Podcasts about Scale Venture Partners

Share your thoughts with us!In the high-stakes world of startups, few roles have evolved more dramatically than that of the CFO. Today's finance leader is expected to move beyond spreadsheets — shaping strategy, influencing product development, and building cross-functional trust. M.G. Thibaut has done all of that and more.In this episode, Eddie Lopez is joined by M.G. Thibaut — former CFO of Strava, DroneDeploy, and Copper, and now the founder of Coterie CFO and Executive-in-Residence at Scale Venture Partners. With roots in investment banking and big tech, M.G. has spent over 16 years helping venture-backed startups grow, scale, and stay agile through every stage.Now, she's focused on building something new. M.G. shares the founding story of Coterie CFO, a community redefining the relationship between finance leaders and the fintech tools they rely on. She also opens up about her advisory work at Scale, the traits of high-performing finance teams, and why she believes today's CFO must be as comfortable with ambiguity as they are with analytics.Topics Include:How M.G. pivoted from investment banking to startupsWhat makes a modern CFO indispensable to a startup's successThe founding vision behind Coterie CFOBuilding trust and transparency with CEOs and teamsThe evolving role of the CFO in a tech-driven worldAnd other topics…M.G. Thibaut is a startup CFO turned venture partner and community builder. She is the founder of Coterie CFO and an Executive-in-Residence at Scale Venture Partners, advising startups and mentoring emerging finance leaders.

Rish Gupta has had a long, winding journey filled with unexpected turns, painful challenges, and exhilarating wins. He has built and exited companies and is currently riding the incredible momentum and hype in the artificial intelligence world of AGIs. Rish's latest company, Spot AI, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Redpoint Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and StepStone Group.

Alexander Niehenke of Scale Venture Partners joins Nick to discuss The Future of AI is Vertical, Why Vertical TAMs are Getting Exponentially Larger, and Lessons from the Sector Giants that Lead to Dominance. In this episode we cover: Historical Reasons for Horizontal SaaS Success Shift Towards Vertical SaaS Solutions Unfair Advantages of Vertical AI Solutions Lessons for Modern Founders Expansion Strategies for Vertical Startups Talent Dilution and Competitive Moats VC Diligence and Founder Evaluation Regulatory Risk and Investment Decisions Motivation and Future of Venture Capital Guest Links: Twitter/X (guest)  Guest's LinkedIn Company's LinkedIn Company's Website The host of The Full Ratchet is Nick Moran of New Stack Ventures, a venture capital firm committed to investing in founders outside of the Bay Area. Want to keep up to date with The Full Ratchet? Follow us on social. You can learn more about New Stack Ventures by visiting our LinkedIn and Twitter. Are you a founder looking for your next investor? Visit our free tool VC-Rank and we'll send a list of potential investors right to your inbox!

We are doing a little rewind to a classic episode from the archives. Andy welcomes Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com, Robert Koehler, a go-to-market advisor at Scale Venture Partners, and Craig Rosenberg, Chief Platform Officer at Scale Venture Partners. They begin the conversation with the impact of economic changes on sales models, the importance of sales fundamentals, and innovative approaches to sales and marketing. They argue about  predictable revenue models in the current environment, the role of sales development representatives (SDRs), and the importance of aligning sales efforts with marketing strategies. The group gives insight on leveraging LinkedIn for business growth, the effectiveness of live events, and the need for sales specialization and deep understanding of customer industries.Host Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate.

It's VC week at the podcast. TLDR: This episode features interviews with Juliette Chevallier from Scale Ventures and Jasmine Singh from Jay Moon Ventures and covers investment trends in robotics, emphasizing the importance of execution risk over technical risk. Juliette Chevallier, Principal, Investments, Scale Venture Partners Juliette Chevallier has a background in autonomous vehicles and robotics, having previously worked at companies like Google Chauffeur (now Waymo) and MIT spinoff Optimus Ride. She joined Scale Venture Partners about 2 years ago to lead their investment thesis on robotics, AI applications, and cybersecurity. Scale Venture Partners' approach focuses on investing at the point of execution risk rather than technical risk, looking for companies with a working product and proven product-market fit. Juliette emphasizes the importance of understanding the customer ROI and business model as key criteria. In her role as a VC, Juliette prefers to have a deep, hands-on involvement with portfolio companies, acting as a strategic sounding board and collaborating closely with founders to work through tough problems. She sees her role as helping founders navigate the operational and go-to-market challenges. Juliette notes a renewed interest in robotics from VCs, though she is cautious about some "wild" valuations and funding rounds, preferring bottoms-up market analysis over top-down figures. Juliette is bullish on the potential of robotics foundation models (RFMs) to drive transformation, emphasizing the need for more multi-modal AI models that integrate vision, action, and communication. She is excited about the possibilities of AI to enhance robotics, but cautions about the risks of AI development burning through funding. Overall, Juliette's approach focuses on de-risking execution and operational challenges for robotics startups, leveraging her deep technical and business expertise to support founders. Learn more at: https://www.scalevp.com/ Jasmeet Singh, founder, JMOON Ventures Jasmeet Singh has a diverse background spanning robotics engineering, founding startups, and investing since 2012. As an investor at J Moon Ventures, he focuses on "physical AI" startups - those combining hardware, electronics, and AI in areas like robotics, IoT, and 3D printing. Jasmeet emphasizes the importance of solving real problems, not just building cool technology. He looks for startups with a strong understanding of the user and business model, noting operational challenges like scaling manufacturing and finding the right business model. Compared to the more risk-averse Canadian market, Jasmeet sees the US as a better environment for robotics fundraising. He advises founders to target large, underserved problems and focus on customer service and support. Some of Jasmeet's investments include Orange Wood Labs, Brisk AI, and Rural Hologram. As he launches J Moon Ventures, he is particularly interested in opportunities in agriculture, construction, medical, and sustainability. Overall, Jasmeet brings a unique perspective as an investor with deep technical expertise and operational experience in robotics. He is focused on backing founders solving real-world problems with innovative hardware-software solutions. Learn more at: https://jmoon.ventures/ – SPONSOR – The show this week is sponsored by FlexQube. Move material with any size, shape, and weight with the FlexQube Navigator AMR, the world's first multi-purpose and non-load carrying robot.The FlexQube Navigator AMR features a standardized coupling interface to connect with an ecosystem of different load carriers depending on the customer's needs.The system also features a safety-rated identification of load carrier footprint to secure a safe and efficient scale-up of different use cases in a factory or warehouse. FlexQube Navigator – robotics that delivers! To learn more about FlexQube's solutions goto: https://www.flexqube.com

Welcome to another episode of Category Visionaries — Funding the Future. In today's episode, we're speaking with Susan Liu, Partner at Uncork Capital, a seed-stage venture capital firm investing out of a $200 Million fund. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation: Shift to Seed-Stage Investing: Susan transitioned from later-stage investing at Scale Venture Partners to focusing on seed-stage at Uncork Capital, driven by her passion for working with founders at the earliest stages of their journey. State of Enterprise Software: The current enterprise software market is challenging, with traditional SaaS seeing budget constraints. However, AI-driven solutions are gaining traction, often backed by separate AI budgets within enterprises. AI Investment Strategy: While there's a surge in AI startups, Susan emphasizes the importance of founder-market fit and differentiation, as many companies are tackling similar problems in the AI space. Evaluating Early-Stage Startups: Susan looks for a strong founding team with market experience, a large addressable market, and a compelling product wedge when evaluating seed-stage opportunities. Traits of Successful Founders: Founders with deep industry experience, grit, and the ability to learn quickly tend to have a higher success rate, particularly in B2B markets. Advice for Series A: For seed-stage founders preparing for Series A, Susan advises demonstrating strong revenue growth and capital efficiency, as these are key factors that attract investors in the current market.   //   Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe.  www.GlobalTalent.co    

Today's guest is a Go to Market thinker & strategist. He has a decade of success driving growth, revenue, and strategic operations for tech companies, including B2B SaaS, martech, and edtech. Introducing Sol Weinreich, the GTM Advisor at Scale Venture Partners. They join Casey today to discuss the role of data in sales and marketing, the importance of communication, and  Incrementality. Connect with Sol:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/solweinreich  Company website: https://www.salesimpact.io  Ways to Tune In:Apple Podcasts:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hard-corps-marketing-show/id1338838763Amazon Music/Audible: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/0f4497c6-b402-4cad-9018-1e41b7e8f2bb/the-hard-corps-marketing-showSpotify:  https://open.spotify.com/show/1vVLpNI1LssMTiL6KdsamnStitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-hard-corps-marketing-showGoogle Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy50cmFuc2lzdG9yLmZtL3RoZS1oYXJkLWNvcnBzLW1hcmtldGluZy1zaG93YouTube: https://youtu.be/_JCsv-xzyd8Hard Corps Marketing is produced and sponsored by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through branded podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/ 

Chris Yin is CEO/Co-Founder of Plume, which he founded in 2024 to redefine how people use and think about RWAs. He is leading the team realizing the vision to simplify how users bring any kind of asset including collectibles and alternative assets in addition to traditional financial instruments onchain. Chris has an accomplished track record as a product lead and investor, with prior positions at Beluga, Scale Venture Partners, and Rainforest QA. In this conversation, we discuss:- RWAs- RWA-Fi- Advantages of tokenizing assets- Biggest challenges in RWA deployment- Plume's unique offerings in the RWA space- Which collectibles and alternative assets that will be most valuable to bring onchain- Alternative assets for retail investors- Crypto evolving to serve institutional partners-RWA based loans and looping- Understanding the crypto product life cycle- Knowing your audiencePlume NetworkWebsite: www.plumenetwork.xyzX: @plumenetworkTelegram: t.me/plumenetwork_communityChris YinX: @chriseyinBlog: www.chrisyin.xyz ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------  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

The SaaS Mendoza line highlights the slope of the long term growth rate that investors expect and operators should target on a path to IPO. Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike break down the updated expectations.Veteran software VC, Rory O'Driscoll of Scale Venture Partners proposed a theory to identify the growth rate below which a company may not be on the VC-to-IPO trajectory.In 2018, Rory started with an analysis of SaaS companies at the time of IPO. In 2018, SaaS companies going public had a minimum run rate ARR of $100M and at least a 25% forward growth rate. He then examined growth rates over time and observed that the growth persistence - which represents the rate of growth decay year over year, that public SaaS companies grew at 80-85% of their previous year's growth. This metric is commonly known as "Growth Endurance".Dave and Ray discuss the new reality of the SaaS Mendoza line, with the most recent data in 2023-2024 suggesting that a SaaS company must have at least $400M - $500M" in revenue before they can IPO as evidenced by the recent Klaviyo, OneStream and Rubrik initial pubic offerings.CAC and Growth highlight other common "growth expectation" models including the T2D3 (Triple, Triple, Double, Double Double) and 56789 models. If you are evaluating what it takes for early stage company to attract new investors as your growth on a path to IPO - this conversation is full of great insights and perspective on investor expectations.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Klarity, an accounting startup based in San Francisco, raised $70 million in a Series B funding round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, with additional support from Scale Venture Partners, Tola Capital, Picus Capital, Invus Capital, and Y Combinator. The raised funds will be used to expand Klarity's workforce, tripling it to 390 employees within the year. Klarity employs AI to process data in contracts and internal records, eliminating the need for manual work. This trend of significant funding is also observed in other accounting tech firms like Ageras, FloQast, and DataSnipper, which have also secured substantial investment to automate accounting tasks using AI. AI-driven startups in other sectors, such as legal tech, are also attracting significant investment.Learn more on this news visit us at: https://greyjournal.net/news/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From growing up as a quiet kid in New Jersey and biking across the US in support of affordable housing, to moving west to join Salesforce and eventually becoming a partner at Scale Venture Partners, Jeremy Kaufmann shares his compassion-filled adventure with Bree and Vik while sipping The Dude's drink of choice: A White Russian. If you are building or investing in AI, grab some of your favorite vodka, add cream and Kahula, shake with ice, and settle in for his perspective on where everything is headed. Be sure to stay for his hot takes on introverts, decision making, teamwork in venture capital, and of course, his answers to the Fidelity Five Questions.www.scalevp.comwww.dwavc.comwww.fidelity.comwww.ravixgroup.comwww.greencow.vc

Have you ever wondered why financial operations within the insurance industry are notoriously complex? The intricate processes involved can be overwhelming, from data reconciliation to commission payouts.   In this inaugural episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Josh interviews Qiyun Cai, CEO and co-founder of Fintary, a financial operations platform tailored for the insurance industry. Qiyun shares her remarkable journey from technology investing and AI product development to the insurance sector, where she co-founded Amplify, a digital brokerage for life insurance. The challenges of financial operations in insurance, such as data reconciliation and commission payouts, inspired the creation of Fintary in 2023. Fintary focuses on life and health insurance brokerages, offering AI-driven automation to streamline financial processes and drive business outcomes. Qiyun emphasizes the importance of industry-specific solutions, the need for modern tools to attract young talent, and the potential for technology to transform long-standing industry practices.   If you're interested in the intersection of finance and technology, this is a conversation you won't want to miss!   In This Episode: [00:09] Qiyun's background and decision to start Fintary [01:33] Challenges in financial operations in the insurance industry [03:56] Focus and segmentation of customer segments [05:09] Product capabilities and industry-specific workflows [08:38] Use of AI and newer technologies in financial operations [09:03] Product roadmap and comprehensive approach [13:39] Target customer segments and organization size [14:32] Multi-line platform and expansion into different lines of business [15:45] Unique needs and use cases for different insurance lines [17:25] Incorporating technology and product development principles [19:04] Funding and customer agreements for company growth [21:14] Opportunity and challenge in innovating in the life insurance industry [22:27] Go-to-market strategy and product adoption [22:44] Typical entry point and ultimate buyer in organizations [23:33] The product delivering business outcomes [24:53] Evolution of the industry [27:41] Attracting talent to the organization [28:56] Closing remarks and call to action   Notable Quotes [02:45], "I just realized how cumbersome it is to run financial operations in the insurance industry."-Qiyun [06:28] "A lot of these companies have been looking for solutions; it just doesn't solve their end-to-end workflow needs."-Qiyun [21:21] "When we show our product to our customers, people say, 'This is what I've been thinking about, and you've built what would solve my problem.” -Qiyun [25:08]  "When I started in the industry, I realized how it has been around for many years, with organizations running in a very specific manner for quite some time."-Qiyun [26:08]  "Now is the time where there has been a lot of consolidation, and many businesses are going through a phase where they want to professionalize the business."-Qiyun   Our Guest Qiyun Cai is the founder and operator of Fintary, focused on building automation solutions that make a meaningful impact on businesses. Previously, she co-founded Amplify Life Insurance, a digital platform enhancing financial security. She was the first product manager at Spoke, creating an AI-enabled service desk, and an investor at Scale Venture Partners, specializing in B2B enterprise SaaS, IT infrastructure, and mobile technologies. Qiyun excels in combining technology and business innovation.   Resources and Links Josh Hollander https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/ https://www.horton-usa.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/insurtech-leadership-show/?viewAsMember=true Qiyun Cai https://www.linkedin.com/in/qiyun-cai-b3837315/ https://www.fintary.com/

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Northwest Registered Agent. Start your business fast and secure with Northwest Registered Agent! In just 10 clicks and 10 minutes, set up your entire business identity—name, address, mail service, phone, email, website, and domain. Everything You Need to Launch Your Business in Minutes! For just $39 plus state fees, Northwest will handle your complete business identity. visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Wistia - The all-in-one video platform for business, with tools that help you create, manage, and measure the impact of your videos. Try Wistia for free at https://www.wistia.com/startups1 HiddenLayer - Generative AI is revolutionizing industries. HiddenLayer's AI Detection & Response Solution secures your Generative AI & LLMs from malicious attack. Helping you generate more – by enabling seamless & secure Generative AI. Visit https://www.HiddenLayer.com/TWiST to learn more. * Todays show: Rory O'Driscoll joins guest host Mark Suster to discuss: advice for founders with traction but not yet booming (2:33), thirty years of internet cycles and their impact on venture capital (13:25), the approach to big-picture thinking vs. immediate traction and strategizing exits (36:58), and more! * Timestamps: (0:00) Rory O'Driscoll joins guest host Mark Suster. (2:33) Rory's advice for founders with traction but not yet booming. (9:09) Aligning incentives between founders and venture; reminding CEOs to be "selfish.” (10:23) Northwest Registered Agent - For just $39 plus state fees, Northwest will handle your complete business identity. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today. (13:25) Reflections on thirty years of internet cycles and their impact on venture capital. (18:25) Debating AI: Does it favor the incumbents? (20:07) Wistia - Try Wistia for free at https://www.wistia.com/startups (21:35) What Rory and Scale Venture looks for when investing in AI. (26:20) How OpenAI has changed the landscape (29:18) HiddenLayer - HiddenLayer's AI Detection & Response Solution secures your Generative AI & LLMs from malicious attack. Visit https://www.HiddenLayer.com/TWiST to learn more. (30:30) Debating “faux-mentum” vs. long-term sustainability in investments. (34:34) Balancing deep passion and business savvy when evaluating founders. (36:58) Rory's approach to big-picture thinking vs. immediate traction and strategizing exits (44:02) The importance of picking vs. price discipline. (1:00:58) Advice for founders dealing with “busted cap tables.” (1:08:07) Rory's advice for his younger self. * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Check out Scale Venture Partners: https://www.scalevp.com/ * Follow Rory: X: https://x.com/rodriscoll LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roryodriscoll/ * Follow Mark: X: https://twitter.com/msuster LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marksuster/ * Thank you to our partners: (10:23) Northwest Registered Agent - For just $39 plus state fees, Northwest will handle your complete business identity. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today. (20:07) Wistia - Try Wistia for free at https://www.wistia.com/startups (29:18) HiddenLayer - ****HiddenLayer's AI Detection & Response Solution secures your Generative AI & LLMs from malicious attack. Visit https://www.HiddenLayer.com/TWiST to learn more. * Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

 Chris Yin is CEO and Co-founder of Plume Network, the first modular EVM L2 blockchain dedicated for all real-world assets (RWAs). Previously, Chris served as a Principal at Scale Venture Partners, VP Product at RainforestQA, Director of Product at Coupa, and a founder at Xpenser. Chris has also invested as an angel investor in many projects including Retool, Hightouch, BioRender, Certn, Graphite, Alloy, District, and others. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/crypto-hipster-podcast/support

Welcome back to another short standout discussion with Andy and a roundtable of sales pros, Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com, Robert Koehler, a go-to-market advisor at Scale Venture Partners, and Craig Rosenberg, Chief Platform Officer at Scale Venture Partners. They kick it off with a debate on what win rates can expose about product-market fit, and how strategies to get sellers to reach the "win more than you lose" level. They get into the challenges of not having a standardized method for measuring win rates among companies, and the importance of considering win rates by product and market segment to avoid misleading averages. The group also touches on the need for a repeatable sales model before scaling, strategies for maximizing revenue per unit of time spent by sales teams, and wonder if many sellers and leaders expectations have just gotten too low.Listen to the full episode on Apple and SpotifyHost Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate.

Today Andy highlights a conversation he had with a top notch roundtable of sales veterans including, Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com, Robert Koehler, a go-to-market advisor at Scale Venture Partners, and Craig Rosenberg, Chief Platform Officer at Scale Venture Partners. The discussion revolves around the shifting stability in sales pipelines, specifically addressing the shortcomings of the traditional predictable revenue model in software sales. The guests give their own personal examples of the timing involved in scaling sales teams and explore new strategies for demand creation, including leveraging LinkedIn and podcasts. The need for adaptability and innovation in sales techniques has never been more vital.Listen to the full episode on Apple and SpotifyHost Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate.

Are you ready for the roundtable!?! Today, Andy welcomes Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com, Robert Keeler, a go-to-market advisor at Scale Venture Partners, and Craig Rosenberg, Chief Platform Officer at Scale Venture Partners. They begin the conversation with the impact of economic changes on sales models, the importance of sales fundamentals, and innovative approaches to sales and marketing. They argue about  predictable revenue models in the current environment, the role of sales development representatives (SDRs), and the importance of aligning sales efforts with marketing strategies. The group gives insight on leveraging LinkedIn for business growth, the effectiveness of live events, and the need for sales specialization and deep understanding of customer industries.Host Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate.

This week's guest is Dan O'Connell, Dan serves as Chief Strategy Officer at Dialpad and is also a member of the Board of Directors. Prior to Dialpad, Dan was the CEO and President of TalkIQ, real-time speech recognition and NLP start-up backed by Salesforce Ventures and Scale Venture Partners. He was AdRoll's Vice President of Sales and also spent 8 years at Google where he handled key sales positions. Dan holds an MBA from the University of California Berkeley and a degree in Communications from Santa Clara University. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/uncharted1/support

S3E4: Kate Mitchell, Co-founder, Scale Venture PartnersMoments that Made Her is a podcast where the rare and unique women that hold senior private equity roles share their stories, including the key personal and professional moments that defined their journeys and lessons they learned along the way.Moments that Made Her is a production of the Private Equity Women Investor Network, also known as PEWIN, which is the preeminent organization for senior-level women investment professionals in private equity.PEWIN provides its members with opportunities to network, share ideas, make deep connections with peers, and empower each other to succeed. Our mission is to increase the profile of women in private equity, and members represent institutions with over $3 trillion in assets under management.Moments that Made Her is hosted by Kelly Williams, PEWIN's Founding Chair, and is produced in collaboration with Purple Photo Group.To learn more please visit pewin.org.

Tim Guleri has had a remarkable run at Sierra Ventures since 2001. He has invested in transcendent companies including Sourcefire and MakeMyTrip which both went public. Before that, Tim had a successful career as an entrepreneur and exec at companies like Scopus and Octane which was acquired by Epiphany in 2000.Sierra has one of the strongest future of work and AI portfolios that includes companies like Paro, Krisp, and SupportLogic which acquired Emtropy Labs which was founded by great former guest Harish Batlapenamurthy. In full disclosure, Sierra and I are both investors in ArmorCode.Listen and learn...Why the most successful venture investors were previously entrepreneursTim's thesis for investing in gen AI customer journey company SimulateHow Tim identifies "gen AI whitewashing" when hearing pitchesWhy gen AI is more than just another platform shiftHow gen AI startups can beat Big Tech incumbentsWhy all companies are ultimately "financial products"Sierra's primary data from CIOs: "...they're spending money on use cases that unlock employee productivity"What Tim means by "build horizontally but execute vertically"Which jobs AI will eliminate vs. augmentTim's "one that got away" pitch from his early days at SierraReferences in this episode...According to CNBC, 69% of U.S. adults are uncomfortable with AI that can mimic human thinkingAshu Garg from Foundation Capital on AI and the Future of WorkRory O'Driscoll from Scale Venture Partners on AI and the Future of WorkSierra Ventures

Building a career is a series of choices, outcomes of those choices, and then reacting to those outcomes. Sometimes a small choice can have an outsized return, sometimes the reaction to an outcome can lead you down a new path. In investing we are looking for power-law returns, the small bets that we can return exponential value.Our guest today is an investor who has seen some amazing choices turn into huge returns and even better stories to teach and entertain us. Alexander Niehenke is a Partner at Scale Venture Partners where he specializes in Vertical SaaS investing.And John Ruffolo is back to talk about the news!About Alexander Neihenke:Alex Neihenke is a Partner at Scale Venture Partners since 2017. He has focused on early investments in vertical software markets where incumbents have failed to invest in advanced technology offerings. That thesis has led to investments in Archipelago, Dusty Robotics, Motive formally KeepTruckin, Root Insurance, Scout RFP, Spruce, Proscia, and Proxy. Motive has been one of the fastest growing SaaS companies of all time; Scout RFP was acquired by Workday in late 2019 for $540M; and Root completed its IPO in late 2020.He received his bachelor's from UC Berkeley.In this episode we discuss:(0:00:56) News rundown with John Ruffolo(0:16:27) Alexander's path to becoming an investor(0:18:45) The effect of watching his dad work so hard(0:20:50) Alex's experience working in the banking industry(0:24:31) How the experience at Crosslink Capital shaped his career(0:25:56) His role advising Dollar Shave Club(0:28:08) On investing in friends(0:29:46) Joining Scale Venture Partners in 2013(0:32:17) How he focused on Vertical SaaS(0:35:23) Alex's definition of Vertical SaaS(0:36:20) Misconceptions around Vertical SaaS(0:38:11) Why there's a misunderstanding around TAM(0:40:08) Case studies around misaligned TAM(0:44:04) Lessons from his investment in Root Insurance(0:48:59) How Scale's outlook has evolved over the last few years(0:52:06) Why Alex invested in Ripple Portfolio company Rose Rocket(0:54:30) Rules he lives by when joining a new board(0:57:29) What makes a good board member(1:00:00) Why Alex writes about industries prior to investing in them(1:02:52) Thoughts on the AI investing craze(1:05:47) Using data to analyze massive volumes of startups and their success(1:09:16) What would he be doing if he wasn't an investorFast Favorites:*

Scale Venture Partners' Craig Rosenberg joins us on the show to talk about how category design drives demand, how he mentors founders, and a handful of stories from the startup and VC trenches.Craig is the Chief Platform Officer at Scale and long-time friend and collaborator of our co-host, Damp.In this episode, we'll discuss:Category design stories from Scale's portfolio.How Craig teaches young founders category design principles.Is it ever too late or too early to pursue category design?Common Point of View pitfalls.If you want to join a free community of over 500 category designers and join these conversations, you can do so at CategoryThinkers.comConnect with our guest and hosts on LinkedIn:Craig RosenbergMike DamphousseJohn RougeuxPablo Gonzalez

Today we are happy to welcome Ameer Awadiyeh, VP of Investments at AlphaQ Venture Capital, a founder-led VC Fund of Funds. Prior to joining AQVC, Ameer was part of the investment team at Israel-based Vintage Investment Partners, where he developed deep expertise within the global VC fund ecosystem through sourcing, conducting in-depth due diligence, and modeling primary and secondary VC investment opportunities in both established and emerging managers, overseeing the fund of funds pipeline and budget allocation, and establishing a broad network of VCs and VC allocators across the U.S., Europe and Israel.Alph Q has 9 funds and counting, Whitestart Capital, Scale Venture Partners, Abstract Ventures, Nucleus Capital, Signature Ventures, Pale Blue Dot, Maple Capital, Symbol Ventures. AlphaQ is becoming the European gateway to a diversified venture capital fund portfolio via one single stock.

Shahin chats with Craig Rosenberg, Chief Platform Officer at Scale Venture Partners, about the ins and outs of what's working in the enterprise space. The episode covers the following: The state of today's enterprise landscapeThe role of PLG in your go-to-market strategyThe power of events and experiencesContent sharing Craig joined Scale in 2022 to help build and manage their Go-To-Market Platform. The Scale GTM Platform delivers critical expertise to help software companies drive efficient hyper-growth. Prior to joining Scale, Craig was Distinguished Vice President in the Sales Practice for Gartner. While there he advised revenue leaders on their strategic decisions and wrote innovative research on new GTM strategies such as revenue operations and account-based strategy. He joined Gartner in 2019 as part of the acquisition of TOPO where Craig was the co-founder and Chief Analyst. Craig was a Magna Cum Laude graduate of UCLA. When he isn't talking about GTM strategy, he is spending time with his wife and three young boys. Resources mentioned in this episode: The JOLT Effect - Matthew DixonThe Psychopath Test - Jon RonsonC.J Box books _________________ Want to be a part of something great? Fill out the ABM in APAC survey for exclusive tools, insights and a chance at winning a free customised team consultation with xGrowth's experts to help with your ABM strategy. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ABM-APAC-2023 _________________ Hosted & Produced by Shahin Hoda, Allysa Maywald & Alexander Hipwell, from xGrowth. We would love to get your questions, ideas and feedback about Growth Colony, email podcast@xgrowth.com.au

MLOps Coffee Sessions #169 with Barak Turovsky, MLOps at the Age of Generative AI. Thanks to wandb.ai for sponsoring this episode. Check out their new course on evaluating and fine-tuning LLMs wandb.me/genai-mlops.course // Abstract The talk focuses on MLOps aspects of developing, training and serving Generative AI/Large Language models // Bio Barak is an Executive in Residence at Scale Venture Partners, a leading Enterprise venture capital firm. Barak spent 10 years as Head of Product and User Experience for Languages AI and Google Translate teams within the Google AI org, focusing on applying cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies to deliver magical experiences across Google Search, Assistant, Cloud, Chrome, Ads, and other products. Previously, Barak spent 2 years as a product leader within the Google Commerce team. Most recently, Barak served as Chief Product Officer, responsible for product management and engineering at Trax, a leading provider of Computer Vision AI solutions for Retail and Commerce industries. Prior to joining Google in 2011, Barak was Director of Products in Microsoft's Mobile Advertising, Head of Mobile Commerce at PayPal, and Chief Technical Officer at an Israeli start-up. He lived more than 10 years in 3 different countries (Russia, Israel, and the US) and fluently speaks three languages. Barak earned a Bachelor of Laws degree from Tel Aviv University, Israel, and a Master's of Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley. // MLOps Jobs board https://mlops.pallet.xyz/jobs // MLOps Swag/Merch https://mlops-community.myshopify.com/ // Related Links Bio and links about Barak's work: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E4Yrmt_Y57oTEYHQQDvt71XzSJ8Ew5WvscAQbHV4K3U/edit Framework for evaluating Generative AI use cases: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/framework-evaluating-generative-ai-use-cases-barak-turovsky/?trackingId=%2BMRxEZ9WTPCNH2JscILTeg%3D%3D The Great A.I. Awakening: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html --------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ------------- Join our slack community: https://go.mlops.community/slack Follow us on Twitter: @mlopscommunity Sign up for the next meetup: https://go.mlops.community/register Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://mlops.community/ Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/ Connect with Barak on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/baraktur/ Timestamps: [00:00] Barak's preferred coffee [00:23] Barak Turovsky's background [03:10] Please like, share, and subscribe to our MLOps channels! [04:09] Getting into tech [08:39] First wave of AI [12:39] Building a product at a scale and the challenges [15:59] Framework for evaluating Generative AI use cases [24:33] Machine trust adoption [29:13] Wandb's new course [31:10] Focus on achievable use cases for LLMs. [36:36] User feedback [38:23] Disruption of entertainment and customer interactions [46:14] Get new tools or work with your own distribution? [47:57] Importance of data engineers [53:28] ML Engineers Collaborate with Product [56:13] Wrap up

Sam Baker is an investor at Scale Venture Partners, a VC firm that has invested in amazing companies such as HubSpot, DocuSign, Box, Bill.com, Root Insurance, and many more. He was named to Business Insider's list of Rising Stars in Venture Capital. Prior to joining Scale, he was a Growth Manager at Tilt.com that was acquired by Airbnb. Before that, he worked at Box. He began his career at Glouston Capital Partners, an investment firm focused on private equity and venture capital secondaries. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - Robotics use cases in the warehouse, what functions can be automated - Why is the focus shifting to platforms - Why is the supply chain industry defined by exception handling and what can be done to address it - Collaboration between humans and machines - Robotics in the construction industry - Robotics in the restaurant industry - Startup trends within AI + robotics Sam's favorite books: - Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time (Author: Howard Schultz) - Hatching Twitter (Author: Nick Bilton) - Endurance (Author: Alfred Lansing) --------Where to find Prateek Joshi: Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: https://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Join Jeff Mains in this week's episode of the SaaS Fuel™ Expert Series as he welcomes Sam Baker, Principal at Scale Venture Partners, to talk about everything from the power of face-to-face networking events to the potential of robots in the food services industry.Sam highlights the significance of fostering a robust connection between CEOs, founders, and board members, likening it to the dynamics of a valuable friendship. He also stresses the importance of establishing clear expectations from the outset to ensure fruitful collaboration.Sam Baker drops some serious wisdom on the differences between the investment scenes in Boston and Silicon Valley, as well as the key indicators of success for SaaS and cloud businesses.Key Takeaways00:00:00 SaaS Fuel Podcast: Tips And Strategies For Overwhelmed Tech Founders00:01:02 Tech Week in Silicon Valley: Connecting with Founders and Discovering New Solutions00:04:11 Find Your Perfect Software Solution with Tech Po: Honest Reviews and Latest Editions00:11:48 Exploring the Exciting World of Investment Opportunities: A Conversation with Scale Venture Partners00:16:06 Revolutionizing Warehouses: How Automation is Solving Labor Shortages and Cutting Costs00:17:34 The Rise of Robotic Baristas: Exploring the Future of Coffee-Making Technology00:25:03 Proof of Concept Pitfalls: Why They Don't Always Lead to Long-Term Engagements00:28:28 The Shift from Growth at All Costs: Why Companies are Prioritizing Healthy Cash Spend and Efficiency00:32:01 Insights from a Long-Standing Firm: Navigating the Financial Future and Investment Strategy00:36:11 Behind the Scenes: A Venture Capitalist's Favorite Presentations and the Importance of Meeting the Entire Partnership00:37:29 Why Humility is Key to Building Strong Business Relationships: A Story of Owning Mistakes and Winning Trust00:41:16 The Importance of Trust in Long-Term Business Partnerships: Insights from SaaS Fuel00:42:46 The Power of Partnership: How Taking an Active Role Can Help Build Great Companies00:47:33 The Importance of Setting Communication Expectations with Your Board Members: Insights from a Venture CapitalistTweetable Quotes"Being a successful entrepreneur is not just about making money, it's about creating a business that you're proud of and that makes a positive impact on the world." - Jeff Mains (00:35)"It's an interesting crossroad standing at the intersection of new unknown better and the old familiar choosing the right solution can feel a bit like standing in front of a big vending machine with a mass array of colorful candies." - Jeff Mains 02:11)"This is just a job where the learning curve never plateaus and you know you're always talking to people that are tinkering around with interesting things and our job is to figure out whether or not there's a good investment opportunity there." - Sam Baker (11:59)"It's really been that first or second go-to-market around 95% of the time, and we like where we play." - Sam Baker (35:47)"Setting expectations upfront is a key ingredient." - Sam Baker (47:48)"I always love to have conversations, especially with folks in the audience." - Sam Baker (49:25)SaaS Leadership Lessons1. Humility is key to building strong business relationships: One of the guests shared a story about a leader who owned up to a mistake and made a joke about it in front of the team. This level of humility and transparency can help build trust and strengthen relationships with team members and clients.2. Know your business inside and out: To make the right decisions for your business, it's important to have a deep understanding of your vision, goals, and capabilities. This will help you identify the...

What can CMOs do in 2023 to drive efficiency, increase velocity, and prove value to customers?This episode breaks down two of the most important levers CMOs can pull — well-defined positioning and revenue plays. Join host Rowan Noronha live from #PavilionCMOSummit2023 as he talks product marketing strategies with Kyle Coleman, SVP Marketing, Clari, Meagan Eisenberg, CMO, Lacework, and Sydney Sloan, Executive in Residence, Scale Venture Partners.

Ofir Zuk is the cofounder and CEO of Datagen, a platform that provides synthetic data to train and test AI models. They have raised more than $70M in funding so far with Scale Venture Partners leading their latest round. He was previously the cofounder of Click Frauds and has held engineering roles at Check Point and Squeeck.In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - The need for synthetic data - Different methods that are used to generate synthetic data - What role does AI play in generating synthetic data - Generative Adversarial Networks - Synthetic data vs simulated data - Measuring the performance of synthetic data - Fidelity vs privacy Ofir's favorite book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Author: Ben Horowitz) -------- Where to find Prateek Joshi: Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: http://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Hunter Somerville is a Partner @ Stepstone, one of the largest secondary buyers, fund investors and players in our ecosystem with over $600BN in capital responsibility and over $100BN AUM. Additionally, Hunter serves on the LP Advisory Boards for Felix Capital, Foundry Group, Imaginary Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Boldstart Ventures, Ludlow Ventures, and more. Prior to StepStone, Hunter was a general partner with Greenspring Associates, a venture capital and growth equity investment firm that merged with StepStone in 2021. Before that, he worked as an associate for Camden Private Capital. In Todays Episode with Hunter Somerville We Discuss: 1. Three Types of Secondaries: What are the three different types of secondaries? What is the current situation with company secondary opportunities today? What is the current landscape for fund secondary opportunities today? What are GP-led restructuring or strip sales? How do they work? 2. LPs Today and Moving Forward Investing in Funds: Will we see a wave of LPs not commit to their existing managers? What is the denominator effect and how does that impact LP deployment into funds? What are the top 3 reasons why LPs will not re-commit to existing managers? Do LPs feel VCs have fairly marked down their venture books in the last 6 months? Does Hunter agree that if you have not returned cash to your LPs when you could have done ijn the last 5 years, then you are most in trouble? Why does Hunter believe we will see more international LPs entering venture than ever before? 3. Liquidity: When Does the Cash Hit: Why was liquidity so bad in 2022? How did that compare to 2021? How does Hunter forecast liquidity environments in 2023? What could drive them? How active were Stepstone in secondary buying over the last few years? Is now the time to be greedy when others are fearful in secondaries? What discount was Hunter seeing both on fund and company side secondaries in 20-22? What is the current level of discount being applied to both company and fund secondaries? 4. AMA with One of the Largest Secondary Buyers: Which LP class will be hurt the most from the last fund cycle? What would Hunter most like to change about the world of venture? What was Hunter's biggest mistake on a company investment? What are the biggest mistakes LPs make when they do direct investing? Why are big-name people entering firms as GPs not always a good sign?

Podcast SummaryIn this conversation with Sydney Sloan, Executive-in-Residence at Scale Venture Partners, she talks about ad program sophistication. Today, you'll hear about stage-appropriate sophistication, leveraging technology and tools, some of the most common timing mistakes, and the impacts of reaching certain levels of sophistication.Prior to Scale Venture Partners, Sydney's experience includes as a marketing services event specialist at Nestle SSA, Director of Strategic Customer Marketing & Sales Enablement at Adobe, Senior Director of Customer Experience at Jive Software, CMO at Alfresco, CMO at Salesloft, and Limited Partner at Stage 2 Capital.Episode Outline[05:06] Building sophistication into programs[09:25] Leveraging tools and technology[14:43] Common timing mistakes in adding sophistication[17:48] The impact of reaching levels of sophistication[19:41] Saleloft's motionConnect with SydneyWebsiteLinkedInConnect with Matter MadeMatter MadeLinkedIn (Eli)

Max Abram is an investor at Scale Venture Partners, a VC firm with investments in companies like HubSpot, Box, DocuSign, and more. He was previously at Kayne Anderson's growth equity group. He holds a degree from the University of Pennsylvania where he was a varsity lightweight rower. He is an endurance athlete, which comes in handy in venture. He spends free time reading fiction and exploring his new home base in the SF Bay Area. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - Generative AI index - Use cases he's excited by - His learnings as an investor - Trends he's witnessing in the AI market -------- Where to find Prateek Joshi: Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: http://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Welcome to a new episode on the Modern SaaS Finance Podcast hosted by David Appel, head of Software/SaaS at Sage Intacct. On today's episode, we are excited to have Craig Rosenberg, Chief Platform Officer at Scale Venture Partners. At Scale, Craig manages the Scale GTM Platform which leverages data and community to deliver the expertise SaaS companies require in their move from founder-led growth to becoming a repeatable high-growth GTM machine. Craig shares on this episode the top 3 things Sales Leaders need to focus on right now, gives more insight on typical roadblocks and what can get in their way and shares the 3 key elements necessary in a successful sales model. Listen to the full episode for all the great insights shared! For more episodes on the Modern SaaS Finance, subscribe to our podcast channel on any major streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Amazon Music, Audible, etc. If you are a SaaS finance leader or expert and will like to join our Modern SaaS Finance community, click here to request access. Explore more SaaS finance tips and best practices here

So much of sales is about solving existing problems. But category creation is about something new entirely. Joining this episode of Demand Gen U is a panel of experts, including Sydney Sloan, Executive in Residence at Scale Venture Partners, Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, and Mike Volpe, Senior Advisor at Silversmith Capital Partners. Together with Jason Widup, VP of Marketing at Metadata, they break down exactly what category creation is, the different phases of it, and when it's necessary, plus much more.Find out:What category creation isWhen category creation is necessaryThe different phases of category creation0:00 – 4:24 Introduction4:24 – 8:54 How to define category creation8:54 – 15:05 Signs that a company should create a category15:05 – 16:50 The different phases of category creation16:50 – 22:11 Working to a playbook and why analysts are so important22:11 – 27:30 How you can remain the leader after category creation27:30 – 33:11 Potential costs associated with category creation33:11 – 34:18 Outro

Oana Olteanu is a Partner @ SignalFire where she focuses on enterprise software at Seed, Series A and Series B. Prior to joining SignalFire, Oana was at Scale Venture Partners where she invested in applied ML and developer tooling. Oana sourced Scale's investments in Observe.ai, Flatfile, and Proscia. She was part of the deal teams for Honeycomb and AllyO (acquired by HireVue). She also supported existing portfolio companies such as Dialpad, Matillion, and BigID. Prior to Scale, Oana was an AI seed investor at SAP.io, SAP's $35M seed fund, where she sourced the investments in Plum.io, Oto.ai, and Akorda. In Today's Episode with Oana Olteanu We Discuss: 1.) From Tank Driving in Romania to VC's Rising Star: How Oana made her way from driving tanks in Romania to becoming a VC? How did leaving Romania for Germany and then moving to the West Coast impact her mindset? What does Oana know now that she wishes she had known when she entered VC? 2.) How to Assess a VC: The Founders Guide: Pre-investment, how can founders know whether a VC can add value? What are the signs? What three core questions will reveal how much value a VC can add? Post-investment, what can founders do to extract the most value from their VCs? What should the founders ask their investors for help with? What should they do themselves? 3.) The VC Founder Relationship: Oana has the highest founder NPS of any VC I have ever had on 20VC, what does Oana believe makes her founders rate her contribution so highly? What works? What does not? How does Oana give sometimes very hard feedback to founders but retain that relationship of trust and safety at the same time? What mistakes do other VCs make in giving feedback? What does Oana believe are the single biggest misalignment between VCs and founders? 4.) VCs Behaving Badly: 101 What are the single biggest ways Oana sees VCs behaving badly? How does Oana think founders expectations of the product of venture should change? Does Oana believe boards are valuable? What can be done to improve them? Items Mentioned in Today's Episode: Oana's Favourite Book: The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living: Featuring new translations of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius

Craig Rosenberg has worked with hundreds, if not thousands of B2B SaaS companies as the co-founder of TOPO, Distinguished analyst at Gartner, and now as Chief Platform Officer at Scale Venture Partners.Across Craig's roles, he was able to take an expensive view across each stage of a SaaS company's growth including strategy, people, process, technology, tactics, and over time METRICS!Craig highlighted that the best companies in the world were/are "metrics" driven, and as Craig started to work with larger, enterprise-class companies beyond SaaS being "metrics and data" driven was even more critical to decision-making."End to End" Customer Journey is an often discussed subject, but what is it really? Craig's perspective is most customer journey mapping is too generic and needs to be very focused on how the customer buys starting with using third-party internet activity to marketing interactions to Sales Development to Sales and then ending at "Closed-Won". Going beyond Closed-Won to include customer engagement, retention, and expansion,Going beyond mapping and understanding the entire customer journey including acquisition, retention, and expansion, companies need to "SEGMENT" the metrics by customer cohort, such as SMB vs Mid-Market vs Enterprise. Another view should be based upon "HOW" the prospect/customer came into the customer lifecycle process, such as lead source and/or lead channel.When I asked "who" in a company should map the customer lifecycle, Craig's response was quite pragmatic: "whoever is best at mapping the customer lifecycle in your company". Craig added that Revenue Operations is a perfect organization to take the lead on customer journey mapping, and building a "coalition" across Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success. An important caveat is that without the support and involvement of the CEO it becomes less significant and strategic.Another topic we discussed, was if a company should involve customers in the "journey mapping" process. Craig said of course, but you only need to include a few customers in the process as talking with more than 10 customers will provide diminishing returns.Next, I asked Craig about what metrics are priorities to measure the efficiency of the customer lifecycle across acquisition, retention, and expansion. Craig started with the Four Vital Signs Framework to track in a SaaS company:- Growth- Efficiency- Churn- BurnNext, we discussed if any of the Vital Signs are more important at each stage of a company's evolution. Craig's first recommendation was to instrument and begin capturing metrics for all four vital signs early in the journey. Certain metrics like churn/Customer Retention will become more important as a company grows beyond the first and second renewal cycles, but identifying and instrumenting for metrics should begin earlier than most companies believe are required.No matter what stage of growth your SaaS company is currently in, this discussion with Craig Rosenberg provides many interesting, insightful perspectives on the importance and priority of metrics across the customer lifecycle.

The sales and revenue functions at today's fastest-growing companies act and think differently than their counterparts. Massive amounts of data inputs and greater coordination — and often, integration — with product, marketing and customer success have redefined the anatomy of today's sales leader.    But indicators of sales success represent only part of the broader blueprint for rapid business growth. In this episode, originally broadcast on the Gartner Sales Podcast, Craig Rosenberg, a Distinguished VP Analyst who serves heads of sales and revenue in his role at Gartner, welcomes special guest Dale Chang, an operating partner with Scale Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley VC firm. The two discuss the four vital signs that are critical to understanding growth, efficiency, churn and burn; how the expected growth trajectory for successful businesses has changed dramatically; and the most important skills for the sales leaders of today — and tomorrow.   Dig Deeper   Download: The Chief Sales Officer Quarterly: Actionable Insights for Forward-Thinking Sales Leaders https://gtnr.it/3cvyqK6   Subscribe: The Gartner Sales Podcast https://bit.ly/3RQt7VO

Sam Baker, Principal at Scale Venture Partners, has been a venture capitalist for six years. Before that, he gained operational experience at Box in both an Inside Sales role and in a Strategy and Planning role.Scale's culture has a very quantitative-oriented DNA, including having its own benchmarking organization known as Scale Studio. Benchmarking delivers reality to every Scale portfolio company and aligns the founder and the investor on a metrics-oriented approach to decision making.The first topic we approached was what metrics are most important to a Series A and Series B investor? Sam's initial response was not to rattle off a list of metrics but to discuss the importance of "context" in today's investment environment. As an example, Sam shared that the "maturity" of the company is a primary driver of how best to use metrics.Scale has identified and uses four (4) Vital Signs of SaaS that include: 1) Growth; 2)Efficiency; 3) Churn, and; 4)Burn. A small description of the four vital signs below:Growth - How quickly is revenue growingEfficiency - Quantity of revenue compared to Sales and Marketing spendChurn - Do customers stick around and buy more, OR do they leaveBurn - What is the rate of cash consumption to grow a SaaS companyWhen asked about a benchmarking framework that Scale uses - he first highlighted it depends on who is consuming the benchmarks (which role) and what is the stage and maturity of the company. Scale's benchmarking framework is very extensible to enable an increased aperture on the metrics being utilized. For example, when a company dramatically increases investment in Sales and Marketing, Customer Acquisition Cost efficiency metrics become more important.Next, Sam recommended avoiding benchmarking and metrics overload, which requires a company to identify the most important and most informative metrics to how the company is currently trending and will be trending in the near term. Moreover, be prepared to add or change metrics that are most relevant to the growth stage.Scale has a couple of unique metrics, including Instantaneous Compound Annual Growth Rate (iCAGR). The benefit of iCAGR is it provides a real-time and is most sensitive to growth or shrinkage today, versus being biased by the average effect of quarterly or annually metrics. As an example, if growth is down in the most recent quarter, but the previous three quarters had higher than normal growth it can identify potential risk or new trend in company performance.Another metric that Scale uses is "Growth Persistence" which investors use to measure the rate of growth over time. For example, if a company grows 100% one year, and then 85% in year two and 72% in year three, it would reflect an 85% median growth persistence.How to avoid "metrics overload"? This is especially important in board meetings when the "metrics creep" can often happen. First, make sure everyone knows the company's "North Star" and how each metric directly impacts the North Star. Second, gain agreement up-front with the investors and board members on those metrics that are most important, that they are presented in a manner that is easy to understand and ensure the metrics tie back to the source systems being used.Sam provides a very insightful and instructive perspective on using metrics and benchmarks to inform a SaaS company's growth journey - especially from an investor's perspective, which is so critical in the 2022 investment environment.

In this episode, Craig sits down with Dale Chang, Operating Partner with Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Scale Venture Partners. Known as “Scale Dale,” he will share the key elements of the playbook required to drive explosive yet efficient growth.Dale Chang is the Operating Partner at Scale Venture Partners. In his role, Dale is a resource for guidance on evolving go-to-market strategies as well as providing best practices and benchmarks across the portfolio.Previously, Dale was a director at the Alexander Group, a consulting firm specialized in go-to-market strategy. At the Alexander Group, he was the leader of the cloud practice and advised companies including Salesforce, LinkedIn, Box, DocuSign, New Relic, Optimizely and Mixpanel. Prior to his career in consulting, he worked in sales and sales operations roles at startups, including Proofpoint and Jaspersoft.

Mahesh Ram, founder and CEO of Solvvy, set out to "give everyone back time". His company was recently acquired by Zoom to improve customer experiences using conversational AI. Mahesh was inspired by his work using speech recognition to improve business English learning at Global English. Solvvy was founded in 2015 and has raised funding from an exceptional group of investors including previous "AI and the Future of Work" guest Rory O'Driscoll from Scale Venture Partners. Listen and learn...About the three waves of chatbot technologyWhy "more deflection" doesn't need to translate into "lower satisfaction"How Calm uses Solvvy to deliver automated customer serviceWhy AI based on semantic similarity is better than traditional scripted chatbotsWhy "putting the user first" and "not hiding the live agent" is essential for gaining consumer trust in chatbotsHow to address latent bias in data used to train AI modelsWhy bots will never replace live agentsReferences in this episode...Rory O'Driscoll from Scale Venture Partners on AI and the Future of WorkSolvvy acquired by ZoomChandra Khatri from Got It AI on AI and the Future of Work 

Matthew Scullion got an early start in entrepreneurship. Even though he grew up far from Silicon Valley his latest company has raised hundreds of millions from top VCs. Now one of the first unicorn companies from his corner of the world, his venture serves fast-moving small businesses and global corporate giants alike. The venture, Matillion has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Scale Venture Partners, General Atlantic, Sapphire Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

In an industry that relies on being ahead of the curve, the ability to see the potential in new innovations is a necessity. Eric Anderson, Partner of Scale Venture Partners knows how to look ahead, and gives us an inside look at how a cutting-edge venture capital firm finds and funds new technology that benefits the everyday user. Main TakeawaysThe depth of the problem is more important than the solution: According to Anderson, it's important to come in with the empathy needed to sort out the problem set of any particular company, because innovations are grown out of the solutions. It might be intuitive to think that quick fixes mean quick growth, but Anderson cautions against it. Digging in and finding the deeper problems is well worth it, because longer solutions often lead to more meaningful expansions. Young insiders might be the key to innovation: While anyone can have a great idea, Anderson points out that it might be the younger players in older, “sleepier” industries that wind up being disrupters. He points out how as a child of dental distributors he was quick to see the need for a new way to distribute raw materials and bring in a new solution. Software Vs. Content: While, historically, consumers have been more interested in buying content over software, Anderson says that the small sale might change that. We shouldn't ignore the power of the one-dollar design app you can carry on your phone – it might change the way people value software. IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform

Randi Zuckerberg talks with a variety of guests about the investing landscape in 2022! Topics include hot investing trends to watch, big trends and ideas in social media, tech and society, early stage investing vs growth stage investing and much more! Guests include New York Times Bestseller Nicole Lapin about her new book, “Miss Independent: A Simple 12-Step Plan to Start Investing and Grow Your Own Wealth”, The Washington Post's Will Oremus on the Metaverse and DAO's, and two top female venture capitalists - Stacey Bishop, Partner at Scale Venture Partners, and Laela Sturdy, General Partner at CapitalG, Alphabet's independent growth fund!

Rory and Scott McGrew ponder luck, happiness and the two words you should never say in a VC pitch.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Scale is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital investment firm with $1.3B under management. They were early investors in SaaS pioneers like Bill.com (NYSE:BILL), DocuSign (NASDAQ:DOCU), HubSpot (NYSE:HUBS), JFrog (NASDAQ: FROG) and Root (NASDAQ: ROOT). Today they are focused on the next generation of enterprise software companies building Cognitive Applications like: Comet.ml, Observe.ai, Techsee and Viz.ai. Eric Anderson is a Partner at Scale Venture Partners, where he focuses on cloud infrastructure and security investments. He is a Board member at Scale portfolio companies Datastax and Upsolver and a Board observer at Matillion, BigID, Expel, Honeycomb, Tetrate, and AppOmni. Before Scale, Eric led early Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services product teams. At Google, he was a Product Manager in the Data Analytics and Machine Learning group. He led the team that launched Cloud Dataprep and critical components of Cloud Dataflow. Previously, Eric built aircraft engines in General Electric's Operation Management Leadership Program. Eric is a go-to resource on open source (he also moonlights as the host of the Contributor podcast) and has deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, and app development and contributed to the deal teams for Matillion and BigID and more recent deals like AppOmni, Comet, and Upsolver. I learn more about the early-stage VC investor that is focused on intelligent business software, and we discuss the trends he is seeing in the industry.

Sam shares how his iconic, early-stage enterprise s/w venture fund found itself investing in emerging tech applications like warehouse robotics, drones, etc., outlines why “cognitive applications” will be the next generation of great s/w companies and how those apps are built on top of the current foundation of cloud & SaaS infrastructure, describes how Scale leverages their Mega-Trends Process to identify the upside potential/alpha within emerging technologies, walks us through lessons learned of what does and doesn't work to hit product-market-fit in industrial robotic settings where bits meet atoms (hint: start with doing one high-frequency task associated with a tangible ROI really well!), and finally he discusses how he thinks about early-stage investment syndication within these emerging tech and industrial applications.

Fresh from a summer break, Vik and Bree are back with episode thirteen of DrinksWithAVC, featuring a candid chat with Alex Niehenke from Scale Venture Partners. They explore his eclectic passions from pickling to water polo, his experiences as a German immigrant, and the pivotal role of metrics in driving a company's success. Don't miss the sizzling end where Alex predicts which Companies and Firms will extend their 'Hot Girl Summer' glory and which may brace for a chilly season ahead.Links:www.scalevp.comwww.twitter.com/aniehenke www.eatuglypickle.com (Gifts!)

Julian Rowlands, VP Finance at Spruce I chat with Julian about: His career journey from a History major before going to business school at uChicago to becoming the VP Finance at Spruce. Spruce — what the company does and what it's all about. Structuring and growing the finance function for scale at growth stage company. When Julian joined Spruce, the company was 75 employees. Since then, the company has tripled, growing to 250 folks. As the head of finance, Julian explains how he inherited the finance function and how it has evolved to accommodate this hyper growth. In June of 2021, Spruce raised a $60M Series C round from Bessemer, Scale Venture Partners and Zigg Capital. While Julian was at Xendit, he helped the company raise a $65M Series B round from Accel. Julian shares some of his biggest learnings going through these fundraise processes and imparts advice to folks going through fundraising rounds today. The biggest misconception about the finance function within growth stage tech companies like Spruce. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/backbone/message

I sit down with Patrick Burns, CEO and Co-founder of Spruce, a proptech powering online real estate transactions that's on a mission to build a one-click checkout experience for real estate transactions. Spruce has raised more than $50M from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, and Third Prime. Mr. Burns is based in NYC and holds an MA in Statistics from Yale and a BA in Physics from Oxford. We discuss - Patrick's journey from Scotland to the heart of fintech in NYC - Digitization of the real estate market and why shifting consumer expectations are driving innovation and a better customer experience - Importance of thinking of company culture from day one and how they've built a culture of decentralized and autonomy - Reflections and lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs… And just a lot more including the ideal itinerary for your next visit to Scotland! Patrick Burns Patrick is the CEO and co-founder of Spruce, the proptech company powering online real estate transactions. Spruce has raised more than $50M from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, and Third Prime. Prior to founding Spruce in 2016, Patrick was a product manager at Betterment, the largest automated investment service with $20B under management. He holds an MA in Statistics from Yale, and a BA in Physics from Oxford. About Spruce Spruce is the proptech company on a mission to build the one-click checkout experience for real estate transactions. The company is digitizing real estate transactions for forward-thinking real estate companies and mortgage lenders. By leveraging proprietary technology and best-in-class operations, Spruce provides a seamless, affordable solution. Spruce was founded by Andrew Weisgall and Patrick Burns in 2016, and is headquartered in New York with hubs across the U.S. For more FinTech insights, follow us below: Medium: medium.com/wharton-fintech WFT Twitter: twitter.com/whartonfintech Miguel's Twitter: twitter.com/MiguelArmaza Miguel's Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3jWIpqp

Dan O'Connell, former founder and CEO of TalkIQ which was acquired by Dialpad, discusses the future of cloud communications. Dan's vision for helping teams sell more with less churn led to Dialpad becoming a unicorn last year having raised $100M at a $1.2B pre-money valuation.  Exceptional investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures are betting on Dialpad's ability to convert legacy telephony infrastructure into cloud-native, SaaS systems using AI to analyze voice transcripts.Listen and learn...Dan's entrepreneurial journey from incubator to launch to fundraising to acquisition.Why TalkIQ was really three startups in one... and how Dan navigated his team through the process of finding one big customer problem to fix.Why voice will soon be the primary computing interface.The challenges of developing NLP technology for voice transcription and AI-based analytics.What Dan learned from nearly a decade at Google... and, more important, what he learned not to do.References in the episode...AI and the Future of Work with Rory O'DriscollDialpad raises $100M at a $1.2B valuationWesley Chan from Felicis Ventures

Varun Talwar has already raised tens of millions of dollars to empower developers to build more new technology faster and to drive the success of small to enterprise-sized companies. His venture, Tetrate has successfully raised funding from top-tier investors like 8VC, Dell Technologies Capital, Scale Venture Partners, and Sapphire Ventures.

Varun Talwar has already raised tens of millions of dollars to empower developers to build more new technology faster and to drive the success of small to enterprise-sized companies. His venture, Tetrate has successfully raised funding from top-tier investors like 8VC, Dell Technologies Capital, Scale Venture Partners, and Sapphire Ventures.

Varun Talwar has already raised tens of millions of dollars to empower developers to build more new technology faster and to drive the success of small to enterprise-sized companies. His venture, Tetrate has successfully raised funding from top-tier investors like 8VC, Dell Technologies Capital, Scale Venture Partners, and Sapphire Ventures.

About DonnieDonnie is VP of Products at Docker and leads product vision and strategy. He manages a holistic products team including product management, product design, documentation & analytics. Before joining Docker, Donnie was an executive in residence at Scale Venture Partners and VP of IT Service Delivery at CWT leading the DevOps transformation. Prior to those roles, he led a global team at 451 Research (acquired by S&P Global Market Intelligence), advised startups and Global 2000 enterprises at RedMonk and led more than 250 open-source contributors at Gentoo Linux. Donnie holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry and biophysics from Oregon State University, where he specialized in computational structural biology, and dual B.S. and B.A. degrees in biochemistry and chemistry from the University of Richmond.Links: Docker: https://www.docker.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/dberkholz TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It’s an awesome approach. I’ve used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there’s more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It’s awesome. If you don’t do something like this, you’re likely to find out that you’ve gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It’s one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That’s canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I’m a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you’ve built anything from serverless, you know that if there’s one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it’s that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications. It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You’ve created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more, visit lumigo.io. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. Today I’m joined by Donnie Berkholz, who’s here to talk about his role as the VP of Products at Docker, whether he knows it or not. Donnie, welcome to the show.Donnie: Thanks. I’m excited to be here.Corey: So, the burning question that I have that inspired me to reach out to you is fundamentally, and very bluntly and directly, Docker was a thing in, I want to say the 2015-ish era, where there was someone who gave a parody talk for five minutes where they got up and said nothing but the word Docker over and over again, in a bunch of different tones, and everyone laughed because it seemed like, for a while, that was what a lot of tech conference talks were about 50% of the way. It’s years later, now, and it’s 2021 as of the time of this recording. How is Docker relevant today?Donnie: Great question. And I think one that a lot of people are wondering about. The way that I think about it, and the reason that I joined Docker, about six months back now, was, I saw the same thing you did in the early 2010s, 2013 to 2016 or so. Docker was a brand new tool, beloved of developers and DevOps engineers everywhere. And they took that, gained the traction of millions of people, and tried to pivot really hard into taking that bottom-up open-source traction and turning it into a top-down, kind of, sell to the CIO and the VP operations, orchestration management, kind of classic big company approach. And that approach never really took off to the extent that would let Docker become an explosive success commercially in the same way that it did across the open-source community and building out the usability of containers as a concept.Now, new Docker, as of November 2019, divested all of the top-down operations production environment stuff to Mirantis and took a look at what else there was. And the executive staff at the time, the investors thought there might be something in there, it’s worth making a bet on the developer-facing parts of Docker to see if the things that built the developer love in the first place were commercially viable as well. And so looking through that we had things left like Docker Hub, Docker Engine, things like Notary, and Docker Desktop. So, a lot of the direct tools that developers use on a daily basis to get their jobs done when they’re working on modern applications, whether that’s twelve-factor, whether that’s something they’re trying to lift and shift into a container, whatever it might look like, it’s still used every day. And so the thought was, there might be something in here.Let’s invest some money, let’s invest some time and see what we can make of it because it feels promising. And fast-forward a couple of years—we’re in early 2021—we just announced our Series B investment because the past year has shown that there’s something real there. People are using Docker heavily; people are willing to pay for it, and where we’re going with it is much higher level than just containers or just a registry. I think there’s a lot more opportunity there. When I was watching the market as a whole drifting toward Kubernetes, what you can see is, to me, it’s a lot like a repeat of the old OpenStack days where you’ve got tons of vendors in the space, it’s extremely crowded, everybody’s trying to sell the same thing to the same small set of early adopters who are ready for it.Whereas if you look at the developer side of containers, it’s very sparsely populated. Nobody’s gone hard after developers in a bottom-up self-service kind of way and helped them adopt containers and helped them be more productive doing so. So, I saw that as a really compelling opportunity and one where I feel like we’ve got a lot of runway ahead of us.Corey: Back in the early days—this is a bit of a history lesson that I’m sure you’re aware of, but I want to make sure that my understanding winds up aligning with yours is, Docker was transformative when it was announced—I want to say 2012, in Santa Clara, but don’t quote me on that one—and, effectively, what it promised to solve was—I mean, containerization was not a new idea. We had that with LPARs on mainframes way before my time. And it’s sort of iterated forward ever since. What it fundamentally solved was the tooling around those things where suddenly it got rid of the problem of, “Well, it worked on my machine.” And the rejoinder from the grumpy ops person—which I very much was—was, “Great. Then backup your email because your laptop’s about to go into production.”By having containers, suddenly you have an environment or an application that was packaged inside of a mini-environment that was able to be run basically anywhere. And it was, write once, deploy basically as many times as you want. And over time, that became incredibly interesting, not just for developers, but also for folks who were trying to migrate applications. You can stuff basically anything into a container. Whether you should or not is a completely separate conversation that I am going to avoid by a wide margin. Am I right so far in everything that I have said there?Donnie: Yep. Absolutely.Corey: Awesome. So, then we have this container runtime that handles the packaging piece. And then people replaced Docker in that cherished position in their hearts—which is the thing that they talk about, even when you beg them to stop—with Kubernetes, which is effectively an orchestration system for containers, invariably Docker. And now people are talking about that constantly and consistently. If we go back to looking at similar things in the ecosystem, people used to care tremendously about what distribution of Linux they ran.And then—well, okay. If not the distro, definitely the OS wars of, is this Windows or is this a Linux workload? And as time has gone on, people care about that less and less where they just want the application to work; they don’t care what it’s running in under the hood. And it feels that the container runtime has gotten to that point as well. And soon, my belief is that we’re going to see the orchestrator slip below that surface level of awareness of things people have to care about, if for no other reason than if you look at Kubernetes today, it is fiendishly complicated, and that doesn’t usually last very long in this space before there’s an abstraction layer built that compresses all of that into something you don’t really have to think about, except for a small number of people at very specific companies. Does that in any way change, I guess, the relevance of Docker to developers today? Or am I thinking about this the wrong way with viewing Docker as a pure technology, instead of an ecosystem?Donnie: I think it changes the relevance of Docker much more to platform teams and DevOps teams—as much as I wish that wasn’t a word or a term—operations groups that are running the Kubernetes environments, or that are running applications at scale in production, where maybe in the early days, they would run Docker directly in prod, then they moved to running Docker as a container runtime within Kubernetes, and more recently, the core of Docker—which was containerd—as a replacement for that overall Docker, which used dockershim. So, I think the change here is really around, what does that production environment look like? And where we’re really focusing our effort is much more on the developer experience. I think that’s where Docker found its magic in the first place was in taking incredibly complicated technologies and making them really easy in a way that developers love to use. So, we continue to invest much more on the developer tools part of it, rather than what does the shape of the production environment look like?And how do we horizontally scale this to hundreds or thousands of containers? Not interesting problems for us right now. We’re much more looking at things like how do we keep it simple for developers so they can focus on a simple application. But it is an application and not just a container, so we’re still thinking of moving to things that developers care about. They don’t necessarily care about containers; they care about their app.So, what’s the shape of that app, and how does it fit into the structure of containers? In some cases, it’s a single container, in some cases, it’s multiple containers. And that’s where we’ve seen Docker Compose pick up as a hugely popular technology. When we look at our own surveys, when we look at external surveys, we see on the order of two-thirds of people who use Docker using Compose to do it, either for ease of automation and reproducibility or for ease of managing an application that spans across multiple containers as a logical service, rather than try and shove it all in one and hope it sticks.Corey: I used to be relatively, I guess, cynical about Docker. In fact, one of my first breakout talks started life as a lightning talk called “Heresy in the Church of Docker,” where I just came up with a list of a few things that were challenging and didn’t fully understand. It was mostly jokes, and the first half of it was set to the backstory of an embarrassing chocolate coffee explosion that a boss of mine once had. And that was great. Like, what’s the story here? What’s the relevance? Just a story of someone who didn’t understand their failure modes of containers in production. Cue laugh.And that was great. And someone came up to me and said, “Hey, can you give the full version of that talk at ContainerCon?” To which my response was, “There’s a full version?” Followed immediately by, “Absolutely.” And it sort of took life from there.Now, I want to say that talk hasn’t aged super well because everything that I highlighted in that talk has since been fixed. I was just early and being snarky, and I genuinely, when I gave that first version, didn’t understand the answers. And I was expecting to be corrected vociferously by an awful lot of folks. Instead, it was, “Yeah, these are challenges.” At which point I realized, “Holy crap, maybe everyone isn’t 80 years ahead of me in technical understanding.” And for better or worse, it’s set an interesting tone.Donnie: Absolutely. So, what do you think people really took out of that talk that surprised you?Corey: The first thing that I think, from my perspective, that caught me by surprise was that people are looking at me as some sort of thought leader—their term, not mine—and my response was, “Holy crap. I’m not a thought leader. I’m just a loud, white guy in tech.” And yep, those are pretty much the same thing in some circles, which is its own series of problems. But further, people were looking at this and taking it seriously, as in, “Well, we do need to have some plans to mitigate this.”And there are different discussions that went back and forth with folks coming up with various solutions to these things. And my first awareness, at least, that pointing out problems where you don’t know the answer is not always a terrible thing; it can be a useful thing as well. And it also—let me put a bit of a flag there as far as a point in time because looking back at that talk, it’s naive. I’ve done a bunch of things since then with Docker. I mean, today, I run Docker on my overpowered Mac to have a container that’s listening with our syslog.And I have a bunch of devices around the house that are spitting out their logs there, so when things explode I have a rough idea of what happened. It solves weird problems. I wind up doing a number of deployment processes here for serverless nonsense via Docker. It has become this pervasive technology that if I were to take an absolutist stance that, “Oh, Docker is terrible. I’m never going to use Docker.”It’s still here for me, and it’s still available and working. But I want to get back to something you said a minute ago because my use of Docker is very much the operations sysadmin-with-title-inflation whatever we’re calling them this week; that use case and that model. Who is Docker viewing as its customer today? Who as a company are you identifying as the people with the painful problem that you can solve?Donnie: For us, it’s really about the developer, rather than the ops team. And specifically it’s about the development team. And this to me is a really important distinction because developers don’t work in isolation; developers collaborate together on a daily basis, and a lot of that collaboration is very poorly solved. You jump very quickly from, “I’m doing remote pairing in my code editor,” to, “It’s pushed to GitHub, and it’s now instantly rolling into my CI pipeline on its way to production.” There’s not a lot of intermediate ground there.So, when we think about how developers are trying to build, share, and run modern applications, I think there’s a ton of whitespace in there. We’ve been sharing a bunch of experiments, for anybody who’s interested. We do community all-hands every couple of months where we share, here’s some of the things we’re working on. And importantly, to me, it’s focused on problems. Everything you were describing in that heresy talk was about problems that exist, and pointing out problems.And those problems, for us, when we talk to developers using Docker, those problems form the core of our roadmap. The problems we hear the most often as the most frustrating and the most painful, guess what? Those are the things we’re going to focus on as great opportunities for us. And so we hear people talking about things like they’re using Docker, or they’re using containers, but they have a really hard time finding the good ones. And they can’t create good ones, they are just looking for more guidance, more prescription, more curation, to be able to figure out where’s this good stuff amidst the millions of containers out there? How do I find the ones that are worth using, for me as an individual, for me as a team, and for me as a company. I mean, all of those have different levels of requirements and expectations associated with them.Corey: One of the perceptions I’ve had of the DevOps movement—as someone who started off as a grumpy Linux systems administrator—is the sense that they’re trying to converge application developers with infrastructure engineers at some point. And I started off taking a very, “Oh, I’m not a developer. I don’t write code.” And then it was, “Huh. You know, I am writing an awful lot of configuration, often in something like Ruby or Python.” And of course, now it seems like everyone has converged as developers with the lingua franca of all development everywhere, which is, of course, YAML. Do you think there’s a divide between the ops folks and the application developers in 2021?Donnie: You know, I think it’s a long journey. Back when I was at RedMonk, I wrote up a post talking about the way those roles were changing, the responsibilities were shifting over time. And you step back in time, and it was very much, you know, the developer owns the dev stack, the local stack, or if there’s a remote developer environment, they’re 100% responsible for it. And the ops team owned production, 100% responsible for everything in that stack. And over the past decade, that’s clearly been evolving.They could still own their code in production and get the value out of understanding how that was used, the value of fast iteration cycles, without having to own it all, everywhere, all of the time, and have to focus their time on things that they had really no time or interest to spend it on. So, those things have both been happening to me, not in parallel, quite; I think DevOps in terms of ops learning development skillsets and applying those has been faster than development teams who were taking ownership for that full lifecycle and that iteration all the way to production, and then back around. Part of that is cultural in terms of what developer teams have been willing to do. Part of it is cultural in terms of what the old operations teams—now becoming platform engineering teams—have been willing to give up, and their willingness to sacrifice control. There’s always good times like PCI compliance, and how do you fight those sorts of battles.And when I think about it, it’s been rotating. And first, we saw infrastructure teams, ops teams, take more ownership for being a platform, in a lot of cases, either guided by the emerging infrastructure automation config management tools like CFEngine back in the early 90s, which turned into Puppet and Chef, which turned into Ansible and Salt, which now continue to evolve beyond those. A lot of those enabled that rotation of responsibilities where infrastructure could be a platform rather than an ops team that had to take ownership of overall production. And that was really, to me, it was ops moving into a development mindset, and development capabilities, and development skillsets. Now, at the same time, development teams were starting to have the ability to take over ownership for their code running into production without having to take ownership over the full production stack and all the complexities involved in the hardware, and the data centers, and the colos, or the public cloud production environments, whatever they may be.So, there’s a lot of barriers in the way, but to me, those have been all happening alongside, time-shifted a little bit. And then really, the core of it was as those two groups become increasingly similar in how they think and how they work, breaking down more of the silos in terms of how they collaborate effectively, and how they can help solve each other’s problems, instead of really being separate worlds.Corey: This episode is sponsored by ExtraHop. ExtraHop provides threat detection and response for the Enterprise (not the starship). On-prem security doesn’t translate well to cloud or multi-cloud environments, and that’s not even counting IoT. ExtraHop automatically discovers everything inside the perimeter, including your cloud workloads and IoT devices, detects these threats up to 35 percent faster, and helps you act immediately. Ask for a free trial of detection and response for AWS today at extrahop.com/trial.Corey: Docker was always described as a DevOps tool. And well, “What is DevOps?” “Oh, it’s about breaking down the silos between developers and the operations folks.” Cool, great. Well, let’s try this. And I used to run DevOps teams. I know, I know, don’t email me. When you’re picking your battles, team naming is one of the last ones I try to get to.But then we would, okay, I’m going to get this application that is in a container from development. Cool. It’s—don’t look inside of it, it’s just going to make you sad, but take these containers and put them into production and you can manage them regardless of what that application is actually doing. It felt like it wasn’t so much breaking down a wall, as it was giving a mechanism to hurl things over that wall. Is that just because I worked in terrible places with bad culture? If so, I don’t know that I’m very alone in that, but that’s what it felt like.Donnie: It’s a good question. And I think there’s multiple pieces to that. It is important. I just was rereading the Team Topologies book the other day, which talks about the idea of a team API, and how do you interface with other teams as people as well as the products or platforms they’re supporting? And I think there’s a lot of value in having the ability to throw things over a wall—or down a pipeline; however you think about it—in a very automated way, rather than going off and filing a ticket with your friendly ITSM instance, and waiting for somebody else to take action based on that.So, there’s a ton of value there. The other side of it, I think, is more of the consultative role, rather than the take work from another team and then go do another thing with it, and then pass it to the next team down and then so on, unto eternity. Which is really, how do you take the expertise across all those teams and bring it together to solve the problems when they affect a broader radius of groups. And so, that might be when you’re thinking about designing the next iteration of your application, you might want to have somebody with more infrastructure expertise in the room, depending on the problems you’re solving. You might want to have somebody who has a really deep understanding of your security requirements or compliance requirements if you’re redesigning an application that’s dealing with credit card data.But all those are problems that you can’t solve in isolation; you have to solve them by breaking down the barriers. Because the alternative is you build it, and then you try and release it, and then you have a gatekeeper that holds up a big red flag, delays your release by six months so you can go back and fix all the crap you forgot to do in the first place.Corey: While on the topic of being able to, I guess, use containers as sort of as these agnostic components, I suppose, and the effects that that has, I’d love to get your take on this idea that I see that’s relatively pervasive, which is, “I can build an application inside of containers”—and that is, let’s be clear, that is the way an awful lot of containers are being built today. If people are telling you otherwise, they’re wrong—“And then just run it in any environment. You’ve built an application that is completely cloud agnostic.” And what cloud you’re going to run it in today—or even your own data center—is purely a question of either, “What’s the cheapest one I can use today?” Or, “What is my mood this morning?” And you press a button and the application lives in that environment flawlessly, regardless of what that provider is. Where do you stand on that, I guess, utopian vision?Donnie: Yeah, I think it’s almost a dystopian vision, the way I think about it—which is the least common denominator approach to portability—limits your ability to focus on innovation rather than focusing on managing that portability layer. There are cases where it’s worth doing because you’re at significant risk, for some reason, of focusing on a specific portability platform versus another one, but the bulk of the time, to me, it’s about how do you focus your time and effort where you can create value for your company? Your company doesn’t care about containers; your company doesn’t care about Kubernetes; your company cares about getting value to their customers more quickly. So, whatever it takes to do that, that’s where you should be focusing as much time and energy as possible. So, the container interface is one API of an application, one thing that enables you to take it to different places, but there’s lots of other ones as well.I mean, no container runs in isolation. I think there’s some quote, I forget the author, but, “No human is an island” at this point. No container runs in isolation by itself. No group of containers do, either. They have dependencies, they have interactions, there’s always going to be a lot more to it, of how do you interact with other services?How do you do so in a way that lets you get the most bang for your buck and focus on differentiation? And none of that is going to be from only using the barest possible infrastructure components and limiting yourself to something that feels like shared functionality across multiple cloud providers or multiple other platforms.Corey: This gets into the sort of the battle of multi-cloud. My position has been that, first, there are a lot of vendors that try and push back against the idea of going all-in on one provider for a variety of reasons that aren’t necessarily ideal. But the transparent thing that I tend to see—or at least I believe that I see—is that well, if fundamentally, you wind up going all-in on a provider, an awful lot of third-party vendors will have nothing left to sell you. Whereas as long as you’re trying to split the difference and ride multiple horses at once, well, there’s a whole lot of painful problems in there that you can sell solutions to. That might be overly cynical, but it’s hard to see some stories like that.Now, that’s often been misinterpreted as that I believe that you should always have every workload on a single provider of choice and that’s it. I don’t think that makes sense, either. I mean, I have my email system run in GSuite, which is part of Google Cloud, for whatever reason, and I don’t use Amazon’s offering for the same because I’m not nuts. Whereas my infrastructure does indeed live in AWS, but I also pay for GitHub as an example—which is also in the Azure business unit because of course it is—and different workloads live in different places. That’s a naive oversimplification, but in large companies, different workloads do live in different places.Then you get into stories such as acquisitions of different divisions that are running in completely different providers. I don’t see any real reason to migrate those things, but I also don’t see a reason why you have to have single points of control that reach into all of those different application workloads at the same time. Maybe I’m oversimplifying, and I’m not seeing a whole subset of the world. Curious to hear where you stand on that one?Donnie: Yeah, it’s an interesting one. I definitely see a lot of the same things that you do, which is lots of different applications, each running in their own place. A former colleague of mine used to call it ‘best execution venue’ over at 451. And what I don’t see, or almost never see, is that unicorn of the single application that seamlessly migrates across multiple different cloud providers, or does the whole cloud-bursting thing where you’ve got your on-prem or colo workload, and it seamlessly pops over into AWS, or Azure, or GCP, or wherever else, during peak capacity season, like tax season if you’re at a tax company, or something along those lines. You almost never see anything that realistically does that because it’s so hard to do and the payoff is so low compared to putting it in one place where it’s the best suited for it and focusing your time and effort on the business value part of it rather than on the cost minimization part and the risk mitigation part of, if you have to move from one cloud provider to another, what is it going to take to do that? Well, it’s not going to be that easy. You’ll get it done, but it’ll be a year and a half later, by the time you get there and your customers might not be too happy at that point.Corey: One area I want to get at is, you talk about, now, addressing developers where they are and solving problems that they have. What are those problems? What painful problem does a developer have today as they’re building an application that Docker is aimed at solving?Donnie: When we put the problems that we’re hearing from our customers into three big buckets, we think about that as building, sharing, and running a modern application. There’s lots of applications out there; not all of them are modern, so we’re already trying to focus ourselves into a segment of those groups where Docker is really well-suited and containers are really well suited to solve those problems, rather than something where you’re kind of forklift-ing it in and trying to make it work to the best of your ability. So, when we think about that, what we hear a lot of is three common themes. Around building applications, we hear a lot about developer velocity, about time being wasted, both sitting at gatekeepers, but also searching for good reusable components. So, we hear a lot of that around building applications, which is, give me a developer velocity, give me good high-trust content, help me create the good stuff so that when I’m publishing the app, I can easily share it, and I can easily feel confident that it’s good.And on the sharing note, people consistently say that it’s very hard for them to stay in sync with their teams if there’s multiple people working on the same application or the same part of the codebase. It’s really challenging to do that in anything resembling a real-time basis. You’ve got the repository, which people tend to think of—whether that’s a container repository, or whether that’s a code repository—they tend to think of that as, “I’m publishing this.” But where do you share? What do you collaborate on things that aren’t ready to publish yet?And we hear a lot of people who are looking for that sort of middle ground of how do I keep in sync with my colleagues on things that aren’t ready to put that stamp on where I feel like it’s done enough to share with the world? And then the third theme that we hear a lot about is around running applications. And when I distinguish this against old Docker, the big difference here is we don’t want to be the runtime platform in production. What we want to do is provide developers with a high-fidelity, consistent kind of experience, no matter which environment they’re working with. So, if they’re in their desktop, if they’re in their CI pipeline, or if they’re working with a cloud-hosted developer environment, or even production, we want to provide them with that same kind of feeling experience.And so an example of this was last year, we built these Compose plugins that we call code-to-cloud plugins, where you could deploy to ECS, or you could deploy to ACI cloud container instances, in addition to being able to do a local Compose up. And all of that gives you the same kind of experience because you can flip between one Docker context and the other and run, essentially, the same set of commands. So, we hear people trying to deal with productivity, trying to deal with collaboration, trying to deal with complex experiences, and trying to simplify all of those. So, those are really the big areas we’re looking at is that build, share, run themes.Corey: What does that mean for the future of Docker? What is the vision that you folks are aiming at that goes beyond just, I guess—I’m not trying to be insulting when I say this, but the pedestrian concerns of today? Because viewed through the lens of the future, looking back at these days, every technical problem we have is going to seem, on some level, like it’s, “Oh, it’s easy. There’s a better solution.” What does Docker become in 15 years?Donnie: Yeah, I think there’s a big gap between where people edit their code, where people save their source code, and that path to production. And so, we see ourselves as providing a really valuable development tools that—we’re not going to be the IDE and we’re not going to be the pipeline, but we’re going to be a lot of that glue that ties everything together. One thing that has only gotten worse over the years is the amount of fragmentation that’s out there in developer toolchains, developer pipelines, similar with the rise of microservices over the past decade, it’s only gotten more complicated, more languages, more tools, more things to support and an exponentially increasing number of interconnections where things need to integrate well together. And so that’s the problem that, really, we’re solving is all those things are super-complicated, huge pain to make everything work consistently, and we think there’s a huge amount of value there and tying that together for the individual, for the team.Corey: Donnie, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about what you’re up to, where can they find you?Donnie: I am extremely easy to find on the internet. If you Google my name, you will track down, probably, ten different ways of getting in touch. Twitter is the one where I tend to be the most responsive, so please feel free to reach out there. My username is @dberkholz.Corey: And we will, of course, put a link to that in the [show notes 00:29:58]. Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate the opportunity to explore your perspective on these things.Donnie: Thanks for having me on the show. And thanks everybody for listening.Corey: Donnie Berkholz, VP of products at Docker. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you’ve hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an insulting comment that explains exactly why you should be packaging up that comment and running it in any cloud provider just as soon as you get Docker’s command-line arguments squared away in your own head.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Alex is the co-founder of two tech companies. His first company, Onosys – was a comprehensive, enterprise-level digital ordering platform for restaurant chains. Note that Alex started Onosys in 2008, so he was on the bleeding edge of the digital revolution for restaurants. Onosys raised angel capital from Zapis Capital, a family office that is a great partner to early stage founders, before they sold to Living Social in 2012. Alex's second company was Scout RFP, an innovative e-sourcing solution for companies across all industries, which he started in 2014 With Scout, Alex and his co-founders raised $60M from funds like NEA, Menlo Ventures, and Scale Venture Partners. Scout was acquired by Workday in 2019 for $540M. In this episode, we get into: When he knew he wanted to become an entrepreneur The ambition to drive his own destiny The biggest piece of advice he would give to an entrepreneur How your big idea will be rough before you get it right His unique approach to early market discovery What founders can learn from an interview vs. a survey The moment listening to the customer changed his revenue model Why it is critical to ask customer what they have vs. what they use The benefit of establishing relationships with investors early How to effectively build relationships The importance of being open and honest from the start What investors are looking for in the early days Why co-founders need to have the uncomfortable conversations upfront Why founders shouldn't worry about an exit strategy How and when to bring in strategic investors How to decide which city is the best location to build your business

Chicago-based Spot Meetings raises $5 million in seed funding led by Ilya Fushman at Kleiner Perkins. That follows a $1.9 million pre-seed round led by Chapter One earlier this year. Spot Meetings wants to reinvigorate our meetings and displace Zoom as the default meeting medium at the same time.Esper, raises  $30 million in Series B round. Esper builds tools to enable developers and engineers to deploy and manage fleets of Android-based edge devices. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Root Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures and Haystack.Portside, an aviation startup that is building a platform for managing the backend of a corporate flight department, charter operation, government fleet and fractional ownership operation, raises  $17 million funding round led by Tiger Global Management. Alek Vernitsky, co-founder and CEO of Portside stated that the new capital will be used to accelerate investment in product innovation, support further engagement with large enterprise customers and grow their global engineering and customer success teams.Enterprise app configuration platform Salto today raises $42 million in series B funding, bringing its total raised to $69 million. The company says the funds will be used to expand its capacity while growing the size of its workforce.Cognite, an industrial software-as-a-service  company raises $150 million in an equity funding round led by TCV at a $1.6 billion post-money valuation. Cognite says this investment marks one of the largest funding rounds for a SaaS company in Europe and will be used to expand its platform and support hiring efforts.

Era Software raises $15.25M for enterprise data management. EraDB officially rebranded as Era Software as part of the Series A announcement. The new round of funding was led by Playground Global and brings total funding to Era Software up to $22 million. AppOmni raises $40 million in a Series B. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with Salesforce Ventures and ServiceNow Ventures, as well as previous backers ClearSky, Costanoa Ventures, Inner Loop Capital and Silicon Valley Data Capital.The company today integrates with more than 100 connectors, platforms used by developers and IT teams at companies to manage the apps that their businesses use, such as tools like Splunk and Sumo Logic. Through this, AppOmni is able to aggregate and normalize event data around those apps, in addition to deeper monitoring in cases where it can integrate with apps themselves.Per Diem raises $2.3M to help local businesses build subscription programs. The round of seed funding was led by Two Sigma Ventures. The startup is currently focused on New York, but it's already working with businesses in Phoenix and Washington, D.C. 

Rory O'Driscoll has been investing in startups since founding Scale Venture Partners 27 years ago. He and his team have invested in transcendent companies like Box, DocuSign, Omniture, Bill.com, HubSpot, and others. Listen to this one multiple times. You'll learn something new each one.Hear Rory's insights on AI and venture investing..."The venture business is more a decision business and less an action business.""The purpose of AI is to make better, more cost-effective decisions.""It’s extraordinarily hard to replace people with AI.""It’s hard to regulate what you don’t understand."How software is eating into traditional spending on telco and banking.Why successful startups must pick one of three strategies: "fight, focus, or fly" Previous episodes and companies mentioned on the podcast:Bill Davidow on AI and the Future of WorkDave Kellogg on AI and the Future of WorkForterDialpadZoom

An episode in which I thank each of the 2020 guests.  A podcast first (probably).  I briefly recall – fondly – a bit of each of the 2020 episodes. Is it interesting?  I think so.  Can I do it in one take?  Turns out, yes.  Enjoy, and thank you for listening. Marco Zappacosta, Thumbtack Founder Keller Fitzsimmons, “Lost in Startuplandia” Author Jeff Macpherson, Tiki Bar TV Creator Brianne Kimmel, worklife Founder Paul-Henri Ferrand, Brex COO Matt Hulett, Rosetta Stone CEO Mike Stutz, Television Producer Joe Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle Senior Political Writer Kaiser Kuo, Sinica Podcast Host Eric Tarczynski, Contrary Capital Founder Somesh Dash, IVP General Partner Monique Woodard, Cake Ventures Founder Michael Ellison, Codepath Founder Promise Phelon, The Growth Warrior Founder Scott Simpson, Comedian – Cheaper than Therapy Founder Parker Conrad, Rippling Founder Brad Feld, Foundry Group Founder Domm Holland, Fast Founder Garrett Smallwood, Wag Labs CEO Deena Shakir, Lux Capital Partner Rob Chesnut, AirBnB General Counsel William Davidow, Mohr Davidow Founder Trae Vassallo, Defy.vc Founder Sarah Leary, Nextdoor Co-founder Jaclyn Hester, Foundry Group Partner Hooman Radfar, Collective Founder Jeff John Roberts, “Kings of Crypto” Author Stacey Bishop, Scale Venture Partners

Stacey Bishop is a partner at Scale Venture Partners where she invests in “business applications driving the Intelligent Connected World”. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of companies like Abstract, Airspace, Demandbase, Extole, Lever, and Textio. Stacey is a founding member of All Raise – an organization frequently mentioned on Something Ventured. She is also an advisor to The University Growth Fund Stacey got her MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA from The University of Michigan. In this episode we discuss her path to becoming a partner at a prominent Silicon Valley firm, and the role All Raise played in accelerating her career. Notable quotes from this episode:   On the Early Days of “All Raise” “Before All Raise, women in venture, we just put our heads down, did our job -- just focused on trying to get ahead and do the right thing. And I think the most eye-opening thing – when All Raise started, it changed the dynamic. It suddenly brought all the women together. And even though we had all been kind of working side by side, we weren't really -- there were so few of us but there was little getting together. Now there's this whole network. And so I think it's changed the industry.”   On Hedge Funds Moving Into Venture Capital “Hedge funds have certainly been there later stage. Mostly because private companies are going public much later. So in order for them to get the returns they need, they started coming into the private markets. So they had been showing up at the late stage. But now we're seeing them much earlier. That’s probably been the biggest change and that's been over the last several years.”   On Valuation Trends of Tech Companies “We just had (another) billion dollar exit: Most people haven't even heard of the company. But, if you had a five or six billion-dollar exit, everybody would have known about it. Snowflake went public last week…it was under the radar, but Snowflake was the biggest venture exit of all time.”   On The Future of Meetings “In meetings ‘before’, somebody had to get in the car and drive to go see you and take all that time. So out of respect, you don't want to not spend the time with them. So you spend a full hour or more. Even if it’s just an introductory meeting you feel this obligation. I don’t know how much in-person meetings will drop, but there will be a whole subset of meetings that can be done remotely.”   Stacey on Twitter https://twitter.com/StaceyCurry   Scale Venture Partners on Twitter https://twitter.com/ScaleVP   Scale Venture Partners https://www.scalevp.com   Something Ventured Podcast       https://somethingventured.us

Patrick Burns is the co-founder and CEO of Spruce Holdings which aims to improve title insurance assessment and issuance to reduce the time needed to close a real estate deal. The company has raised over $50 million from investors like Bessemer Venture Partners, Omidyar Network, Scale Venture Partners, and Collaborative Fund to name a few.

Patrick Burns is the co-founder and CEO of Spruce Holdings which aims to improve title insurance assessment and issuance to reduce the time needed to close a real estate deal. The company has raised over $50 million from investors like Bessemer Venture Partners, Omidyar Network, Scale Venture Partners, and Collaborative Fund to name a few.

Ariel is a Partner at Scale focused on investments in the cloud and security industries. He currently sits on the board of directors at Agari, BigID, CyberGRX, Expel, Honeycomb, PerimeterX, and Threat Stack. Previously, he was Director of Cloud Solutions at Netflix where he was responsible for creating and operating one of the most modern cloud infrastructures in the industry, accounting for a full third of all US downstream internet traffic at peak. Ariel holds an MBA with honors from Wharton.

Susan Liu is a successful venture capital investor with a leading, top-tier VC firm, Scale Venture Partners. She has been recognized as a Forbes 30 under 30 for Venture Capital recipient and has invested in leading technology companies, including Lever, Namely, Textio, TalkIQ, WalkMe, Wrike, and others. Started her career in technology investment banking in San Francisco before moving into a career in venture capital. She is a thoughtful, genuine, and ambitious woman doing impressive things and backing amazing entrepreneurs. In addition to her professional success, she believes her relationships with her family and friends are the most important aspects of life. This episode will cover an exciting array of topics from how Susan grew up without any knowledge of exposure to the business world and how she has risen to where she is today.

Michael Winn is the co-founder and CEO of DroneDeploy which is a cloud-based drone mapping and analytics platform to help businesses get things done. The company has raised $100 million from top tier investors which include Bessemer Venture Partners, Threshold, Redpoint, Data Collective DCVC, Uncork Capital, Scale Venture Partners, Emergence, AngelPad, AirTree Ventures, High Alpha, Drone Fund, and Energize Ventures to name a few.

Michael Winn is the co-founder and CEO of DroneDeploy which is a cloud-based drone mapping and analytics platform to help businesses get things done. The company has raised $100 million from top tier investors which include Bessemer Venture Partners, Threshold, Redpoint, Data Collective DCVC, Uncork Capital, Scale Venture Partners, Emergence, AngelPad, AirTree Ventures, High Alpha, Drone Fund, and Energize Ventures to name a few.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.First, a big thanks to everyone who took part in the Equity survey, we really appreciated your notes and thoughts. The crew is chewing over what you said now, and we'll roll up the best feedback into show tweaks in the future.Today, though, we've gone Danny and Natasha and Chris and Alex back again for our regular news dive. This week we had to leave the Vroom IPO filing, Danny's group project on The Future of Work, and a handwashing startup (?) from Natasha to get to the very biggest stories:Brex's $150 million raise: Natasha covered the latest huge round from corporate charge-card behemoth Brex. The party's over in Silicon Valley for a little while, so Brex is turning down your favorite startup's credit limit while it stacks cash for the dowturn.Spruce raises a $29 Series B: Led by Scale Venture Partners, Spruce is taking on the world of real estate transactions with digital tooling and an API. As Danny notes, it's a huge market and one that could find a boost from the pandemic.Masterclass raises $100 million: Somewhere between education and entertainment, Masterclass has found its niche. The startup's $180 yearly subscription product appears to be performing well, given that the company just stacked nine-figures into its checking account. What's it worth? The company would only tell Natasha that it was more than $800 million.Clubhouse does, well, you know. Clubhouse happened. So we talked about it.SoftBank dropped its earnings lately, which gave Danny time to break out his pocket calculator and figure out how much money it spent daily, and Alex time to parse the comedy that its slideshow entailed. Here's our favorites from the mix. (Source materials are here.)And at the end, we got Danny to explain what the flying frack is going on over at Luckin. It's somewhere between tragedy and farce, we reckon. That's it for today, more Tuesday after the holiday!

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.First, a big thanks to everyone who took part in the Equity survey, we really appreciated your notes and thoughts. The crew is chewing over what you said now, and we'll roll up the best feedback into show tweaks in the future.Today, though, we've gone Danny and Natasha and Chris and Alex back again for our regular news dive. This week we had to leave the Vroom IPO filing, Danny's group project on The Future of Work, and a handwashing startup (?) from Natasha to get to the very biggest stories:Brex's $150 million raise: Natasha covered the latest huge round from corporate charge-card behemoth Brex. The party's over in Silicon Valley for a little while, so Brex is turning down your favorite startup's credit limit while it stacks cash for the dowturn.Spruce raises a $29 Series B: Led by Scale Venture Partners, Spruce is taking on the world of real estate transactions with digital tooling and an API. As Danny notes, it's a huge market and one that could find a boost from the pandemic.Masterclass raises $100 million: Somewhere between education and entertainment, Masterclass has found its niche. The startup's $180 yearly subscription product appears to be performing well, given that the company just stacked nine-figures into its checking account. What's it worth? The company would only tell Natasha that it was more than $800 million.Clubhouse does, well, you know. Clubhouse happened. So we talked about it.SoftBank dropped its earnings lately, which gave Danny time to break out his pocket calculator and figure out how much money it spent daily, and Alex time to parse the comedy that its slideshow entailed. Here's our favorites from the mix. (Source materials are here.)And at the end, we got Danny to explain what the flying frack is going on over at Luckin. It's somewhere between tragedy and farce, we reckon. That's it for today, more Tuesday after the holiday!

After a career in banking, Kate co-founded Scale Venture Partners that went on to back high growth companies such as Hubspot, Box, and DocuSign. She attended hundreds of Board meetings for more than a dozen private and public tech companies.In this episode, Kate, Justine and I reflected on the difference between public and private boards and discussed the difference between diversity and inclusion. On diversity, we also discussed the mission, vision, and purpose of the Venture Forward initiative that Kate co-founded. Finally, we reflected on the pipeline issue that some argue is the main reason for the lack of diversity at board level. Kate shared creative ways to  bring diversity at the Board level and we can only conclude that the pipeline issue is not a good excuse!If you want to know what Kate is up to, you should follow her on Twitter @KateDMitchell. For more information about her firm, follow @ScaleVP on Twitter or visit their website  https://www.scalevp.com/. For more podcasts on how to build better Boards, join us at www.boardsnetwork.com and follow us on Twitter @boardsnetwork. 

After a career in banking, Kate co-founded Scale Venture Partners that went on to back high growth companies such as Hubspot, Box, and DocuSign. She attended hundreds of Board meetings for more than a dozen private and public tech companies.In this episode, Kate was kind enough to open up about her career path and first board experiences. We discussed what a banking career can bring to future board members, the importance of mentors, and why independent board members are so critical. Kate also helped us compare and contrast non-profit, private, and public boards. Finally, we discussed what a bad board looks like, how to build trust with management teams as a new board member, and how to continuously become a better board member.If you want to know what Kate is up to, you should follow her on Twitter @KateDMitchell. For more information about her firm, follow @ScaleVP on Twitter or visit their website  https://www.scalevp.com/. For more podcasts on how to build better Boards, join us at www.boardsnetwork.com and follow us on Twitter @boardsnetwork. 

Dimitri Sirota is the Founder & CEO @ BigID, the startup that provides advanced data discovery and intelligence for the data centre and cloud. To date Dimitri has raised over $145M for BigID from some of the best in the world of enterprise including Boldstart, Scale Venture Partners, Bessemer, Salesforce Ventures and Tiger Global who just a couple of weeks ago, led their latest $50M Series C. Before to BigID, Dimitri founded 2 prior businesses, the first in 1999 being a VPN security company called eTunnels and then the second being Layer Technologies where Dimitri enjoyed an incredible 10 year journey leading to their acquisition by CA Technologies in 2013. Dimitri is also an angel investor with a portfolio including Zume Pizza, Modalyst and TalentClick.  In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How Dimitri made his way into the world of enterprise software and came to found BigID as his third company?  What specifically would Dimitri advise founders when the interests of their investor are not aligned to theirs? What is the right way to manage that situation? Does Dimitri believe that founders should always be raising? Does Dimitri believe when the money is on the table, you should take it? What is the right way for founders to think about valuation?  What did the fundraising journey look like for BigID? What situation does every founder want to put themselves in? How does Dimitri think about runway and using fundraising for optionality? What does Dimitri make of the rise of pre-emptive rounds? How does Dimitri determine when is the right time to pour fuel on the fire?      Dimitri's 60 Second SaaStr: What is his biggest strength and biggest weakness as a CEO? Who was the first check in BigID? How did the check come about? What does Dimitri believe that most around him disbelieve?  Read the 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 Dimitri Sirota

Fred Kneip is the co-founder and CEO of CyberGRX which provides the most comprehensive third-party cyber risk management platform to cost-effectively identify, assess, mitigate and monitor an enterprise’s risk exposure across its entire partner ecosystem. The company has raised over $60M from top tier investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Google Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, AllegisCyber, Blakstone, Telstra Ventures, and Rally Ventures to name a few.

Fred Kneip is the co-founder and CEO of CyberGRX which provides the most comprehensive third-party cyber risk management platform to cost-effectively identify, assess, mitigate and monitor an enterprise's risk exposure across its entire partner ecosystem. The company has raised over $60M from top tier investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Google Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, AllegisCyber, Blakstone, Telstra Ventures, and Rally Ventures to name a few.

Andrew Filev is the founder and CEO of Wrike, a SaaS-based work management platform that helps teams achieve operational excellence. Founded in 2006, Wrike now serves more than 15,000 customers in 130 countries, and employees 600 people across 5 offices. The company has raised north of of $26 million from Bain Capital Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, DCM Ventures and TMT.

Rory and Scott McGrew ponder luck, happiness and the two words you should never say in a VC pitch.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Dimitri Sirota is the cofounder and CEO of BigID which develops a software that helps companies have a secure customer data and satisfy privacy regulations. The company has raised so far $96 million from investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Western Technology Investment, Boldstart Ventures, and Deepfork Capital to name a few. Prior to this the founded wo enterprise software companies focused on security (eTunnels) and API management (Layer 7 Technologies), which was sold to CA Technologies in 2013 for $200M.

Dimitri Sirota is the cofounder and CEO of BigID which develops a software that helps companies have a secure customer data and satisfy privacy regulations. The company has raised so far $96 million from investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Western Technology Investment, Boldstart Ventures, and Deepfork Capital to name a few. Prior to this the founded wo enterprise software companies focused on security (eTunnels) and API management (Layer 7 Technologies), which was sold to CA Technologies in 2013 for $200M.

Shoaib Makani is the co-founder and CEO of KeepTruckin which is helping trucking companies manage their fleets and have their drivers legally log their hours. The company has raised over $200 million at a $1.4 billion valuation from investors like Index Ventures, Google Ventures, IVP, Scale Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, and ITOCHU Corporation. Before becoming a trucker, Shoaib Makani was a VC at Khosla Ventures and also an employee at Google.

Shoaib Makani is the co-founder and CEO of KeepTruckin which is helping trucking companies manage their fleets and have their drivers legally log their hours. The company has raised over $200 million at a $1.4 billion valuation from investors like Index Ventures, Google Ventures, IVP, Scale Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, and ITOCHU Corporation. Before becoming a trucker, Shoaib Makani was a VC at Khosla Ventures and also an employee at Google.

In this episode, we talk to Jeremy Kaufmann, Principal at Scale Venture Partners. Scale Venture Partners is a venture capital firm that invests primarily in technology companies that are starting to bring in revenue, and they focus on companies doing business on the Internet, in the cloud, on mobile, and delivering their product as a service. Scale Venture Partners prides itself on being a data driver Venture Capital firm, and we talked to Jeremy about how they leverage data to make better investment decisions and make their portfolio companies more successful.

Amit Sharma is the founder and CEO of Narvar, an intelligent customer experience platform that helps commerce companies simplify the everyday lives of consumers. The company has raised $64 million from Accel, Battery, Freestyle Capital, Scale Venture Partners, and Salesforce Ventures. Prior to this Amit was a senior executive at Walmart and Apple.

Amit Sharma is the founder and CEO of Narvar, an intelligent customer experience platform that helps commerce companies simplify the everyday lives of consumers. The company has raised $64 million from Accel, Battery, Freestyle Capital, Scale Venture Partners, and Salesforce Ventures. Prior to this Amit was a senior executive at Walmart and Apple.

On the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we host Rory O'Driscoll, Partner of Scale Venture Partners and talk about the things he believes SaaS entrepreneurs should be mindful of even as the SaaS industry seems to be thriving. Originally from Ireland, Rory moved to California 28 years ago. For 25 of those, he has been investing in enterprise software with Scale Venture Partners and its predecessor. In that time he has learned a lot of things about the world of venture funding, starting with the fact of just how deceivingly easy all of it seems, yet how difficult it is to make the right decisions about entrepreneurs and their companies and have the conviction to see them through the tough times.   Rory has also learned to count his blessings and remember that a lot of the successful bets he has made have a lot to do with luck. That humbleness is what keeps him cautious even in the best of times for SaaS and in this interview he shares some of his reservations about valuations, market saturation, the increasing competition, making the economics work and others. Listen on to hear: How worrisome is the market saturation in SaaS How other companies are dealing with that issue How to become recession proof Rory O'Driscoll is one of many excellent speakers we will host at SaaStock19 in Dublin this October alongside Claire Hughes Johnson, COO, Stripe, Leela Srinivasan, CMO, Survey Monkey, Kathryn Petralia, COO, Kabbage, and Girish Mathrubootham, CEO, Freshworks. Grab a ticket now at the best possible price.

Eric Anderson is Principal at Scale Venture Partners, investing in breakout stage (series A, B, C) business software, focused on cloud infrastructure, security, open source, and industry 4.0. https://scalevp.com LinkedIn ► https://linkedin.com/in/ericmand ******* This interview is in partnership with COFES Institute, the world’s largest community fostering the convergence of advanced enabling engineering and design technologies. https://cofesinstitute.org ******* Simulation is rebirthing the public intellectual by hosting the greatest multidisciplinary minds of our time. Build the future. Architect the frameworks and resource flows to maximize human potential. http://simulationseries.com ******* SUBSCRIBE TO SIMULATION ► YOUTUBE: http://bit.ly/SimYoTu ITUNES: http://bit.ly/SimulationiTunes FACEBOOK: http://bit.ly/SimulationFB TWITTER: http://bit.ly/SimulationTwitter ******* SPOTIFY: http://bit.ly/SimuSeries SOUNDCLOUD: http://bit.ly/SimulationSC INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/SimulationIG LINKEDIN: http://bit.ly/SimulationLinkedIn PATREON: http://bit.ly/SimulationPatreon CRYPTO: http://bit.ly/SimCrypto ******* NUANCE-DRIVEN DISCOURSE ► http://bit.ly/SimulationTG WATCH ALLEN'S TEDx TALK ► http://bit.ly/AllenTEDx FOLLOW ALLEN ► INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/AllenIG TWITTER: http://bit.ly/AllenT ******* LIST OF THOUGHT-PROVOKING QUESTIONS ► http://simulationseries.com/the-list GET IN TOUCH ► simulationseries@gmail.com

Hunter Somerville is a Partner at Greenspring Associates, a leading venture firm and fund of funds. On the direct side their portfolio includes the likes of Sonos, App Annie, Docusign and Alibaba just to name a few. As for their fund investing, they have backed the likes of Accel, Founders Fund, Thrive, Lightspeed, Foundry Group and many more incredible managers. As for Hunter, he is actively involved in the assessment of micro-vc managers for the Firm where he sits on the LP advisory boards for the likes of Pear, Foundry Group, Scale Venture Partners and BullPen Capital just to name a few. Prior to joining Greenspring, Hunter worked as an Associate for Camden Private Capital. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Hunter made his way into the world of fund investing and came to be a Partner @ Greenspring? 2.) How does Hunter assess the world of micro-VC today? Does Hunter think we will see the market start to shrink as LPs become over-allocated to the space? Why does Hunter believe the barriers for micro VCs to raise are lower than ever? What does this mean for the future of early stage? 3.) How does Hunter fundamentally approach the assessment of new funds? Is it all about track record? How does he look to build a framework/model to predict future performance? What makes Hunter sceptical when assessing new opportunities? Where do many managers go wrong in the fundraising process? How does Hunter think about loss ratio? 4.) As an LP having to allocate to multiple different stages, why does Hunter feel there is a shortage of dedicated A and B round funds? How does Hunter expect both reserve allocation and loss ration to alter as we move from early to later stage? How does Hunter feel about opportunity funds? How does Hunter and other LPs assess GP led restructurings? 5.) Why is Hunter bullish on the future for direct secondaries? Why does he believe this is fundamentally good for the ecosystem? How does Hunter think about early stage managers in their needs for early liquidity? To what extent will early stage managers need to navigate the private secondaries market to attain this liquidity? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Hunter’s Fave Book: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens Hunter’s Most Recent Investment: Amplify Partners As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Are you thinking about life insurance in the new year? Ladder. Is the smart and easy way to get term life insurance online. With Ladder there are no commissioned agents and no policy fees — you can be done in minutes. Even better, coverage can start today, if you qualify, and you can cancel anytime. Ladder is licensed and backed by trusted partners, with billions in coverage. Visit ladderlife.com to apply and get an instant decision on fully underwritten term life insurance, and check life insurance off your list TODAY. Ready for tax season? Wishing you’d kept a closer eye on your books this year? Set yourself up for success in 2019 with Pilot. Pilot is a bookkeeping company focused on the needs of startups. Their team of SF-based bookkeepers are assisted by engineers to automate the most error-prone parts of bookkeeping, so you know you’re getting an accurate report every month. Plus, Pilot does accrual basis bookkeeping in Quickbooks Online, so you’re never locked into a proprietary platform. Learn more and sign up here. Don’t wait – the first 100 members of the Twenty Minute VC community get 20% off Pilot Core for six months.

Eric Anderson is a Principal at Scale Venture Partners, a Bay Area venture firm that specializes in enterprise SaaS, developer tools, and infrastructure. Eric is a former product manager at both Google and Amazon, a former engineer with GE’s rotational leadership program, and a lifelong entrepreneur. Eric founded DocPro (www.docpro.app), the "Uber for office work." He’s also a dedicated family man, as a father of four fantastic children. In this episode, Eric shares his unique experiences growing up as a one of six siblings, discovering his passion for science and “making things” as a kid, facilitating union conflicts as a young engineer, breaking into the world of cloud computing with some of the largest tech titans of Silicon Valley, and eventually transitioning to a career in venture capital. Follow Eric on Twitter @ericmander and his firm @scalevp Or visit Scale Venture Partners at www.scalevp.com And check out DocPro (www.docpro.app), the "Uber for office work"

Today on our podcast we have Rory O’Driscoll, cofounder and partner at Scale Venture Partners. Scale Venture Partners just raised their 6th fund of $400m managing over $1.5 billion in assets under management. Scale had interesting beginnings as a firm; they were an in-house VC fund inside Bank of America and spun out as a separate firm in 2007 by Rory Driscoll and Kate Mitchell. Scale is one of the few model VC funds in SV with a woman founder and many women investing partners . Scale has been a helpful partner to Array since our early days and one of the few firms such as Array that focuses in enterprise investing. Rory has led investments and sits of the boards of companies such as Box, DocuSign, Pantheon and many more where Scale invested in these companies around Series A or B until they go public. I wanted to sit down with Rory and learn how to build a long lasting firm and how his views on the enterprise sector have evolved over the years. In this episode, Rory discusses the typical lifecycle of an enterprise startup and there path to IPO, his views on ICOs, how to pick an investment strategy, when/if to consider changing your investment strategy and much more.Rory O’Driscoll's Twitter: https://twitter.com/rodriscollShruti Gandhi's Twitter: https://twitter.com/atshrutiScale Venture Partner: https://www.scalevp.com/Array Ventures: http://www.array.vc/

BigID announced a big $30 million Series B round today, which comes on the heels of closing their $14M A investment in January. It's been a whirlwind year for the NYC data security startup as GDPR kicked in and companies came calling for their products. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from previous investors ClearSky Security, Comcast Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Information Venture Partners and SAP.io.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s weekly venture-themed podcast where we dive into the numbers behind the noise. Forget the summer lull, friends. This week was chock full of news that broke right up until the very last minute. Matthew Lynley was off this week, but Katie Roof and Alex Wilhelm were incredibly lucky to have Kate Mitchell, co-founder and partner at Scale Venture Partners on hand to help us shift the weight. Picking from among the various conflagrations, mistakes, and Softbank-led boondoggles deals, we dove into Blue Apron's earnings report, which led to a steep decline in its market value. We then turned to Snap's earnings report, which also led to a steep decline in its market value. Following the two public companies' sheepish reports, we moved on to the brand new Benchmark-Uber-Travis Kalanick lawsuit, which may deter the troubled ride-hailing company from finding a proper new CEO. That Travis wants to come back to the company appears correct. That the company's investors don't want that also seems correct. To the courts with Uber, then.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s weekly venture-themed podcast where we dive into the numbers behind the noise. Forget the summer lull, friends. This week was chock full of news that broke right up until the very last minute. Matthew Lynley was off this week, but Katie Roof and Alex Wilhelm were incredibly lucky to have Kate Mitchell, co-founder and partner at Scale Venture Partners on hand to help us shift the weight. Picking from among the various conflagrations, mistakes, and Softbank-led boondoggles deals, we dove into Blue Apron's earnings report, which led to a steep decline in its market value. We then turned to Snap's earnings report, which also led to a steep decline in its market value. Following the two public companies' sheepish reports, we moved on to the brand new Benchmark-Uber-Travis Kalanick lawsuit, which may deter the troubled ride-hailing company from finding a proper new CEO. That Travis wants to come back to the company appears correct. That the company's investors don't want that also seems correct. To the courts with Uber, then.

Rory O’Driscoll is a founding member and Partner at Scale Venture Partners. An active investor for the past 20 years, Rory is focused on early-in-revenue software companies benefiting from the move to Software as a Service and the wider transition of enterprise computing to the cloud. Rory currently sits on the boards of Axcient, Bill.com, Box, Chef Software, DataSift, DocuSign, DroneDeploy, Forter, Katch, OneLogin, Pantheon, WalkMe and Wrike.  Prior investments include ExactTarget (ET; Acq: SFDC), Omniture (OMTR; Acq: ADBE), ScanSafe (Acq: Cisco), Frontbridge (Acq: MSFT), Placeware (Acq: MSFT) among others. Rory has been recognized by the Forbes Midas List and AlwaysOn Power Players in Venture Capital for his investments.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Rory made his way into the world of venture and came to be a Partner @ Scale. 2.) How does Rory address market size? Does he utilise the bottom up or top dpwn approach? What is his strategy? 3.) Why are markets more important to Rory than management? What do each element have a different role in achieving? 4.) How does Rory look to navigate board conflict? When conflict does arise, how does Rory look to resolve a CEO who does not listen? 5.) What are the 4 fundamental roles of a board member? Why is competence underrated? What should founders and CEOs look for in prospective board members? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Rory's Fave Blog: Term Sheet Rory's Fave Book: SuperForecasting: The Art & Science of Prediction Rory's Most Recent Investment: DroneDeploy As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rory on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. So many problems start with your head: stress, depression, anxiety, fear of the future. What if there was some kind of exercise you could do, that would help you get your head in shape. That’s where the Headspace app comes in. Headspace is meditation made simple. The Headspace app provides guided meditations you can use whenever you want, wherever you want, on your phone, computer or tablet. They have sessions focused on everything from dealing with stress and depression, to helping you eat more mindfully. So download the Headspace app and start your journey towards a happier, healthier life. Learn more at headspace.com/20vc. That’s headspace.com/20vc. Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device.When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at xero.com/20vc

Kate Mitchell, managing director of Scale Venture Partners, demonstrates why an optimistic, but realistic mindset is a central key for successful entrepreneurs. Mitchell also challenges entrepreneurs to play an active role in civic life by actively telling their stories to affect policy at the national and international level.

Kate Mitchell, managing director of Scale Venture Partners, demonstrates why an optimistic, but realistic mindset is a central key for successful entrepreneurs. Mitchell also challenges entrepreneurs to play an active role in civic life by actively telling their stories to affect policy at the national and international level.

Kate Mitchell, managing director of Scale Venture Partners, demonstrates why an optimistic, but realistic mindset is a central key for successful entrepreneurs. Mitchell also challenges entrepreneurs to play an active role in civic life by actively telling their stories to affect policy at the national and international level.

Kate Mitchell, Managing Director of Scale Venture Partners, sits down for an interview with Dr. Linda Livingstone, Dean of the Graziadio School of Business and Management. Kate also answers various questions from audience members. (Part 2 of 2)

Kate Mitchell, Managing Director of Scale Venture Partners, discusses how to be a successful entrepreneur, and effectively pursue venture capital. (Part 1 of 2)

Kate Mitchell, Managing Director of Scale Venture Partners, sits down for an interview with Dr. Linda Livingstone, Dean of the Graziadio School of Business and Management. Kate also answers various questions from audience members. (Part 2 of 2)

Kate Mitchell, Managing Director of Scale Venture Partners, discusses how to be a successful entrepreneur, and effectively pursue venture capital. (Part 1 of 2)

Managing Director of Scale Venture Partners, Mark Brooks tells listeners what types of deals he likes most. He also describes his analytical investment process and what tips he has for entrepreneurs who believe they have an investment for SVP.

Jeremy Kaufmann and I discuss how synthetic data has revolutionized the AI Industry.Guest speaker: Jeremy Kaufmann, principal at Scale Venture Partners. KeepTruckin, is an end-to-end fleet management solutions and electronic logging devices for drivers, fleet managers and fleets of all sizes. Cognata, is a start-up founded in 2016 focusing on simulation platform for autonomous vehicles. Solvi, ingests data and deflects customer service queries in real time. Kaufmann mentions Unbabel, an artificial intelligence powered human translation platform. DroneDeploy, captures images, creates maps, 3D models and analyzes data across industries. The guest mentions Locus Robotics, a multi-bot solution that delivers higher productivity while reducing labor expenses.