Twitter * * * FULL TRANSCRIPTION OF THE INTERVIEW: Alejandro: Alrighty. Hello everyone and welcome to the DealMakers show. Today on the show, we're going to have someone that I think we're going to be learning quite a bit about batteries. He was one of the early employees at Tesla, and now he's building a unicorn startup. Without further ado, I'd like to welcome him on the show. Gene Berdichevsky, welcome today. Gene Berdichevsky: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Alejandro. Alejandro: So, Gene, originally from the Ukraine. You were born in the Ukraine, and then you were raised in Russia. How were those years growing up? Gene Berdichevsky: Yeah. They were great. I bounced around a little bit. Ukraine, on the Black Sea, and then spent actually five years of my life north of the Arctic Circle in Murmansk, and a few more years in St. Petersburg. Then when I was nine, my family came to the States. It was a great time when I was a kid there. Alejandro: Where in the states did you guys relocate? Gene Berdichevsky: We landed in Richmond, Virginia. I lived there through high school. Then I came out to Stanford for my undergrad studies. Alejandro: Got it. Richmond is quite beautiful. Was this like your parents were teaching, or what would you say drove the move? Gene Berdichevsky: Yeah. My dad's also an entrepreneur. He had some small businesses that he built there. They both became software engineers. Back in Russia, they were nuclear submarine engineers. Then when they came here, they both became software engineers. He had a beautiful place in Richmond, and I grew up in a little suburb there, much like many suburbs around the country.  Alejandro: So, engineering. At what point did you start developing this love for solving problems? Gene Berdichevsky: It's funny. When I went to Stanford, I think the one thing my parents really wanted me to do was be a software engineer. So,

The StepStone group acquired 85 percent of the US-American company Appcast for about EUR 70 million. Appcast is the leading technology provider for programmatic job advertising in the US. With the acquisition, Axel Springer continues its growth strategy and further expands the StepStone group’s portfolio of intelligent recruiting and matching tools. Appcast specializes in displaying job ads online precisely where suitable candidates find them. Appcast’s clients include well-known US brands as well as hundreds of other companies from all industries. Appcast was founded by CEO Chris Forman in 2014. He will continue to lead the company after the takeover of the majority stake by the StepStone Group. Today, the company headquartered in Lebanon, New Hampshire, already employs about 100 people. https://recruitingheadlines.com/appcast-acquired-by-stepstone/   PITTSBURGH, July 10, 2019 — JazzHR, the leading recruiting software provider for small and medium-sized businesses, today announced an integrated partnership with candidate-assessment provider Wonderlic to enable companies make more informed hiring decisions. JazzHR users can now view results from Wonderlic’s scientifically backed “Wonscore®” tests right from JazzHR – empowering them to compare candidates, predict engagement and accelerate time-to-hire. Wonscore assessments are designed by industrial-organizational psychologists to evaluate candidates for cognitive ability, motivation and personality. Seeing how candidates scored in each of these areas without leaving JazzHR saves time and gives hiring teams a competitive edge in making the right hire, faster. “We’re so excited to combine JazzHR’s easy-to-use recruiting solution with the power of Wonderlic’s pre-employment testing,” said JazzHR’s VP of Strategic Alliances, Amanda Friedl. “Users can now move candidates through their recruiting stages with confidence reinforced by each candidate’s Wonscore.” https://recruitingheadlines.com/jazzhr-partners-with-wonderlic-pre-employment-testing-provider/ 15Five, the pioneer in continuous performance management, today announced the close of a $30.7 million Series B round led by Next47, a global venture firm created by Siemens, with participation from Matrix Partners, PointNine Capital, Jason Calacanis’s LAUNCH Fund, Newground Ventures, Bling Capital, Chaifetz Group, and Chicago and Salt Lake City-based Origin Ventures, which led the startup’s Series A funding round. This latest round of financing brings 15Five’s total capital raised to $42.6 million. 15Five will use the Series B funding to further accelerate growth, scale sales and marketing, and continue to invest heavily in their innovative product that delivers on the promise of their unique Best-Self Management methodology. 15Five’s further investment in talent, will more than double its 2018 headcount by the end of 2019 to a total of 190 employees. “This latest round of funding signifies a paradigm shift in organizations’ people management practices, driven by a new generation of employees,” said David Hassell, co-founder and CEO of 15Five. “Millennials perform at their peak when given regular feedback, flexibility in how they work, and growth opportunities. Now as managers, directors and even founders, they see the value of investing in technologies that enable thriving workplaces. We believe that the market has arrived and demand for talent management software like 15Five will continue.” 15Five differentiates itself by basing its product and Best-Self Management approach on the latest research in organizational development and positive psychology. This new approach posits that when leaders build cultures and institute practices that support people in being and becoming their Best Selves, then high performance and uncommon loyalty are the result. Best-Self Management begins with a “Best-Self Discovery” process—setting at least one Personal Development Objective along with other quarterly OKRs—and leverages other key 15Five features like the Weekly Check-in and 1-on-1s. https://recruitingheadlines.com/15five-raises-over-30-million-for-its-performance-management-software/ Every day, hundreds of our military personnel leave the service in search of civilian employment. On July 25th, employers across the country are reminded to consider these servicemen and women as highly trained, qualified individuals to fill open positions in their ranks during National Hire a Veteran Day. While legislation is in place protecting separating servicemen and women as they enter the nonmilitary workforce, the best way a potential employer can honor a veteran is to hire one! Around the world, our military personnel serves to protect our freedom. While they are doing so, provide their returning brothers and sisters with the opportunities to pursue a career in the civilian world. Find qualified candidates for a range of fields from Information Technology, Engineering, and Cyber Security, to Sales, Marketing, Management, Finance, Healthcare, Skilled Trades, and so many more! HOW TO OBSERVE “Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill” and do it with a Veteran! Starting in July and throughout Veterans Day you can post your current job openings to Hire Our Heroes Veteran Job Board by visiting www.hireourheroes.com for a 50% discount on 1 year of unlimited job postings by entering the code “Hire a Vet”. For year-round partnerships, employers and veterans can find more assistance and free training resources at www.hireourheroes.com and search for the latest job opportunities.  Please take a moment to Honor our men and women of Armed Forces by offering them your time and consideration in the civilian workforce and use #HireAVeteranDay to share on social media. https://recruitingheadlines.com/national-hire-a-veteran-day-set-for-july-25th/ Amazon has pledged to upskill 100,000 of its employees across the United States, dedicating over $700 million to provide people across its corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network with access to training programs that will help them move into more highly skilled roles within or outside of Amazon. Amazon’s Upskilling 2025 pledge invests in a range of new upskilling programs to serve employees from all backgrounds and Amazon locations. Programs include Amazon Technical Academy, which equips non-technical Amazon employees with the essential skills to transition into, and thrive in, software engineering careers;  Associate2Tech, which trains fulfillment center associates to move into technical roles regardless of their previous IT experience;  Machine Learning University, offering employees with technical backgrounds the opportunity to access machine learning skills via an on-site training program;    Amazon Career Choice, a pre-paid tuition program designed to train fulfillment center associates in high-demand occupations of their choice;  Amazon Apprenticeship, a Department of Labor certified program that offers paid intensive classroom training and on-the-job apprenticeships with Amazon; and  AWS Training and Certification,which provide employees with courses to build practical AWS Cloud knowledge that is essential to operating in a technical field. https://recruitingheadlines.com/amazon-launches-initiative-to-upskill-100000-u-s-employees/   Follow Recruiting Headlines on social media: @recheadlines on Twitter Facebook Linkedin

Today on CHURN.FM we have David Skok, a four-time founder, investor, and author of the blog For Entrepreneurs. We chatted about how David evaluates startups to invest in, the definition of product market fit, and what he looks for after it.We also discussed the importance of churn and retention in the investment evaluation process, the key characteristics that companies with great retention share, and the power of negative churn.David also shared what a healthy LTV to CAC ratio should be, why the time to recover CAC is critical, and what attracted him to SaaS, to begin with.I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do too!

Ian Goh is a Founder and General Partner of 01VC, a venture firm building on China's untapped potential in enterprise and transaction platforms.  He is a seasoned investor in the technology space with 18 years experience, an early participant in China's tremendous evolution to today's Internet powerhouse. He was previously a partner of Matrix Partners and was heavily involved in consumer internet and transaction platforms. Prior to that he was a partner with Kleiner Perkins based in Shanghai and a partner in TDF Capital / Venture TDF.

David Skok is a serial entrepreneur turned VC at Matrix Partners. He founded four companies: Skok Systems, Corporate Software Europe, Watermark Software, and SilverStream Software and did one turnaround with Xionics. Three of the companies he founded went public and one was acquired. Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr, the world’s largest SaaS community and leading early-stage SaaS fund with investments in Automile, TalkDesk, Algolia and more. Jason Vandeboom is the Founder of ActiveCampaign, a sales and marketing automation platform that enables small businesses around the world to meaningfully connect and engage with their customers. Since 2013 with their transition to SaaS have grown to more than $50 million in ARR in less than five years, while maintaining profitability. Dave Kellogg is a leading technology executive, independent board member, advisor and angel investor. In his most recent role, Dave was the CEO @ Host Analytics where he quintupled ARR, halved customer acquisition costs and increased net retention rates before selling the company to a private equity sponsor. Fred Shilmover is the CEO and co-founder of InsightSquared, one of Boston’s premiere tech startups paving the way in the sales intelligence space. Throughout the InsightSquared journey, Fred has raised over $25m in VC funding from the likes of DFJ, Bessemer, Salesforce and Atlas Venture. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: Does David Skok believe that ACV should sit at the top of the metrics stack? What are the 4 metrics that fundamentally matter in your business? What can founders do to their pricing model to extract as much value from each customer? How do the very best businesses structure their pricing for value extraction? If ACV increase is a core focus for our startup, should we hire a sales rep solely selling to enterprise? What are the biggest mistakes founders make in this scenario? What can founders do to optimise revenue per lead? How does on need o approach lead targeting according to the individual skills of their reps? Is it best to start at enterprise and work down to SMB or does SMB and work up to enterprise work best? How does the product have to change with the scaling to enterprise? How does the messaging need to change with the scaling to enterprise? How do you need this change to be reflected in your pricing?     What does it truly mean to be an ARR first company? What is the right way for founders to calculate their differing ACVs? What is the right way to present that when pitching VCs? Where do many founders go wrong in how they present and discuss ACVs with investors? Read the full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Harry Stebbings Jason Lemkin SaaStr David Skok Jason Vandeboom Dave Kellogg Fred Shilmover

S01E15 - How to design and optimize SaaS funnels? Guest: David Skok, General Partner at Matrix Partners #StartupBasics series in Insights Alley Podcast: Startup, Product, Growth, Sales & Strategy Insights for Entrepreneurs. Its a Blog/Podcast by Arun Verma. Get Notes of this conversation at https://insightsalley.com Please give feedback and suggest topics for next episodes on arun@insightsalley.com

This week Bengaluru-based hyperlocal grocery startup, BigBasket, finally closed its $150 Mn Series F funding round. With the latest round, the company has comfortably landed on the unicorn club.The company will use the funds towards growth through further penetration into existing markets with more investments in the first mile, scaling-up of its supply chain and for developing new reseller channels. Further, Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori-led fitness startup Cure.fit raised $75 Mn from Piramal Group’s Anand Piramal, Accel Growth, Kalaari Capital, IDG Ventures India. Cure.fit uses an online-offline model to offer physical fitness (Cult.fit), mental fitness (Mind.fit), nutrition (Eat.fit), with a primary care vertical (Care.fit) coming soon. Gurugram-based digital nutrition platform HealthKart raised $25 Mn from Sofina in a fresh round of financing. The company said it would use the funds to further expand its store network, and plans to use data science and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve its customer-facing offerings. Bengaluru-based logistics optimisation startup Locus secured $20 Mn in a funding round led by New York-based hedge fund Falcon Edge, VC firm Tiger Global and its existing investors. The details around the funding round and fund allotment are yet to be disclosed. The latest round takes the total funding of Locus to $26.75 Mn. Ola Electric Mobility, the electric unit of Indian ride hailing unicorn Ola, raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons. The company plans to use the latest funding to fund its mission to make electric mobility viable at scale. Bengaluru-based lifestyle brand Chumbak raised $10.02 Mn in a Series D round. The round was led by private equity fund Gaja Capital with participation from venture capital funds Matrix Partners and Seedfund. The company plans to double the number of stores by next year and will focus on metros primarily. The funds will also help the company expand its presence in Tier 2 cities. Last but not the least, Bengaluru-headquartered hyperlocal concierge app Dunzo raised $713.9K from Centrum, through its private equity fund, Kalpavriksh. The startup is currently looking to raise nearly $50 Mn from investors. It was also closing INR 80 Cr Series C funding round to further its business. Tune in to listen to more on acquisition and trends!

Funding Pesto raised $2 Million angel funding Pesto, a Gurugram based edtech startup raised $2 Mn angel funding led by Matrix Partners, with participation of a group of angel investors including — Swiggy founders, Innov8 founder; Posist founder and OIC Capital’s Jack Yeung. BlackBuck closed its $150 Mn Series D round Bengaluru-based logistics startup BlackBuck closed its Series D round of $150 Mn led by Goldman Sachs Investment Partners and Silicon Valley-based Accel. Zenoti raised $50 Million in a series C funding Washington-headquartered SaaS startup Zenoti raised $50 Mn in a Series C funding round led by Tiger Global Management. Acquisition Gurugram-based hospitality chain OYO committed to acquire Amsterdam-based vacation rental company @Leisure Group. With this acquisition, OYO’s capabilities of asset management and technology will be combined with the presence, local know-how and category-specific expertise of the @Leisure Group in the sphere of vacation rentals. Gurugram-headquartered online travel company MakeMyTrip acquired a majority stake in Mumbai-based corporate travel management startup Quest2Travel for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will help the company to extend its service offerings to large corporates for their travel requirements. Hyderabad-based healthcare technology firm Suvarna Technosoft is acquiring a controlling stake in Mumbai-based laboratory information management systems (LIMS) solutions provider MedPrecinct Solutions.

Erik is joined on this episode by Ilya Sukhar (@ilyasu) of Matrix Partners and formerly of Parse, and Alex Yaseen (@alexyaseen), co-founder and CEO of Parabola.They start by talking about what exactly “devsumer” is and why it’s important. They discuss some of the biggest names in the space and how these tools are enabling people who are not engineers to have the kind of leverage that engineers typically enjoy. Ilya and Alex talk about the trends in the space and what they would be looking for if they were running a venture fund focused on devsumer. They discuss some of the common pitfalls founders face and some of the unique forces at play in this market. They talk about why people get excited about what they can build with the tools and how they intersect with some of the more developer-focused applications that exist.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Colin Campbell is our audio engineer and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik is joined on this episode by Ilya Sukhar (@ilyasu) of Matrix Partners and formerly of Parse, and Alex Yaseen (@alexyaseen), co-founder and CEO of Parabola.They start by talking about what exactly “devsumer” is and why it’s important. They discuss some of the biggest names in the space and how these tools are enabling people who are not engineers to have the kind of leverage that engineers typically enjoy. Ilya and Alex talk about the trends in the space and what they would be looking for if they were running a venture fund focused on devsumer. They discuss some of the common pitfalls founders face and some of the unique forces at play in this market. They talk about why people get excited about what they can build with the tools and how they intersect with some of the more developer-focused applications that exist.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Colin Campbell is our audio engineer and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

In this episode of AroundStartups interviews we bring to you Gourav Bhattacharya [Twitter, LinkedIn], VP, Matrix Partners India. Gourav is a graduate from IIT Mumbai & holds MBA degree from IIM Ahmedabad with distinction. He has worked with UBS & McKinsey prior to joining Matrix. Gourav wholeheartedly accepted our interview request and shared his perspective on a range of topics about India's startup ecosystem including: Day to day life of an Indian VC. Challenges of starting a SaaS based startup in India Tips to budding entrepreneurs Work/Life balance Happiness Credits: Background Music LA Montage by Rockit Maxx Audio Editing, Mixing & mastering at Mediaforart studios, Gurgaon Graphics by Jugal Mody Your suggestions and feedback are most welcome to make this project the best of its kind. You can write to me at atul@aroundstartups.com or connect via Twitter or Facebook. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/aroundstartups/message

Donde Search has just closed a $6 million Series A investment led by Matrix Partners, with participation from previous investors such as senior leaders from AliExpress, Google and Waze. Donde first launched in 2014 as a consumer-facing app that helped users search and discover apparel items based on visual characteristics rather than text-based searches. In early 2018, the company pivoted to the enterprise space, helping retailers power suggestions and related items on their websites.

This interview is with one of my most-requested guests and someone who’s had an outsized influence on my thinking about SaaS metrics and the wider SaaS industry. David Skok is a former entrepreneur turned VC, who founded four companies before he turned his focus to investing. He’s now General Partner at Matrix Partners. David was thinking about SaaS metrics before I was even starting out on my career. His industry-defining post, SaaS Metrics 2.0 is the go-to reference for entrepreneurs and VCs alike, and serves as a guiding light for anyone who has a need to understand the principles and measurements behind a SaaS business. This conversation was recorded at this year’s SaaStock conference in Dublin, where I was super excited to sit down with David in the SaaStock podcasting studio. There’s so much in here for anyone building or growing a SaaS business, we dive deep on certain metrics and measurements, we talk about why some metrics are only useful at specific stages of growth, and what’s relevant for businesses in 2019.

On this episode of Shunya One, we are joined by Gourav Bhattacharya, Director of Matrix Partners India. Gourav talks about what they look into before investing in a company or a concept. The discussions also highlights the future and economics of e-commerce business in India. Previously on Shunya One, Mihir Shah, Vice President, Product & Marketing Growth at Hotstar. Catch that episode here! You can reach out to Gourav on e-mail at gourav@matrixpartners.in , Tweet to Shiladitya @shiladitya and Amit @doshiamit for your questions or reactions to this episode! To join the Shunya One slack channel, request for an invite here: http://ivmpodcasts.com/shunyaone Listen to this show and other awesome shows on the IVM Podcast App on Android: https://goo.gl/tGYdU1 or iOS: https://goo.gl/sZSTU5

On the show, we bring you the story of Suchi Mukherjee’s ecommerce marketplace Limeroad. Founded in 2012, LimeRoad was focused on women’s fashion from day one, but it has recently expanded to men’s & kid’s wear space. Suchi is also looking to aggressively build a strong brick-and-mortar presence & has opened the first LimeRoad-branded store in Surat, Gujarat this year. The company has so far raised $50 million in three rounds of funding from Matrix Partners, Tiger Global and Lightspeed. Today Suchi Mukherjee is in conversation with Matrix Partner India’s Founder and Managing Director Avnish Bajaj.

On this week's episode of The SaaS Revolution Show, we take you back to the SaaStock New York stage. David Skok, Managing Partner, Matrix Partners is in conversation with Seth Besmertnik, CEO of Conductor, which was recently acquired by WeWork. They chat about the journey of 10 years to get to this exit. Speaking of journeys - our own SaaStock journey is only 6 weeks away from hitting a major milestone - our 3rd annual conference! There are still a few passes available so grab yours at saastock.com if you haven't yet, it's going to be epic. When WeWork acquired Conductor, Seth mentioned to WeWork's CEO, Adam Neumann that he Adam may have built a billion dollar company very fast but Seth had made many more mistakes than him. He wasn't exaggerating. Starting Conductor straight out of college, Seth messed up in a myriad of ways and had on many occasions almost given up and closed the company. Almost. But he never actually gave up. Seth has learned to play the long game and it paid off for him. Sitting for a chat with David Skok, he now wants to help you do the same. Listen on to learn: How he dealt with a very high churn How he made sure customers understand his product What Seth wishes he knew in the early days of Conductor David Skok is coming to SaaStock18 again this year, featuring in 2 sessions. Firstly a keynote - Get inside your buyers head to improve funnel conversion rates and then he's moderating a fireside chat with Corey Thomas, CEO of Rapid 7 entitled From $15M to $250M - Scaling with Soul. You don't want to miss either. David doesn't leave back to Boston after his talks. He will stick around meeting with as many early Stage SaaS Founders as possible, looking for the next HubSpot. Maybe that's you. if you do want to join us at SaaStock18- grab your ticket online ASAP https://www.saastock.com/tickets

David Skok is a serial entrepreneur turned VC at Matrix Partners. He founded four companies: Skok Systems, Corporate Software Europe, Watermark Software, and SilverStream Software and did one turnaround with Xionics. Three of the companies he founded went public and one was acquired. In 2001 David joined Matrix Partners, who had backed his last two startups, as a General Partner. David’s successful exits as an investor at Matrix include: HubSpot, JBoss, AppIQ, Tabblo, Netezza, Diligent Technologies, CloudSwitch, TribeHR, GrabCAD, OpenSpan and Enservio. David currently serves on the boards of Atomist, CloudBees, Digium, Meteor, Namely HR, Salsify, and Zaius. You can also find David’s amazing blog here! Huge thanks to Hardi Meybaum and Jason Lemkin for the intro to David today. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: What are the leading indicators that early stage VCs dig deep on to assess the strength of product market fit? What level of traction both in enterprise and SMB would an early stage investor deem exciting enough to pursue? What levels of engagement are sufficient enough to suggest cause for a much larger and increased round? How should founders assess sales rep productivity? What can they do to actively shorten the ramp time? How will early stage investors analyse the ramp time? What suggests repeatability of process? Why does David believe there is no point focusing on CAC/LTV in the early days? What is the single biggest thing that founders can do to show repeatability of process and revenue as fast as possible? What is the most common reason that people miss plan? How must the mindset of the founder switch from extreme frugality to hyper growth scaling? When is the right time for this transition to take place? What are the inherent challenges to this switch? Read the full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr David Skok If you’re looking to simplify file version control, ensure data security and save time while increasing accessibility, Egnyte is the right solution for your business. Egnyte delivers secure content collaboration, compliant data protection and simple infrastructure modernization; all on a single SaaS platform. Founded in 2007, Egnyte is privately held, headquartered in Mountain View, CA and supports thousands of businesses worldwide. For more information, please visit egnyte.com/SaaStr. MonkeyLearn allows companies to easily analyze text with Machine Learning. Customers like Clearbit and Segment are using MonkeyLearn to turn emails, support tickets, customer feedback, and documents into actionable data. Their platform makes it super easy to classify texts by topic, sentiment or intent or to extract specific data such as keywords, names, and companies. MonkeyLearn makes teams more efficient by automating business processes, getting insights and saving hours of manual text data processing. And if you would like to learn more, head to monkeylearn.com/saastr, that is www. m o n k e y l e a r n .com/saastr. Plus, listeners of the SaaStr podcast will have a very special opportunity to purchase monthly plans for half the price. So, check out MonkeyLearn and start getting more out of your text today.

The robots are here and one company, Starship Technologies, has raised $25 million to bring even more to the mainstream. This latest round of funding includes a follow-on investment from Matrix Partners and Morpheus Ventures. New investors include Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk, Skype founding engineer Jaan Tallinn and others. These autonomous robots can carry items, like groceries or packages, within a two-mile radius.

When Jack Beaman, CEO and Co-founder at Syft, decided to disrupt the temp worker industry, he thought he would be building a marketplace. He started off with a clear idea - create a marketplace where hospitality industry employers and temp workers would be able to find each other. What he didn't suspect was that they would find each other so efficiently that employers would experience 400% increase in workers. And they would need new efficient ways to manage them. An invaluable opportunity to create a SaaS platform they were prepared to pay for presented itself on a silver platter. Entrepreneurial Jack jumped on. Listen on to hear: How to sell and get customers in traditional industries What has helped with the adoption of tech Does traditional advertising work in SaaS Jack is one of many speakers that we will host in Dublin this October at SaaStock18. He will be joined by the likes of Corey Thomas, CEO of Rapid7, David Skok, Managing Partner at Matrix Partners and Meagen Eisenberg, CMO of MongoDB. As we are approaching the 100th episode of the podcast, we are offering a €100 discount for SaaStock18 to our listeners. Use code saasrevolution100. See more info and tickets on https://www.saastock.com

On this week's episode, we take you back to one of the panels we hosted on the SaaStock17 stage. Benedicte de Raphelis Soissan, founder of Clustree, Phil Chambers, CEO and co-founder of Peakon, and Jonathan Anguelov, co-founder and COO of Aircall discus the power of people, and how to hire, keep and develop people for the success of the company. Benedicte shares how she has grown Clustree to 25 people in the past three years, carefully crafting a hiring plan and an idea who is a right fit. Phil eludes to the importance of alignment, which Peakon has aimed to get from the first moment and has scaled to 70 people spread between three offices. Jonathan shares how Aircall has developed an outcome based onboarding process, where every employee has a bespoke and detailed plan, making sure that they get quickly on track with everything they need to know and be able to execute. Listen on to hear: What are the recruiting processes of three of the most exciting European SaaS companies How to onboard people so they feel part of the organisation and can quickly deliver How to transcend company culture through geographical boundaries How to create the company values and get a buy in from people When is the right time to establish remote teams P.S. Bringing such diverse viewpoints on key SaaS topics is one of many ways SaaStock helps to grow your company. We already have signed up over 50 exciting speakers for SaaStock18 such as Michael Litt, founder of Viddyard, David Cancel, founder of Drift and David Skok, Managing Partner, Matrix Partners. Join our Insider Sale by March 31st https://insider.saastock.com to get a 2 for1 discount code on April 1st. This is not an April fools joke. 2 tickets for the price of 1. By entering the Insider Sale, you also get the chance to win great prizes like platinum tickets, team tickets, and cool SaaStock swag.

Zack Urlocker helped grow a number of software companies to billion dollar exits - including Active Software, MySQL, Zendesk and most recently Duo Security. And he's been an advisor and board member for many other successful venture-backed software companies including HubSpot and SugarCRM. He's also written a rock opera! Zack's worked with many Tier 1 VCs including Benchmark Capital, CRV, Index Ventures and Matrix Partners and he now lectures at the University of Michigan on Entrepreneurial Leadership. Zack discusses: Why product management is a great career path for any budding enterprise sofrtware entrepeneur The importance of focusing on great customer service when you expand internationally How and why you should avoiding micro-managing local decisions from an overseas HQ The importance of transferring your culture and cloning your successful DNA as you expand internationally The mis-step Duo Security took in failing to hire sufficient local domain expertise when they initially expanded into Europe His focus on developing entrepreneurs in the Mid-West: a US region historically starved of entrepreneurial development & learning opportunities  Head over to www.alpinasearch.com for more advice on globally scaling your enterprise software venture    

David Skok is a serial entrepreneur turned VC at Matrix Partners. He founded four companies: Skok Systems, Corporate Software Europe, Watermark Software, and SilverStream Software and did one turnaround with Xionics. Three of the companies he founded went public and one was acquired. In 2001 David joined Matrix Partners, who had backed his last two startups, as a General Partner. David’s successful exits as an investor at Matrix include: HubSpot, JBoss, AppIQ, Tabblo, Netezza, Diligent Technologies, CloudSwitch, TribeHR, GrabCAD, OpenSpan and Enservio. David currently serves on the boards of Atomist, CloudBees, Digium, Meteor, Namely HR, Salsify, and Zaius. You can also find David’s amazing blog here! In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did David make his way into the world of SaaS? What was it about Matrix that made him want to make the transition from operations to VC? Metrics: Why are metrics so important? What role do they play in an organisation? How do good founders respond to questions on not achieving sales targets? What metrics in SaaS really determine the trajectory of the business? How can founders examine unit economics to determine whether they have a sustainable SaaS business? How does David address sales rep productivity? How much in ARR should they be booking in relation to their annual comp package? Negative Churn: What is negative churn? Why is it fundamental for SaaS startups to have a strong grasp of their negative churn? How does negative churn affect the pricing axis? What can startups do if they have no alternative product to upsell to? Upsell: To what extent should founders be willing to engage in customisation in order to upsell a product? What are the dangers? What should founders be mindful of? To what extent is upsell the responsibility of customer success? Should they have a hand in the sales process? What are the dangers and concerns? How important is it for a startup to track their champion with the customer company? Does it matter if your champion leaves? What should you do if so? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr David Skok

Wolfgang Allisat is the Chief Commercial Officer at Unbabel - "The World's Translation Layer". Unbabel - funded by the Notion Capital, Google Ventures, Faber Ventures, Matrix Partners, Schilling Capital and Caixa Capital - utilizes artificial intelligence to enable translations between companies and their customers. Wolf has previously held international sales leadership positions at a number of successful software scaleups including Omniture where he was the first international employee and grew the European business to more than 1,100 customers and 200 employees. Wolf discusses how enterprise software ventures can successfully expand their sales and marketing teams internationally including: The research and planning required to support successful overseas expansion How to recruit your initial sales hires with the characteristics to evangelise your offering and drive customer successes in new markets  How to adapt your business culture to succeed in each local market Wolf also discusses the way Unbabel have created a unique culture to resonate with the millennials they typically hire - including weekly company-wide surfing sessions! For more information on Unbabel's AI-powered translation solutions head over to https://unbabel.com and check out http://alpinasearch.com/clients/ for advice on recruiting A-players to globally scale your software/SaaS venture  

James Smith. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Bugsnag, the leading crash monitoring platform for web and mobile applications. The company helps companies like Airbnb, Lyft, Cisco, Pandora and Yelp catch and fix errors on their applications. Originally from London, James moved to the Bay area in 2009, leading the product team as the CTO of Heyzap. In his spare time, he likes hacking open source software, eating junk food and practicing his American accent. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Radical Focus What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos Favorite online tool? — eShares How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “If you don’t ask, you don’t get, apply it to your life” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:11 – Nathan introduces James to the show 02:00 – If a company has a software, Bugsnag detects when the software is broken 02:22 – Bugsnag charges monthly 02:28 – The price varies depending on the company’s needs 02:36 – Price starts at $29 a month to tens of thousands a month depending on the scale of the business 03:17 – Customer cohorts 03:57 – Team size is 35 and will be 45 at the end of the year 04:30 – James and his co-founder quit their job in 2012 and started Bugsnag in 2013 04:40 – James was the CTO for Heyzap which was a Y combinator company in the gaming space 04:59 – Heyzap wasn’t able to solve the problem James had with Bloomberg 05:59 – James invested in Heyzap and learned a lot from his time with them 06:40 – Heyzap was acquired by the German company Fyber 07:06 – James’ experience entering the startup world 08:30 – With Heyzap, James had to decide whether or not he’d buy his shares before the acquisition 09:43 – James’ price was low because he was an early employee of Heyzap 10:41 – James was 29 when he left Heyzap 10:50 – Bugsnag was initially bootstrapped, then raised in 2013 11:08 – Bugsnag went with Matrix Partners 11:32 – Bugsnag raised a total of $9.5M 11:49 – Customer number is around 4000 companies 12:04 – Bugsnag has a free and premium model 12:14 – There are 60K software engineers who are using Bugsnag 12:21 – One third are organizations and the rest are using it for free 13:00 – First year revenue was $4.5K in ARR 13:27 – Bugsnag has broken $2M ARR already 13:47 – “The expansion revenue is really, really strong” 13:50 – Bugsnag is constantly in a net negative churn 14:06 – Logo churn is around 1% 14:40 – Bugsnag started with low deal sizes and grew them slowly 15:05 – People try Bugsnag for free and see its value 15:45 – Healthy net negative churn in the industry is around mid-single digit to low double digit negative churn 16:41 – The best driver of growth for Bugsnag is word of mouth 17:01 – Bugsnag also does conferences and had 18 conferences last year 17:10 – Sponsorship price per conference can go up to $10K 17:28 – Large companies go to conferences as well 17:35 – Payback period is the 12-month which is the rule of thumb 18:17 – Bugsnag is in a typical SaaS gross margin 20:25 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: If you don’t ask, you won’t receive; therefore, just get out there and ask for what you want. Small deal sizes can grow and expand to large ones once people see your value. Consider owning a part of a company—especially if it’s a company that you truly believe in. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

In this interview, David Skok explains effective sale strategies and how people buy. We also discuss reducing churn, increasing retention and the importance of improving your sales funnel.

GUEST  Avnish Bajaj is the co-founder and Managing Director at Matrix Partners – a Venture Investing firm, a firm that he set up around 11 years back. He did this at the back of a successful exit from Baazee.com when he sold it to eBay for USD 55 Million. In his own words, he has been a serial brand collector before he took the plunge and started eBay. He is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur, Harvard Business School, Apple Computers, McKinsey & Co. and Goldman Sachs. In our conversation, we spoke about the various transition points in his journey till date and discuss how he thought about some of those forks in the road. He talks about what his views on what it takes to succeed as a Venture Investor. We also talk about his views on entrepreneurship given his experiences as an investor and an entrepreneur in his previous innings. HOST HOST Deepak is a Leadership Advisor and an Executive Coach. He works with leaders to improve their effectiveness and in helping them make better decisions specifically around organisational and career transitions. He currently runs Transition Insight (www.transitioninsight.com) and works with leaders to handle phases of transition thoughtfully. He has worked as an Operations Consultant with KPMG in UK, Strategy Consultant with McKinsey in the US and as a Leadership Consultant with EgonZehnder (a Swiss Leadership Advisory firm) where he helped companies recruit CEOs, CXOs and Board Members and worked on Leadership Development. Deepak is a certified CEO Coach and is an alumnus of IIT Madras, IIM Ahmedabad and London Business School. His detailed profile can be found at https://in.linkedin.com/in/djayaraman OTHER GUESTS 1.Vijay Amritraj 2.Amish Tripathi 3.Raghu Raman 4.Papa CJ 5.Kartik Hosanagar 6.Ravi Venkatesan 7.Abhijit Bhaduri 8.Viren Rasquinha 9.Prakash Iyer 10.Avnish Bajaj 11.Nandan Nilekani 12.Atul Kasbekar 13.Karthik Reddy 14.Pramath Sinha 15.Vedika Bhandarkar 16.Vinita Bali 17.Zia Mody 18.Rama Bijapurkar 19.Dheeraj Pandey 20.Anu Madgavkar 21.Vishy Anand 22. Meher Pudumjee 23.KV Shridhar (Pops) 24.Suresh Naraynan 25.Devdutt Pattanaik 26.Jay Panda 27.Amit Chandra 28.Chandramouli Venkatesan 29.Roopa Kudva 30.Vinay Sitapati 31.Neera Nundy. DISCLAIMER  All content and opinions expressed in the podcast are that of the guests and are not necessarily the opinions of Deepak Jayaraman and Transition Insight Private Limited. Views expressed in comments to blog are the personal opinions of the author of the comment. They do not necessarily reflect the views of The Company or the author of the blog. Participants are responsible for the content of their comments and all comments that are posted are in the public domain. The Company reserves the right to monitor, edit, and/or publish any submitted comments. Not all comments may be published. Any third party comments published are third party information and The Company takes no responsibility and disclaims all liability. The Company reserves the right, but is not obligated to monitor and delete any comments or postings at any time without notice.

David Hassell is the founder and CEO of 15Five, the leading web-based employee feedback and alignment solution that is transforming the way employees and managers communicate. They have backing from the likes of Matrix Partners, Point Nine Capital and many more leading investors. As for David, he was named "The Most Connected Man You Don't Know in Silicon Valley" by Forbes Magazine, David has also been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Inc., Entrepreneur, Wired, Fast Company, and the Financial Post. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did David made his way into the world of SaaS and came to found 15Five? How does David view competition? How should founders view additional competition to their space? What is the right response? Why did David choose such a public and deliberate fight back against one competitive attempt? David has said before that is passionate about the meaning and purpose of the business vehicle. What does he mean by this? How does this affect his thinking toward management and organisational structure? What are the keys to creating a harmonized, incentivized and happy culture for your business? How scalable is this approach and how has David seen his approach alter and develop with the growth of the company? Why did David choose the more bootstrapped funding option over the traditional heavy reliance on VC funding? Which startups is this right for? How can founders know when is the right time to put the pedal to the metal? 60 Second SaaStr David’s fave productivity tools? David’s biggest mentor and how it came about? What does David know now that he wishes he had known at the start? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr David Hassell

Seth Besmertnik is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Conductor, the company that boasts the biggest customer list in their category including more than 500 Fortune and Internet Retailer 500 brands like Under Armour, Citi and FedEx with their web presence management and SEO. With this incredible success, the company has been ranked 13th fastest growing software company in the US and the 3rd Best Place To Work in NYC. They have also raised funding over $60m from some of the best investors on the east coast in the form of Matrix Partners and FirstMark Capital just to name a few. I would like to say a huge thanks to Fayez @ Bluecore for the intro to Seth today.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Seth make his way into the world of SaaS? What was the a-ha moment for Conductor? What does Seth mean when he says, ‘B2B companies need to build a weapon in their marketing’? How does this look in his approach? How does this differ according to differing startup budgets? Previously, Meaghan Eisenberg @ MongoDB has said ‘the largest lift you are going to see is from your site’. Does Seth agree with this? How should we prioritise the site? What are the fundamentals to consider in terms of optimising conversion? With the proliferation of content today, to what extent should B2B companies look to alternative platforms such as  Snapchat, Youtube and Instagram for content differentiation? What are the fundamentals to consider with platform diversification? How does Seth suggest creating a culture of content creation in previously segmented cultures? How can this be done with actionable strategies to encourage non-marketing professionals to produce content? 60 Second SaaStr What does Seth know now that he wishes he had known before? Biggest advice on content creation for B2B SaaS companies? Fave SaaS reading material? Being a CEO vs Being a Founder If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Seth Besmertnik

Part 2 with David Skok, now David is a serial entrepreneur turned VC at Matrix Partners. He founded four companies: Skok Systems, Corporate Software Europe, Watermark Software, and SilverStream Software and did one turnaround with Xionics. Three of the companies he founded went public and one was acquired. In 2001 David joined Matrix Partners, who had backed his last two startups, as a General Partner. David’s successful exits as an investor at Matrix include: HubSpot, JBoss, AppIQ, Tabblo, Netezza, Diligent Technologies, CloudSwitch, TribeHR, GrabCAD, OpenSpan and Enservio. David currently serves on the boards of Atomist, CloudBees, Digium, Meteor, Namely HR, Salsify, and Zaius. You can also find David’s amazing blog here! Huge thanks to Hardi Meybaum and Jason Lemkin for the intro to David today. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: What is negative churn? Why is it fundamental for SaaS startups to have a strong grasp of their negative churn? How does negative churn affect the pricing axis? What can startups do if they have no alternative product to upsell to? To what extent should founders be willing to engage in customisation in order to upsell a product? What are the dangers? What should founders be mindful of? To what extent is up sell the responsibility of customer success? Should they have a hand in the sales process? What are the dangers and concerns? How important is it for a startup to track their champion with the customer company? Does it matter if your champion leaves? What should you do if so? 60 Second SaaStr If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr David Skok

David Skok is a serial entrepreneur turned VC at Matrix Partners. He founded four companies: Skok Systems, Corporate Software Europe, Watermark Software, and SilverStream Software and did one turnaround with Xionics. Three of the companies he founded went public and one was acquired. In 2001 David joined Matrix Partners, who had backed his last two startups, as a General Partner. David’s successful exits as an investor at Matrix include: HubSpot, JBoss, AppIQ, Tabblo, Netezza, Diligent Technologies, CloudSwitch, TribeHR, GrabCAD, OpenSpan and Enservio. David currently serves on the boards of Atomist, CloudBees, Digium, Meteor, Namely HR, Salsify, and Zaius. You can also find David’s amazing blog here! Huge thanks to Hardi Meybaum and Jason Lemkin for the intro to David today. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did David make his way into the world of SaaS? What was it about Matrix that made him want to make the transition from operations to VC? Why are metrics so important? What role do they play in an organisation? How do good founders respond to questions on not achieving sales targets? Why are SaaS businesses immune from being measured on standard financials like GAP financials? What metrics in SaaS really determine the trajectory of the business? How can founders examine unit economics to determine whether they have a sustainable SaaS business? How does David address sales rep productivity? How much in ARR should they be booking in relation to their annual comp package? 60 Second SaaStr If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr David Skok

Hardi Meybaum is a General Partner @ Matrix Partners and similar to Josh Hardi is a natural born entrepreneur. Prior to becoming a VC Hardi was a Founder of GrabCAD where he built the company into the world’s leading cloud-based collaboration platform for engineering teams to manage, share, and view CAD files. He sold GrabCAD to Stratasys in 2014 for a reported 100m dollars, and continued to lead GrabCAD for the next year.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Hardi made the transition from founding GrabCAD to becoming a General Partner @ Matrix? 2.) When times were really hard for Hardi in making the move to the US, what were the big elements that drive him to continue? What stopped him from giving up? 3.) What does Hardi's time allocation split look like? How does he look to optimise this? 4.) How much of a role has David Skok played in Hardi's progression? What are the key takeaways from the mentorship? 5.) What are the right reasons to start a company? How does Hardi assess founder product fit? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Hardi’s Fave Book: Deep Work: Rules For Focussed Success Hardi’s Fave Blog: David Skok: For Entrepreneurs Hardi’s Most Recent Investment: SketchDeck As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Hardi on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Angelloop is the leading post funding management platform for private market investors and their portfolio companies. They help investors manage and track their portfolio companies on the cloud while providing them with access to their investments performance data. Angelloop helps founders of startups track their performance, manage their cap table and keep their investors in the loop. Investors get free access while their portfolio companies pay only $49/Month. Use or share the promo-code 20MinVC to get your portfolio companies online with a two month trial. This episode was supported by Wunder Capital, the leading online investment platform that allows individuals to invest in large scale solar projects across the U.S. Wunder’s solar investment funds allow you to earn up to 11% annually, while diversifying your portfolio, curbing pollution and combating global climate change. Do well by doing good and sign up for a free account here and join the thousands of people that are already achieving their investment targets.

Rod Drury is the Founder & CEO @ Xero, essentially beautiful accounting software for small business. Xero has received funding from some of the best investors in the world including the likes of Peter Thiel, Accel and Matrix Partners. Prior to Xero, Rod has founded and exited several successful startups including being acquired by QuestSoftware (later acquired by Dell). This success has led to a mass of awards including the likes of NZ Entrepreneur of The Year and NZ High Tech Hall Of Fame.    In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Rod came to found one of New Zealand's breakout tech startup in Xero? 2.) What were the very first days of Xero like? How and why did Rod decide to IPO from the start? How did Rod convey the narrative so well from day 1? 3.) What does it take to transition a firm like Xero from a 50 man startup to a 500 an company? What are the challenges? How do you assure a consistent hiring quality and mechanism? 4.) How are Xero doing in the US in terms of fighting Intuit? Is it a winner take all market? 5.) How was the fundraising process for Rod? How did Rod choose and meet his investors? What was important for Rod when making the selection? Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:  Rod’s Fave Book: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future Rod’s Fave Blog: Feedly, Techmeme As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Rod on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!   The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!

David Skok from Matrix Partners and creator of highly acclaimed forentrepreuners.com joins us to talk about the evolution of Customer Success as a strategy in SaaS, how its now taking over board meetings, and why Hubspot has the right idea.

Part 2 of Mike Volpe's interview with David Skok, General Partner, Matrix Partners and four-time entrepreneur.

On this episode of The Growth Show, HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe sits down with David Skok from Matrix Partners. Skok started his first company in 1977 at age 22, and since then has started four separate companies, three of which went public. Through his experience as a founder and now an investor, Skok has become one of the leading thinkers on growth and building a business -- and specifically in the areas of sales and marketing.

Avnish Bajaj, co-founder of Baazee.com and now with Matrix Partners. He agreed to have an informal conversation about enterpreneurship, VC funding and about his journey as an entrepreneur to a VC. The interview is a bit long (40 mins) but contains a lot of experiential thoughts.

For our introductory episode we thought about getting someone who helps people realize their tech dream and so we have Avnish Bajaj, co-founder of Baazee.com and now with Matrix Partners. He agreed to have an informal conversation about enterpreneurship, VC funding and about his journey as an entrepreneur to a VC. The interview is a bit long (40 mins) but contains a lot of experiential thoughts.

For our introductory episode we thought about getting someone who helps people realize their tech dream and so we have Avnish Bajaj, co-founder of Baazee.com and now with Matrix Partners. He agreed to have an informal conversation about enterpreneurship, VC funding and about his journey as an entrepreneur to a VC. The interview is a bit long (40 mins) but contains a lot of experiential thoughts.