POPULARITY
Unlock the secrets of empathetic growth strategies and become the architect of your business's success story as I, Rajiv Parikh, converse with Tae Hea Nahm from Storm Ventures. Prepare to shift your perspective on customer relationships and discover the power of positioning customers as the champions of their own narratives. Our journey together reveals how the urgency of a customer's pain point can be the golden ticket for startups seeking engagement, and how aligning with your clients' goals can propel you towards mutual triumphs. Tae Hea's legal expertise sheds light on this alignment, guiding us through the nuances of winning client trust and fostering lasting success.Embark on a voyage through the evolving realms of leadership, culture, and strategy. We navigate the intricate dance between the precision of mathematics and the fluid dynamics of legal systems, uncovering the profound influence of cultural shifts on company visions and leadership styles. Tae Hea and I dissect the saga of founders, where adaptability is king, and vision coupled with execution forms the lifeblood of entrepreneurial victory. We trace the paths of Marketo's ascension and entertain with a whimsical digression into the strategic depths of Sid Meier's Civilization, underscoring the parallels between gaming and business strategy.Step into the vibrant tapestry of Silicon Valley as we celebrate its diversity and the community it nurtures. As the episode draws to a close, we leave you with reflections on the cultural revolutions that resonate with customers, the emotional milestones charting the champion's journey, and the pivotal strategies distinguishing industry frontrunners. Tune in for an episode that promises not just insights, but a treasure trove of experiences that could ignite your own spark for the ages alongside Tae Hea Nahm's wisdom.Producer: Anand Shah & Sandeep ParikhTechnical Director & Sound Designer: Sandeep Parikh, Omar NajamExecutive Producers: Sandeep Parikh & Anand ShahAssociate Producers: Taryn Talley & Jesse DiepEditor: Sean Meagher & Aidan McGarvey#entrepreneur #innovation #venturecapital #gotomarket #management #technology #innovators #innovator #product #law #lawyerlife #revenue #revenuegrowth #founder #entrepreneurship #data #analytics #dataanalytics #growthhacking #enterprise #business #bschools #bschoolscholarship #siliconvalley #company #companies #smartgrowth #efficiency #money #sustainability #sustainablegrowth #process #processimprovement #value #valuecreation #funny #podcast #comedy #desi #indian #communityhttps://www.position2.com/podcast/
In der Rubrik “Investments & Exits” begrüßen wir heute Daniel Wild, Gründer und Aufsichtsrat von Mountain Alliance. Daniel bespricht die Finanzierungsrunde von Retorio und Aikido.Das KI-Startup Retorio, ein Spin-off der Technischen Universität München, hat in einer neuen Finanzierungsrunde 9 Millionen Euro erhalten. Angeführt wurde die Runde von SquareOne aus Berlin. Weitere Investoren sind unter anderem Porsche Ventures, Storm Ventures und mehrere Family Offices. Mit dem frischen Kapital plant Retorio die globale Expansion, insbesondere den Markteintritt in den USA. Das 2018 als KI-Recruiting-Plattform gegründete Unternehmen bietet mittlerweile eine videobasierte KI-Coaching-Plattform an. „Auf diese Weise können sich Unternehmen deutlich schneller auf neue Marktgegebenheiten einstellen und im immer härteren globalen Wettbewerb behaupte", erklärt Dr. Christoph Hohenberger, Co-CEO von Retorio.Aikido Security, eine Software-Sicherheits-App für wachsende SaaS-Unternehmen, hat in einer von Notion Capital und Connect Ventures geleiteten Seed-Runde 5 Millionen Euro eingesammelt. Hinzu kommen Investments von Inovia Capital Precede Fund I, angeführt von den Partnern Raif Jacobs und dem ehemaligen Google-CFO Patrick Pichette, sowie eine Reihe von Angel-Investoren, darunter Christina Cacioppo, CEO von Vanta. Das 2022 gegründete Startup hat es sich zur Aufgabe gemacht, die SaaS-Sicherheit mit einem All-in-One-Tool zu vereinfachen, das verschiedene Funktionen für die Anwendungssicherheit zusammenfasst.
In der Mittagsfolge sprechen wir heute mit Christoph Hohenberger, Co-CEO und Co-Founder von Retorio, über die erfolgreich abgeschlossene Series-A-Finanzierungsrunde in Höhe von 9 Millionen Euro.Retorio hat ein videobasiertes KI-Coaching entwickelt. Dieses verbindet künstliche Intelligenz mit Erkenntnissen aus der modernen Verhaltensforschung. Die Technologie erkennt Erfolgsmuster und hilft Unternehmen dabei, die Leistung ihrer Mitarbeitenden skalierbar und kosteneffizient zu steigern. Das Kernelement ist der KI-Coach, mit dem Angestellte herausfordernde und realitätsnahe Gesprächssituationen in einem virtuellen Raum nachhaltig trainieren können. 5 der 10 umsatzstärksten DAX-Unternehmen setzen Retorio bereits ein, um die Fähigkeiten ihrer Mitarbeitenden effektiv, skalierbar und kosteneffizient zu steigern, indem die proprietäre Behavioral Intelligence die erfolgreichen Verhaltensweisen von Vertriebs-, Service- und Führungspersonal per Videoanalyse erkennt und trainiert. Neben den deutschen Großkonzernen zählen auch amerikanische, britische oder asiatische Unternehmen zu den Kunden des KI-Startups. Darunter zählen führende Automobil-, Versicherungs-, Telekommunikations- und Logistikkonzerne. Der KI-Coach lässt sich nahtlos und bedarfsgerecht in den Workflow der Mitarbeitenden integrieren. Dazu löst zum Beispiel ein CRM-System eine virtuelle Trainingseinheit aus, in der sich Vertriebsmitarbeitende zielgerichtet auf ein Kundengespräch am nächsten Tag vorbereiten können. Retorio wurde im Jahr 2018 als Spin-off der TU München von Abdurrahman Namli, Christoph Hohenberger und Patrick Oehler gegründet. Ursprünglich ist das Startup als KI-Recruiting-Plattform in den Markt eingetreten.Nun hat die Münchner KI-Schmiede in einer Series A 9 Millionen Euro unter der Führung von Square One eingesammelt. Zu den weiteren Kapitalgebern zählen Porsche Ventures, Storm Ventures sowie die Bestandsinvestoren, wie u.a. Basinghall Partners, Passion Capital, Sofia Angels Ventures und die Family-Offices mehrerer DAX-Vorstände und Unternehmenden. Mit dem frischen Kapital möchte das Startup seine KI-Lösung weiterentwickeln, um in noch mehr Unternehmen Transformationsprozesse voranzutreiben und möglichst vielen Menschen Zugang zu individualisierter Weiterbildung zu ermöglichen.
This week John welcomes Yash Daftary to the show for an impactful conversation about entrepreneurship, higher education, and the rewards of starting your own company. Yash is the CEO & Co-Founder of FanBasis, the first Content Creator Monetization Ecosystem & Social Equalizer, designed to eliminate the barriers separating content creators from their fans. Yash is a serial entrepreneur who started his first business when he was 16 and has been fascinated with entrepreneurship since he was young. Prior to FanBasis, Yash also worked in Venture Capital at Storm Ventures and MBX Capital. While working in the VC world, he gained valuable experience that led to the roadmap and strategic foundation of scalability & success. FanBasis is changing the way content creators and fans interact by building a one of a kind marketplace where fans can purchase and experience bespoke digital interactions with their favorite content creators, celebrities, athletes, and influencers. With a roster of some of the worlds best known athletes, including Lamar Odom, Michael Vick, Dennis Rodman, Ric Flair, Pacman Jones, and Santana Moss and world renowned influencers and celebrities such as Gabby B, Mandy Sacs, and Derrick Fox, FanBasis is redefining how we experience and interact with our favorite celebrities and icons. In this episode, after confessing to no longer being the “young cool guy in the room” John picks Yash's younger mind about everything from changing perspectives on higher education to the truth about celebrity influencers. This is a great conversation for any young or aspiring entrepreneur to learn from someone who has built a business from the ground up, turning his ideas and passions into a positive cash flow business that is shaking up the world of sports and celebrity and providing unique experiences for fans and followers. Topics include: Building on a Legacy of Entrepreneurship Changing Perspectives on Higher Education Monetizing Celebrity Influence The Truth About Instagram Followers Connect with Yash: FanBasis Linkedin Instagram Twitter Follow John: Instagram TikTok LinkedIn 2000 Percent Raise (Book) More 2000 Percent Raise Episodes and Content Produced by Social Chameleon
Elan Amir has served as CEO at MeasureOne since July 2019. Elan brings to MeasureOne extensive general management, product, and technology leadership experience that spans a wide range of IT and financial technology disciplines. Prior to MeasureOne, Elan was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Storm Ventures and held executive management positions at online lending companies SpringboardAuto and Prosper Marketplace. Prior to Prosper, Elan served more than nine years as President & CEO at Bivio Networks, a cyber security solutions provider. Prior to joining Bivio, Elan served in a variety of leadership roles including CTO for OmniSky Corporation, one of the pioneers in the wireless data application, software, and services sectors, VP Engineering at ProxiNet, one of the first developers of web browsing solutions for mobile device, and as co-founder of FastForward Networks, a developer of broadcast media distribution software. Connect with Jon Dwoskin: Twitter: @jdwoskin Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.dwoskin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejondwoskinexperience/ Website: https://jondwoskin.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jondwoskin/ Email: jon@jondwoskin.com Get Jon's Book: The Think Big Movement: Grow your business big. Very Big! Connect with Elan Amir: Website: https://www.measureone.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/MeasureOneInc LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elan-amir-8524051/
Remote work is here to stay. But it's not what you think. Storm Ventures' managing director Ryan Floyd reflects upon the new way people work and what that means for founders and investors going forward. Make sure to also: - Follow Ryan on Twitter @RyanFloyd for more content on building SaaS B2B startups, venture capital, and entrepreneurship in general - Subscribe to Ryan's blog at https://ryanfloyd.org, where he talks about why he invests in certain companies and broader tech industry issues - Check out his #AskAVC podcast based on this channel - https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc About Ryan Floyd: Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures, where he invests in, and works with, early-stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure-related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and regularly contributes to The UK Newspaper. He's the host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode, he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as pitching to an investor and tackling sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally, he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
Replay einer der beliebtesten Episoden aus 2020/21. Diese Episode wurde das erste Mal am 30.03.2020 als Episode #073 ausgestrahlt. In dieser Episode hörst du eine Live-Aufzeichnung von einer spannenden exklusiven Podiumsdiskussion aus dem Seeport in Pörtschach. Dabei sind drei Business Angels, die darüber sprechen wie und warum sie investieren. Unter dem Titel "3 Business Angels, 4 Meinungen" haben wir eine extrem lebhafte und unterhaltsame Diskussion geführt. Dabei sind: Michael Ströck, der selbst viele Investments getätigt hat und jetzt mit Calm/Storm Ventures, einem neuen Fonds, am Start ist. Michael ist auch im Business Angel Buch mit vielen tollen Zitaten vertreten. Ebenfalls am Panel ist Roderik van Kessenich, ein gebürtiger Holländer, der schon viele Jahre in Kärnten lebt und dort als Business Angel aktiv ist. Die Runde komplett macht Aleksander Kopac von AlpVent, ein VC aus Slowenien. Auch er hat in der Region Investments getätigt und hat dankenswerter Weise die Diskussion mit den übrigen Panelisten auf deutsch bestritten. Ihr hört in dieser Episode die spannenden Insights von einigen Business Angels, die auch im Business Angel Buch präsent sind. Das Business Angel Buch bekommst du unter www.businessangelbuch.at Viel Spaß mit dieser heiteren und super informativen Session aus Pörtschach! Links in dieser Episode: Business Angel Buch: www.businessangelbuch.at KPMG Smart Start unterstützt diesen Podcast. Ihre wertvollen Ressourcen und Kontakte findest du auf: derstartuppodcast.com/smartstart
Elan Amir has served as CEO at MeasureOne since July 2019. Elan brings to MeasureOne extensive general management, product, and technology leadership experience that spans a wide range of IT and financial technology disciplines. Prior to MeasureOne, Elan was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Storm Ventures and held executive management positions at online lending companies SpringboardAuto and Prosper Marketplace. Prior to Prosper, Elan served more than nine years as President & CEO at Bivio Networks, a cyber security solutions provider. Prior to joining Bivio, Elan served in a variety of leadership roles including CTO for OmniSky Corporation, one of the pioneers in the wireless data application, software, and services sectors, VP of Engineering at ProxiNet, one of the first developers of web browsing solutions for mobile device, and as co-founder of FastForward Networks, a developer of broadcast media distribution software. Connect with Jon Dwoskin: Twitter: @jdwoskin Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.dwoskin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejondwoskinexperience/ Website: https://jondwoskin.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jondwoskin/ Email: jon@jondwoskin.com Get Jon's Book: The Think Big Movement: Grow your business big. Very Big! Connect with Elan Amir: Website: https://www.measureone.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/MeasureOneInc LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elan-amir-8524051/
Our guest, Pascale Diaine, a partner at Storm Ventures, is passionate about and committed to investing in female founders of early-stage B2B enterprises.Her investment thesis focuses on sales and marketing automation, AI/ML, IoT, retail tech, AR, computer vision, and robotics applied to the enterprise space.Before joining Storm, Pascale founded Orange Fab, the corporate accelerator of the European Telco Orange, and managed cohorts including Talkdesk (today worth $3B), Wonolo, Rallyteam (acquired by Workday), Verdigris, Pixlee, and many more.She also started an alliance of corporations piggybacking on Orange Fab's deal-flow and helping cohorts land their first Fortune 500 customers. To learn more about Storm Ventures, please visit: https://www.stormventures.com/Follow and connect with Pascale and Storm Ventures via these social platforms:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paskale/ and https://www.linkedin.com/company/storm-ventures/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/pascale and https://twitter.com/stormventures Thank you for carving out time to improve your Founder Game - when you do better, your business will do better - cheers!Ande ♥https://andelyons.com#bestyoutubechannelforstartups #venturecapital #femalefounders #b2bsaas Psst: If you're thinking “Wow – that Andelicious Advice really helped me,” please buy me a cup of coffee – a breve cappuccino will make my heart and mind sing with joy and keep me powered to serve more founders – thank you! You'll also find some Andelicious documents and resources for startups ready to download and ease your founder journey. ♥https://www.buymeacoffee.com/andelyonsCONNECT WITH ME ONLINE: https://andelyons.com https://twitter.com/AndeLyonshttps://www.facebook.com/StartupLifew... https://www.linkedin.com/in/andelyons/ https://www.instagram.com/ande_lyons/ https://www.pinterest.com/andelyons/ https://angel.co/andelyons TikTok: @andelyonsANDELICIOUS ANNOUNCEMENTSArlan's Academy: https://arlansacademy.com/Scroobious - use Ande15 discount code: https://www.scroobious.com/https://bit.ly/AAElizabethYinTune in to Mia Voss' Shit We Don't Talk About podcast here: https://shitwedonttalkaboutpodcast.com/ANDELICIOUS RESOURCES:JOIN STARTUP LIFE LIVE MEETUP GROUPGet an alert whenever I post a new show!https://bit.ly/StartupLifeLIVEAGORAPULSEMy favorite digital marketing dashboard is AGORAPULSE – it's the best platform to manage your social media posts and presence! Learn more here: http://www.agorapulse.com?via=ande17STARTUP DOX Do you need attorney reviewed legal documents for your startup? I'm a proud community partner of Startup Dox, a new service provided by Selvarajah Law PC which helps you draw out all the essential paperwork needed to kickstart your business in a super cost-effective way. All the legal you're looking for… only without confusion or frustration. EVERY filing and document comes with an attorney review. You will never do it alone. Visit https://www.thestartupdox.com/ and use my discount code ANDE10 to receive 10% off your order.SPONSORSHIPIf you resonate with the show's mission of amplifying diverse founder voices while serving first-time founders around the world, please reach out to me to learn more about making an impact through sponsoring the Startup Life LIVE Show! ande@andelyons.com.Ande ♥
Tae Hea Nahm, Managing Director and Co-founder at Storm Ventures, emphasizes and articulates his firm's specific interest in investing in vertical cloud startups.
The venture capital world is notoriously elusive - even for the founders seeking investments. But the process isn't intended to be secretive. Venture Capital investor Ryan Floyd and fellow partner at Storm Ventures, Pascale Diaine take you behind the scenes, revealing their firm's process step-by-step. Find out what happens after your initial pitch, what to note when talking to different VC firms, and the importance of culture & aligned values. Ryan and Pascale will leave you ready, confident and ready to impress at your next investment meeting. Make sure to also: - Follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RyanFloyd) for a lot more content on building SaaS B2B startups, as well as venture capital and entrepreneurship in general - Subscribe to my blog at http://ryanfloyd.org/, where I talk about why I invest in certain companies and broader tech industry issues - Check out my #AskAVC podcast based on this channel (https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc) About Ryan Floyd Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures where he invests in, and works with, early stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and is a regular contributor to The UK Newspaper. He's host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as how to pitch to an investor and how to combat sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
Growth-stage companies don't get much hotter than Salesloft, the leading platform for sales reps to execute their day to day selling tasks. Put simply, they enable sales teams to drive more revenue. Customers include Stripe, ServiceNow, and Shopify. And the company's leadership team is committed to culture like few others. Katie Branham is VP People at Salesloft, where she's tripled headcount to 750 Lofters in just 4 years. Unlike most, Katie & team have developed a crystal clear employer value proposition “we promise you'll learn more here than anywhere” which has attracted Lofters in Atlanta & beyond. Clearly, it's working… Investors include Atlanta Ventures, Emergence, HarbourVest Partners, High Alpha, Insight Partners, Storm Ventures, Techstars Candidates are interviewed to ensure they possess the same core values. In this 20-minute episode, Katie reveals how you can do the same.
The only certainty in business is uncertainty! No founder or investor could have predicted events like the Covid-19 pandemic or the war in Ukraine - both of which had profound effects on the economy, and therefore SaaS and the venture capital investment trends. But there are ways that startups can prepare for unforeseen ups and downs. Venture Capital investor Ryan Floyd shares his advice on how SaaS starutps specifically can plan for, adapt to and thrive in times of economic uncertainty. Make sure to also: - Follow me on Twitter - for a lot more content on building SaaS B2B startups, as well as venture capital and entrepreneurship in general - Subscribe to my blog, where I talk about why I invest in certain companies and broader tech industry issues - Check out my #AskAVC YouTube channel this podcast is based on About Ryan Floyd Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures, where he invests in, and works with, early-stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure-related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and regularly contributes to The UK Newspaper. He's the host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode, he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as pitching to an investor and tackling sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally, he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
Can you accelerate your time to market and out-innovate competitors by building privacy into your products from day 1? View the full video interview here. Anshu Sharma is the Co-founder & CEO of Skyflow. A serial entrepreneur and angel investor, he co-founded Clearedin where he serves as Executive Chairman, and Suki, a digital assistant for doctors. Prior, he served as venture partner at Storm Ventures and was vice president of platform at Salesforce. He has invested in over 25 startups including Nutanix, Algolia, Workato, and RazorPay. Amruta Moktali is the CPO of Skyflow. Amruta is an innovative, customer-focused product management leader with developer roots. She has held executive product leader roles at a number of software companies, including Cleo, Salesforce, Topsy Labs, and Microsoft, building data-driven products in search, AI, and analytics across multiple industries.
Welcome to the 8th episode on the Modern SaaS Finance podcast hosted by David Appel, head of Software/SaaS at Sage Intacct. Today, we are please to have Ryan Floyd, Co-Founding managing director of Storm Ventures join us to talk about changes in todays funding market, what is critical in early stage investing, an ideal investment for Storm Ventures and so much more! Storm Ventures is an early-stage B2B focused venture firm that specializes in building enterprise leaders. They are always looking for new investment opportunities and are keen to meet passionate technology entrepreneurs with great ideas for building new enterprise companies. Check them out here. 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 and so much more. If you are a SaaS finance leader or expert and will like to join our Modern SaaS Finance community, click here to request access.
Tae Hea Nahm, Managing Director and Co-Founder at Storm Ventures in this episode talks about his experience working as an attorney and helping startup founders raise money for their companies, and eventually starting a VC fund of his own. We also spoke about his book "Survival To Thrival", why he wrote it and what was the affect on his fund. Tae's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tnahm/ Storm ventures: https://www.stormventures.com/ Here is the list of podcasts about fundraising (some of them are non-profit fundraisings but still) - https://blog.feedspot.com/fundraising_podcasts/
Tae Hea co-founded Storm Ventures, an early-stage VC fund based in Silicon Valley and investing worldwide. Storm has invested in nearly 200 B2B software companies leading to 11 unicorns, including Algolia, Marketo, Pipedrive, Solarisbank, Talkdesk, and Workato. At Storm, Tae Hea was the founding CEO of Airespace, a B2B startup, which was later sold to Cisco for $450m. Based on his experience, Tae Hea also co-authored Survival To Thrival to help founders unlock growth by finding Go-To-Market Fit. Tae Hea majored in applied math at Harvard and has a JD from the University of Chicago Law School. He was born in Seoul, Korea. Check out Tae Hea's book Survival To Thrival here https://survivaltothrival.com/ Read more about Storm Ventures here https://www.stormventures.com/ and connect with Tae Hea on Linkedin here https://www.linkedin.com/in/tnahm/ If you enjoyed this podcast, would you consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify? It takes less than 30 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince new amazing guests to come on the show, and on top of that, I love reading the reviews! Connect with me: Email: hello@andrewsenduk.com Website: https://andrewsenduk.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrew.senduk/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-senduk-1980/
In this episode LosBurger is joined by Former Halo 2 Pro Poon, FalkonOnSkiis, and, Mudcat as they discuss the new Halo pop gun skin, Take some community questions, HCS/PHCL update, and talk to Poon about his experiences playing Halo in the Pro scene. Hear the story of Poon being gifted the powers of the Poonmaster and his triumph journey through the Halo pro league and making the immortal Final Boss bleed. Ok, not quite that intense but still cool. For Community Involvement make sure to talk to us on social media at... Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/2H88KnS Follow Los Burger on twitter: twitter.com/TheLosBurger Twitch: twitch.tv/LosBurger Follow PoonHalo on twitter: twitter.com/PoonHalo Twitch: twitch.tv/poonhalo Follow FalkonOnSkiis on twitter: twitter.com/FalkonOnSkiis Twitch: www.twitch.tv/falkononskiis Follow Mudcat on Twitch: twitch.tv/mudcat Twitch D&D: twitch.tv/d20deathmatch Poons Cousin Stream: twitch.tv/Scxzzle
This is Saturday, which means it's not a usual day for us to drop an episode. But what are we if not try-hards at heart? So, we're back today.What do we have on store for you? I brought Anshu Sharma onto the podcast -- and a Twitter space, so make sure you are following the podcast, yeah? -- to chat interest rates, technology growth, startup valuations, and how they all tie together. Sharma was the right person to have on the show because he's been a big tech employee (Oracle, Salesforce), an investor (Storm Ventures, and as an angel), and he's a founder to boot. So he's been around not just the block, but several in the world of technology over time.TechCrunch has covered SkyFlow, his startup, a few times including its most recent fundraise.https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/16/welcome-to-the-post-pandemic-economy-startups/Sharma finds some of the in-market worry about rising rates harming tech stocks silly. His thesis boils down to the value of growth on a longer time-horizon than what a DCF-tuned spreadsheet might tell you. That said, rising rates will impact some startup inputs, like venture funds in the medium-term, so there was a lot to chew on.We try to keep Equity pretty high-level, and focused on discrete events. But why have a show if you can't use it to scratch your own itches from time to time?The pod is back on Tuesday due to an American holiday this Monday. Chat soon!
In der Mittagsfolge begrüßen wir Nikolai Skatchkov, CEO und Co-Founder von Circula. Wir sprechen über die Series-A-Finanzierungsrunde in Höhe von 12 Millionen Euro in das Finanz-Startup. Das Berliner Startup arbeitet an einem Produkt, das den Status quo der neuen Arbeitswelt perfekt widerspiegeln und Mitarbeitende in den Mittelpunkt stellen soll. Das Unternehmen bietet seinen Kunden eine Software an, mit der die komplette Spesenabrechnung von der Quittung bis zur Buchung digitalisiert werden kann - und wollen so von dem traditionellen workflow-zentrierten zu einem mitarbeiterzentrierten Ansatz übergehen. Zu den 1.000 Kunden von Circula, das 2017 von Nikolai und Roman Leicht gegründet wurde, gehören Eigenangaben nach Ebner Stolz, DFL, McMakler, Infarm und Orthomol. Carsten Maschmeyers Fonds Alstin Capital hat die Runde angeführt, dem nun zehn Prozent an der Firma gehören. Außerdem haben sich Peak aus den Niederlanden und Storm Ventures aus den USA beteiligt. Eingestiegen ist auch das Personalmanagement-Startup Personio. Unternehmensangaben zufolge ist Circula 2021 auf über 50 “Circulators” angewachsen, hat ein Umsatzwachstum von 270 Prozent im Vergleich zum Vorjahr verzeichnen können und ist von einem einzelnen Produkt (Ausgabenmanagement) zu mehreren Produkten (Mitarbeiterleistungen und Firmenkarte) gewechselt. One more thing wird präsentiert von Sastrify – Die smarte Lösung für das Management eurer Software-Verträge. Erhaltet jetzt eine kostenlose Analyse eurer SaaS Tools und alle weiteren Informationen unter https://www.sastrify.com/insider
Net dollar retention and customer experience are highly critical for the success of your SaaS business. I had a chance to connect recently with Gaby Moran, director of customer experience at Workato. Before her current role, Gaby spent quite a few years at Medallia, customer experience management software with a world-class NPS of 60+. Our conversation turned out to be a fantastic "customer experience 101" overview, with key terms defined; and many burning questions I get from entrepreneurs all the time - answered. How do you collect and use data to inform your customer experience function? How to account for possible bias in the customer feedback - both positive and negative? How to get started with customer experience as a SaaS startup founder? Listen to the episode to get the answers to all these questions - and more. Make sure to also: - Follow me on Twitter - for a lot more content on building SaaS B2B startups, as well as venture capital and entrepreneurship in general - Subscribe to my blog, where I talk about why I invest in certain companies and broader tech industry issues - Check out my #AskAVC YouTube channel this podcast is based on About Ryan Floyd Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures, where he invests in, and works with, early-stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure-related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and regularly contributes to The UK Newspaper. He's the host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode, he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as pitching to an investor and tackling sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally, he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
Summary: In the third episode of season 8 of The Propcast, Louisa is chatting to Mallorie Brodie CEO & Co-Founder and Lauren Lake COO & Co-Founder of Canadian-based construction technology company, Bridgit about Women in ConTech. They talk about the growth of the ConTech market, how Bridgit have secured investment from some of the leading VC's and won over some major contractors. You'll hear about how a huge part of their software focuses on people and how they have scaled their team during the war on talent which is a problem that many founders are facing. Companies Mentioned: Bridgit Local Logic Agora Autodesk BDCs Capital Women Camber Creek Storm Ventures McKinsey Skanska Ryan Companies Toric Resources: LMRE Global Recruitment and Search Consultancy LMRE YouTube Interviews Shout Outs: Amy Abascal, VP of Marketing for Bridgit Courtney Cooper, Principal at Alate Partner Julian Brockhurst, Venture Capital at VentureCrowd | Director at Proptech BNE Michael Beckerman, CEO, CREtech and CREtech Climate Ben Lerner, MRI Qube Global Software Jason Fitzpatrick, Senior Vice President Of Sales at Bridgit Thiago Da Costa, Co-Founder & CEO at Toric Key Insights From This Episode: The war on talent and is a problem most founders are facing, and I'm sure that many entrepreneurs are experiencing the same pain. - Louisa We found the problem before creating the solution, which we found was different to how a lot of tech companies start. - Lauren You don't solve the pain point and then stop developing the software and just continue marketing into the industry. We are making improvements and learning from our customers every single week. There is no end to continuing to innovate at Bridgit. - Mallorie ConTech market investment has doubled in the last decade and it's accelerated, far beyond the pace of growth of just the venture capital. - Mallorie The other thing we've seen is just a ton of consolidation in the markets. Not all of that capital is going into seeding new companies. Some of the larger companies out there are seeing all of the innovation within the small and midsize companies and there has been a ton of acquisitions. - Mallorie At the beginning, we certainly found it challenging to raise capital early on in the business... Over time what we were able to do is start to prove our efforts more in the actual metrics and numbers of the business. And that makes the conversation much easier. - Lauren You have two female founders... I think looking into DEI is extremely important for the growth of a tech business. - Lousia We were females in construction technology really didn't make a selection of two male dominated industries. - Mallorie Companies felt heard. They get to actually give their input into how the product is being developed. And so, through that process, we're also figuring out, which of these companies would actually want to use the product once it's developed. - Lauren People make the assumption that if they don't have a technical background, they can't work in tech. - Lauren Keywords: Construction, Technology, Women, ConTech About Our Guests: Mallorie Brodie https://www.linkedin.com/in/mallorie-brodie-b3885827/ Mallorie Brodie, CEO and Co-Founder of Canadian-based construction technology company Bridgit. She has almost 10 years of entrepreneurial experience and holds various entrepreneurial awards, including receiving the top prize at Google Demo Day, being named Techvibes Entrepreneur of the Year, being named to the Forbes Manufacturing & Industry 30 Under 30, being named to the Best Of Canada Forbes Under 30 Innovators list, and being named to the Top 40 Under 40 in Canadian Construction list. Since opening Bridgit, herself and Lauren have established Bridgit Bench, our flagship product, as the leading workforce intelligence solution in construction today. Bridgit Bench is now used by over 100 leading general contractors across North America like Rogers-O'Brien, DeAngelis Diamond, Ryan Companies, Alberici, and more. Lauren Lake https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-lake/ Lauren Lake is the COO and co-founder of Canadian-based construction technology company Bridgit. With a degree in Civil Structural Engineering from Western University, With her guidance and expertise in the AEC industry, Lauren has helped establish Bridgit Bench, the company's flagship product, as the leading workforce intelligence solution in construction today. Lauren has been named in the TechWeek 100, Forbes Manufacturing & Industry 30 Under 30, and Best Of Canada Forbes Under 30 Innovators lists. Her true source of pride comes from helping over 100 contractors across North America get the most out of their workforce. About Our Host Louisa Dickins https://www.linkedin.com/in/louisa-dickins-ab065392/?originalSubdomain=uk Louisa started her career in property working at a well-known estate agency in London. Realising her people skills, she moved over to Lloyd May to pursue a career in recruitment. She now is a Director at LMRE, who are a specialist recruitment firm driven by PropTech and recruitment professionals, and Louisa oversees their 5 core areas. Louisa co-founded LMRE and provides a constructive recruitment platform to the new disruptors in real estate. Louisa is also on the board of Directors at UK PropTech Association (UKPA). About LMRE www.lmre.tech LMRE believe there is a better way to recruit. LMRE focus on a more comprehensive, client led focus delivering exceptional talent to the place at the time. They are passionate about the industry and passionate about people's careers. LMRE spend time with each client to become and an extension of the business, and their transparency and core values help them grow with the sector. LMRE simplify recruitment and innovate with our clients and evolve the people driven, PropTech community. Timestamps: [02:30] Talk us through founding Bridgit and the product. You founded it back it in 2014 in the Tech Hub, Waterloo, Canada. We met through an entrepreneurship program. Lauren was studying civil engineering and Mallorie had been studying business. We also both had family in the industry. Lauren had some of that first-hand experience from her time on site, how little technology there was, everything was pen and paper back then. We found was people really liked having the opportunity to open up and share their challenges. We found the problem before creating the solution which we found was different to how a lot of tech companies start Through our research and talking with the largest general contractors in the U.S, we learned about the strategic challenges they were having around the labour shortage in general, and just managing their people and really trying to put the best project teams forward. And we set out to create our second product, Bridgit Bench. [08:00] Last year you raised $23 million and you are backed by some big names like Autodesk, BDCs Capital Women and Technology Venture Fund, what are the plans? Is it further growth across the states? We brought on Camber Creek and Storm Ventures to co-lead the round. Camber brings the deep contraction and property tech expertise and Storm has the B2B enterprise SaaS experience so them joining the board and coming on as investors has been very helpful in the last 6 months. The key to our overall product development process is that it's very repeatable because we know how to go and do the research, find the pain points and actually launch a product or a module or a feature to solve for those pain points. Selling to mean general contractors right now, our primary user, and really excited to just get more and more contractors onboard the platform over the next year. We're definitely looking at adding new product nodules and also looking at international markets like the UK and Australia. [10:10] Tell us a bit more about the ConTech market in terms of investment. It's the era that's received the most amount of investment in 2021 and set to be bigger in 2022. What have you seen since founding Bridgit back in 2014? ConTech market investment has doubled in the last decade and its accelerated, far beyond the pace of growth of just the venture capital. The other thing we've seen is just a ton of consolidation in the markets. Not all of that capital is going into seeding new companies. Some of the larger companies out there are seeing all of the innovation within the small and midsize companies, and there has been a ton of acquisitions. We've just seen a dramatic shift since when we started the company. The appetite and need for technology now, it feels like we're just at the beginning. We've started to see solutions where the data is being collected. And now over the next number of years, I think we're going to see some really interesting opportunities around how that data can be put to use. [13:00] The statistics say it's harder to raise as a female founder. How did you find it? Are there any tips? At the beginning, we certainly found it challenging to raise capital early on in the business. At that point, you're really just pitching your vision and you're pitching yourselves as founders. And at that point that was much more difficult of a sell. Over time what we were able to do is start to prove our efforts more in the actual metrics and numbers of the business. And that makes the conversation much easier. And that was just because of the momentum and the product market fit that we were able to show. And just proving that through all of the growth that we have. [15:30] You're fast-growing tech business. How have you gone about recruiting from a diverse talent pool? What would you say are the most attractive parts of working in this space? And why did you both go into it? We both have family backgrounds in construction. After our studies and hearing all of the different pain points and challenges, we realised we can play a role in helping to solve the problems in the industry. At Bridgit we've been diverse from day one. Mallorie and I did not come from software engineering backgrounds. We were females in construction technology in two male dominated industries. We had little capital to put to work and hired people within our network. If diversity happens early on, it becomes really attractive for a lot of people to come and work at a company that has people with so many different perspectives and so many different backgrounds. We do very specific things in terms of how we're attracting and recruiting talent. We cast a very wide net by how we post our job descriptions and job postings. We eliminate a lot of the criteria that a lot of tech companies would include things like “you need to have X number of years in this type of role at another B2B SaaS company”. For more entry level roles, we've found that you don't need to have that experience to work at Bridgit. [21:00] You've got some huge clients. How did you go about securing some of your clients? Any tips for people looking to break into this industry you'd like to share? We built our product hand in hand with different customers. The construction industry is a very tight nit group, a very competitive industry. It was a very deliberate choice to start with the enterprise segment, because those companies hold a lot of credibility. To have customers speak to how they've used the product at trade shows doing different podcasts or webinars and having the customers speak to the product, that is what we have found is the most engaging. We've been very careful to say no when it comes to our strategy and the type of client that we're selling to. So, we could really focus on who we could add the most value to given where the product is at today and deliver a great experience. We are also very genuine and very honest in how we speak to the product. [26:00] Have you used any sort of external support, associations or groups to help your growth? There are associations that we are part of. We have integration partners, companies that our product integrates with and we're able to actually show that business use case for how the two products can work together. There're other partners that we work with that are more industry specific. There are marketing partners that we work with to do joint webinars and collaborate together as different teams. Our base of investors who provide a ton of different supports. And we've been quite deliberate in building that group of investors to have those construction backgrounds and people with tech backgrounds. There's been so many people in the industry that have given us so much time. And I think it speaks to everyone's motivation and interest. [30:00] The ‘LMRE' part, Louisa asks the guests to talk about: Lessons learned in your career Importance of corporate values. It's really helped to align everyone and the decisions that we're making and how we're hiring and just the brand that we're putting out to the team and to potential employees. Deliver results fast. We have win or lose together, which is all about teamwork. We have never stopped learning. Mention a person, product or service Thiago Da Costa, Co-Founder & CEO at Toric. Analytics is such a compelling opportunity in the space right now. Rewarding parts of working in the space: The industry was open to giving us feedback so that we were able to figure out how to build a product, launch it and build a 90-person diverse team. The partnership that Lauren and I have together What are you most Excited about for the future of the space?: Expanding on our product, workforce planning. The growth and seeing some of the early team members that have been able to just take on challenge after challenge. Sponsors Launch Your Own Podcast Kopus.com is the leading podcast production and strategic content company for brands, organisations, institutions, individuals, and entrepreneurs. Our team sets you up with the right strategy, equipment, training, and guidance and content to ensure you sound amazing while speaking to your niche audience and networking with your perfect clients. Get in touch jason@kopus.com
How can data privacy vaults empower organizations to best address their security, governance, and compliance needs and concerns? What if privacy had an API? View the full video interview here. Anshu Sharma is the Co-founder and CEO of Skyflow besides being a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. He co-founded Clearedin where he serves as Executive Chairman, and Suki, a digital assistant for doctors. Prior, he served as venture partner at Storm Ventures and was vice president of platform at Salesforce.
Tae Hea Nahm is a venture capitalist who has invested in over 200 B2B companies leading to 11 unicorns like Marketo, TalkDesk, and Workato. Tae Hea is also the founding CEO of software startup, Airspace (who sold to Cisco for $450 Million) and the co-author of Survival to Thrival. In Today’s show Tae Hea talks about his four steps for nailing your go to market fit so you can unlock your growth and scale your company. He uses a great metaphor of a surfer to hit the point home. We pick apart the steps from Nailing the Customer Journey and solving your customer’s urgent pain (the wave), building the go to market playbook (the surfboard), Operationalizing the playbook and allowing marketing and sales to work together all being backed by clear metrics or magic numbers (continuing to ride the wave). If you are a believer in frameworks for scale, this episode is for you! What You Will Learn What it means to “catch an emerging wave” when starting a business Founder-led growth vs repeatable process-led growth What “go-to-market fit” is, and how it’s all derived from repeatable processes Tae Hea’s surfer metaphor for directed towards B2B CEO’s Why it’s so important to focus the entire customer journey on transforming your customer to a hero The four steps to take when going to market from Tae Hea’s book, Survival to Thrival Why it’s important to clearly identify when your customer receives their first piece of value Where marketing and sales hand off responsibilities in the customer pipeline Why it’s so important, as an investor, to see the business from the founder’s eyes in order to provide guidance effectively // USE YOUR FINANCIALS TO CLARIFY A PATH TOWARDS A MORE VALUABLE BUSINESS: Intentional Growth Financial Assessment Bio: Tae Hea co-founded Storm Ventures, an early stage VC fund based in Silicon Valley and investing worldwide. Storm has invested in nearly 200 B2B software companies leading to 11 unicorns, including Marketo, Pipedrive, Solarisbank, Talkdesk and Workato. At Storm, Tae Hea was the founding CEO of Airespace, a B2B startup, which was later sold to Cisco for $450m. Based on his experience, Tae Hea also co-authored Survival To Thrival to help founders unlock growth by finding go-to-market fit. Tae Hea majored in applied math at Harvard and has a JD from University of Chicago Law School. He was born in Seoul, Korea. Quotes: 07:29 - “The first thing we looked at is, ‘Is there an emerging wave?’ And creating your own wave is almost impossible.” - Tae Hea Nahm 08:05 - “People are only founders, generally, if they’re really passionate about something.” - Tae Hea Nahm 12:00 - “You need product/market fit to have that product-happy customer and the best indicator is retention.” - Tae Hea Nahm 12:50 - “In B2C, you only need the product/market fit but for B2B you need both: product/market fit and go-to-market fit.” - Tae Hea Nahm 15:39 - “That’s how we want to give people the visual feeling of how to unlock growth, is to go from paddling to surfing and become a surfing unicorn.” - Tae Hea Nahm 19:24 - “The most important thing in catching the wave is to identify the urgent pain for your ideal customer pro
Tae Hea Nahm is a venture capitalist who has invested in over 200 B2B companies leading to 11 unicorns like Marketo, TalkDesk, and Workato. Tae Hea is also the founding CEO of software startup, Airspace (who sold to Cisco for $450 Million) and the co-author of Survival to Thrival. In Today’s show Tae Hea talks about his four steps for nailing your go to market fit so you can unlock your growth and scale your company. He uses a great metaphor of a surfer to hit the point home. We pick apart the steps from Nailing the Customer Journey and solving your customer’s urgent pain (the wave), building the go to market playbook (the surfboard), Operationalizing the playbook and allowing marketing and sales to work together all being backed by clear metrics or magic numbers (continuing to ride the wave). If you are a believer in frameworks for scale, this episode is for you! What You Will Learn What it means to “catch an emerging wave” when starting a business Founder-led growth vs repeatable process-led growth What “go-to-market fit” is, and how it’s all derived from repeatable processes Tae Hea’s surfer metaphor for directed towards B2B CEO’s Why it’s so important to focus the entire customer journey on transforming your customer to a hero The four steps to take when going to market from Tae Hea’s book, Survival to Thrival Why it’s important to clearly identify when your customer receives their first piece of value Where marketing and sales hand off responsibilities in the customer pipeline Why it’s so important, as an investor, to see the business from the founder’s eyes in order to provide guidance effectively Bio: Tae Hea co-founded Storm Ventures, an early stage VC fund based in Silicon Valley and investing worldwide. Storm has invested in nearly 200 B2B software companies leading to 11 unicorns, including Marketo, Pipedrive, Solarisbank, Talkdesk and Workato. At Storm, Tae Hea was the founding CEO of Airespace, a B2B startup, which was later sold to Cisco for $450m. Based on his experience, Tae Hea also co-authored Survival To Thrival to help founders unlock growth by finding go-to-market fit. Tae Hea majored in applied math at Harvard and has a JD from University of Chicago Law School. He was born in Seoul, Korea. Quotes: 07:29 - “The first thing we looked at is, ‘Is there an emerging wave?’ And creating your own wave is almost impossible.” - Tae Hea Nahm 08:05 - “People are only founders, generally, if they’re really passionate about something.” - Tae Hea Nahm 12:00 - “You need product/market fit to have that product-happy customer and the best indicator is retention.” - Tae Hea Nahm 12:50 - “In B2C, you only need the product/market fit but for B2B you need both: product/market fit and go-to-market fit.” - Tae Hea Nahm 15:39 - “That’s how we want to give people the visual feeling of how to unlock growth, is to go from paddling to surfing and become a surfing unicorn.” - Tae Hea Nahm 19:24 - “The most important thing in catching the wave is to identify the urgent pain for your ideal customer profile.” -Tae Hea Nahm 24:07 - “The first step, we say, is you have to nail your customer journey. Where you start, where you end, and every step along the way.” -Tae Hea
In this week's Espresso, we cover updates from Nuvocargo, Clara, Incode and more!The LatamList Espresso podcast team will take a holiday break but make sure to tune in starting January 2022 to find out what's going on in Latin America's ecosystem.Outline of this episode:[0:27] - Brazilian fintech Azos raises $10M in a Series A[0:59] - Nuvocargo raises $20.5M to bolster US-Mexico trade [1:31] - Interview with Deepak Chhugani, Nuvocargo's founder and CEO[5:12] - Clara becomes a unicorn after a Series B financing round of $70 million[5:32] - Incode becomes a unicorn after raising 220 million in a Series B funding round[5:55] - InEvent raises 2 million in seed funding from Storm Ventures[6:22] - Bancolombia and Gemini announce partnership for bitcoin trading[6:51] - Ep.159, Crossing Borders Greatest Hits ft. Mariana CastilloResources & people mentioned:Companies & Startups: Azos, Nuvocargo, Clara, Incode, InEvent, Bancolombia,Gemini, Ben & FrankVCs and funds: Prosus Ventures. Kaszek Ventures, Maya Capital, Propel, Tiger Global Management, Coatue, General Atlantic, Softbank, Storm VenturesPeople: Deepak Chhugani, Mariana Castillo.
Tae Hea Nahm is the co-founder and managing director of Storm Ventures, based in Silicon Valley. He's also the author of Survival to Thrival: Building the Enterprise Startup. Today we're talking about an open-source resource guide for entrepreneurs that Tae Hea has launched. A place where entrepreneurs and their team can share their experiences and learn from others how to scale and unlock growth. We dive into GTM and a newer concept called GTM Fit. Tae Hea says the problem is that Companies find product market fit but don't scale. Because there's a “missing link” between PMF and accelerated growth for the enterprise startup journey. We dig into what that missing link is. We also explore Tae Hea's four steps to find GTM fit, starting with how to Catch the Wave and Nail the Customer Journey. Connect with Andy: LinkedIn Sponsored by: Revenue.io | Unlock exponential growth with an AI-powered RevOps platform | Revenue.io BombBomb | Build better business relationships with video messaging | BombBomb.com Scratchpad | The fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and stay on top of to-dos | Scratchpad.com Explore the Revenue.io Podcast Universe: Sales Enablement Podcast Selling with Purpose Podcast RevOps Podcast
In this episode, I talk about the latest cybersecurity threats you should be aware of as a founder of a small business (what your startup essentially is). Alastair Paterson, Co-founder and CEO of a cybersecurity company Digital Shadows, joined me to answer your questions about the dark web and more. How has the global pandemic affected the cybersecurity landscape? How security threats can impact your success as a startup? What are the latest phishing techniques you should be aware of as a founder? Watch the video to get the answers to all these questions - and make sure you are better equipped to tackle the latest cybersecurity threats your business is facing. Make sure to also: - Follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RyanFloyd) for a lot more content on building SaaS B2B startups, as well as venture capital and entrepreneurship in general - Subscribe to my blog at https://ryanfloyd.org/, where I talk about why I invest in certain companies and broader tech industry issues - Check out my #AskAVC YouTube channel this podcast is based on About Ryan Floyd Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures where he invests in and works with, early-stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure-related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and is a regular contributor to The UK Newspaper. He's the host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as how to pitch to an investor and how to combat sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
Mark Yusko speaks to Sanjay Subhedar, Managing Director of Storm Ventures, about his decades long experience in tech before becoming a venture capitalist. Sanjay reflects on his early investments in innovative technology and particularly his understanding of networks. In addition, Mark and Sanjay discuss the life cycle of a SPAC and the benefits of SPACs as well as other ideas about the companies and industries of the future. If you want to know why there may be a structural positive bias to the value of the warrants tied to a SPAC or value in the types of companies that pursue SPAC mergers, this podcast is for you. To learn more about SPACs, Morgan Creek, and the investment solutions we offer, visit us on the web at https://www.morgancreekcap.com or contact us at IR@morgancreekcap.com.
Net dollar retention (NDR) is critical to your SaaS startup's success. I talked quite a bit about churn in the early days of this channel. Mastering NDR is the next logical step you should consider as you continue to grow your startup. In this episode, I am sharing 4 tips that will help you take control of your net dollar retention metric - and take it to the next level: What is the difference between gross churn and net dollar retention? Can your startup have negative churn? What can you learn from Salesforce when it comes to NDR? Listen to the episode to get the answers to all these questions - and get the complete list of 4 tips that will surely help you master your net dollar retention. Make sure to also: - Follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RyanFloyd) for a lot more content on building SaaS B2B startups, as well as venture capital and entrepreneurship in general - Subscribe to my blog at https://ryanfloyd.org/, where I talk about why I invest in certain companies and broader tech industry issues - Check out my #AskAVC YouTube channel this podcast is based on About Ryan Floyd Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures where he invests in and works with, early-stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure-related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and is a regular contributor to The UK Newspaper. He's the host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as how to pitch to an investor and how to combat sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
In the latest #AskAVC episode, we talk about understanding and the importance of diversity, inclusion, and equity in startups. I am joined by Aubrey Blanche, Director of Equitable Design at Culture Amp, The Mathpath (Math Nerd + Empath), and a startup investor and advisor. Aubrey is a recognized thought leader when it comes to building more equitable businesses - and our conversation is full of actionable insights that any startup founder can utilize right away. Why using the word "diversity" might be counter-effective? Why you as a startup founder should care about equity (and no, we are not talking about ownership)? How to go about creating an inclusive culture at your company? In the episode, we give answers to these questions - and much more. If you are ready to level up your understanding of diversity, inclusion, and equity, and learn how you can apply it in your business today - tune in! Make sure to also: - Follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RyanFloyd) for a lot more content on building SaaS B2B startups, as well as venture capital and entrepreneurship in general - Subscribe to my blog at https://ryanfloyd.org/, where I talk about why I invest in certain companies and broader tech industry issues - Check out my #AskAVC YouTube channel this podcast is based on About Ryan Floyd Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures where he invests in and works with, early-stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure-related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and is a regular contributor to The UK Newspaper. He's the host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as how to pitch to an investor and how to combat sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
Chief Revenue Officer is a wide-reaching and highly strategic role within a business, spanning sales, marketing, customer success, etc. Christof Baumgartner, former CRO at MobileIron, went through a unique journey with the company, from its startup days all the way to an IPO and ultimately acquisition. In the latest episode of the Enterprise Leaders podcast, Arun Penmetsa, partner at Storm Ventures, talks to Christof about what the “day in the life” of a CRO looks like - and how to scale to 15,000 customers and beyond. MobileIron helps companies worldwide enable their employees to choose the best devices and the best apps they want to do their work. MobileIron has over 17,000 customers worldwide. The company was founded in 2007 and backed by top-tier investors, including Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, and Storm Ventures. MobileIron conducted a successful IPO in 2014 (NASDAQ: MOBL). MobileIron was acquired by Ivanti for $872m on December 1, 2020. Make sure to also follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/stormventures) and check out our website (www.stormventures.com/thoughts) for a lot more content on building & scaling successful B2B SaaS businesses. About Storm Ventures Storm Ventures is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that is focused on building enterprise leaders with over $1 billion in capital under management. Over its 20 year history, Storm has partnered with entrepreneurs on the startup journey to address some of the most challenging problems that businesses face across the B2B enterprise software space. Portfolio companies include Algolia, Marketo (IPO/Vista), MobileIron (IPO/Ivanti), Pipedrive (Vista), Qualio, SalesLoft, Splashtop, Talkdesk, Tekion, and Workato. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/enterprise-leaders/message
In the next episode of Enterprise Leaders, we explore the role of the engineering team. Arun Penmetsa, a partner at Storm Ventures, is joined by Vahed Qazvinian, co-founder and CTO at Praisidio. Drawing on his experience as a CTO and an engineer at companies ranging from startups to multinational organizations like Google, Vahed talks about how the engineering team can be a true partner to the rest of the organization and how to develop an engineering-driven culture within the company, and much more. Praisidio is a venture capital-backed Enterprise Risk Management AI software company. Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Silicon Valley, their patent-pending product Procaire is the first of its kind Talent Risk Management platform which provides early employee attrition risk detection, assessment, prioritization, explanations, and action workflows to materially improve retention and employee work life. Make sure to also follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/stormventures) and check out our website (www.stormventures.com/thoughts) for a lot more content on building & scaling successful B2B SaaS businesses. About Storm Ventures Storm Ventures is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that is focused on building enterprise leaders with over $1 billion in capital under management. Over its 20 year history, Storm has partnered with entrepreneurs on the startup journey to address some of the most challenging problems that businesses face across the B2B enterprise software space. Portfolio companies include Algolia, Marketo (IPO/Vista), MobileIron (IPO/Ivanti), Pipedrive (Vista), Qualio, SalesLoft, Splashtop, Talkdesk, Tekion, and Workato. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/enterprise-leaders/message
In this episode, I share with you 8 ways to finance your startup - and that doesn't include venture capital! It might seem odd coming from a VC investor. However, my goal for you as a startup founder is to be aware of all the options that are available to finance your business - along with their respective pros and cons. When you do partner with a VC like myself, you need to be sure that it is, in fact, the best way forward for your startup. What might be the reasons NOT to take venture capital? How to be more like Sam Walton, Walmart's founder? Should you be scared of taking on debt to finance your venture? Listen to the episode to get the answers to all these questions - and get the full list of 8 ways you can go about financing your startup! Buy "Sam Walton: Made In America" book I recommend in this video on Amazon Read Paul Graham's full essay "Do Things That Don't Scale" that I mentioned in the video Make sure to also: Follow me on Twitter for a lot more content on building SaaS B2B startups, as well as venture capital and entrepreneurship in general Subscribe to my blog at where I talk about why I invest in certain companies and broader tech industry issues Check out my #AskAVC YouTube channel this podcast is based on About Ryan Floyd Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures where he invests in and works with, early-stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure-related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and is a regular contributor to The UK Newspaper. He's the host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as how to pitch to an investor and how to combat sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
In this episode, we do a deep dive into the product role within a company - one of the most vital functions for any business. Arun Penmetsa, partner at Storm Ventures, interviews Charanya (CK) Kannan, chief product & engineering officer at TalkDesk. CK shares the lessons from her journey to where she is today - leading a team of more than 850 employees. Talkdesk is a global “unicorn”, providing a better way for businesses and customers to engage with one another through its cloud contact center solution. Over 1,800 innovative companies around the world, including IBM, Acxiom, Trivago, and Fujitsu partner with Talkdesk to deliver a better way to great customer experience. Make sure to also follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/stormventures) and check out our website (www.stormventures.com/thoughts) for a lot more content on building & scaling successful B2B SaaS businesses. About Storm Ventures Storm Ventures is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that is focused on building enterprise leaders with over $1 billion in capital under management. Over its 20 year history, Storm has partnered with entrepreneurs on the startup journey to address some of the most challenging problems that businesses face across the B2B enterprise software space. Portfolio companies include Algolia, Marketo (IPO/Vista), MobileIron (IPO/Ivanti), Pipedrive (Vista), Qualio, SalesLoft, Splashtop, Talkdesk, Tekion, and Workato. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/enterprise-leaders/message
In the 3rd episode of the “Enterprise Leaders” podcast, Arun Penmetsa, partner at Storm Ventures, interviews Jared Lucas, former Chief People Officer at MobileIron and HR leader at companies like LinkedIn and HP. Jared shares insights on building a successful human resources function at your company - and how to become an effective HR leader. MobileIron helps companies worldwide enable their employees to choose the best devices and the best apps they want to do their work. MobileIron has over 17,000 customers worldwide. The company was founded in 2007 and backed by top-tier investors, including Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, and Storm Ventures. MobileIron conducted a successful IPO in 2014 (NASDAQ: MOBL). MobileIron was acquired by Ivanti for $872m on December 1, 2020. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/enterprise-leaders/message
In the 2nd episode of the “Enterprise Leaders” podcast, Arun Penmetsa, partner at Storm Ventures, interviews Mahesh Baxi, co-founder & CEO of Provus. Drawing on his vast experience at companies like Apttus and MyAlly, Mahesh shares insights on building a successful customer success function at your company - and how to become an effective CS leader. Provus (https://www.provusinc.com/) provides a revolutionary CPQ services solution that finally solves the age-old legacy problem of excessively long quoting and deal construction processes. Customers can accelerate turnaround time, grow deal sizes, and increase win probability faster – all while improving their gross margin and mitigating compliance risk - with AI-driven what-if scenarios, real-time collaboration, flexible approval workflows, automated SOW generation and more. Make sure to also follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/stormventures) and check out our website (www.stormventures.com/thoughts) for a lot more content on building & scaling successful B2B SaaS businesses. About Storm Ventures Storm Ventures is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that is focused on building enterprise leaders with over $1 billion in capital under management. Over its 20 year history, Storm has partnered with entrepreneurs on the startup journey to address some of the most challenging problems that businesses face across the B2B enterprise software space. Portfolio companies include Algolia, Marketo (IPO/Vista), MobileIron (IPO/Ivanti), Pipedrive (Vista), Qualio, SalesLoft, Splashtop, Talkdesk, Tekion, and Workato. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/enterprise-leaders/message
Welcome to the inaugural episode of the “Enterprise Leaders” podcast! In this one Arun Penmetsa, partner at Storm Ventures, interviews Travis McPeak, head of product security at Databricks. Drawing on his illustrious career across companies like Netflix, IBM and Symantec, Travis shares his unique tips on breaking into the security industry and becoming successful. Built on a modern Lakehouse architecture in the cloud, Databricks combines the best of data warehouses and data lakes to offer an open and unified platform for data and AI. More than five thousand organizations worldwide — including Shell, Comcast, CVS Health, HSBC, T-Mobile and Regeneron — rely on Databricks. About Storm Ventures Storm Ventures is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that is focused on building enterprise leaders with over $1B in capital under management. Over its 20 year history, Storm has partnered with entrepreneurs on the startup journey to address some of the most challenging problems that businesses face across the B2B enterprise software space. Portfolio companies include Algolia, Marketo/IPO, MobileIron/IPO, Pipedrive, Qualio, Salesloft, Splashtop, Talkdesk, Tekion, and Workato. Make sure to also follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/stormventures) and check out our website (www.stormventures.com/thoughts) for a lot more content on building & scaling successful B2B SaaS businesses. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/enterprise-leaders/message
Ryan Floyd is a Founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures based in Silicon Valley but investing globally. He focuses on early stage enterprise SaaS and has a true love for applications and cloud/infrastructure related companies. Ryan is dedicated to making VC more accessible and is doing important work on this via his YouTube channel Ask A VC. In this episode we put the spotlight on how to think about startup advisors and strategies for breaking into VC.In this episode you'll learn:• The role of advisors and how to use them best in building success• How to think about compensation for advisors• What skills are most important in a venture investor and how to build and prove it • Strategies for breaking into venture, including shadow portfolios and angel investing • How Storm Ventures think about go-to-market strategies for early stage companies
Samuel Läubli, Partner and CTO at TextShuttle, joins the pod to talk about the ins and outs of a language technology provider, and the current state of machine translation.The CTO touches on his background in Computational Linguistics and decision to go back to the academe in 2016. He gives his take on the current state of machine translation, particularly weaknesses around sentence-by-sentence structure and limited control.Samuel discusses his thesis, which tackles three key challenges in MT for professionals: quality, presentation, and adaptability. He debates whether machine translation can become truly creative without artificial general intelligence — or if it will always be considered imitation.He then walks listeners through TextShuttle's business model as well as the key problems the company solves for clients, ranging from producing MT systems to helping with configurations, workflows, and training translators.First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, where RSI platform Interactio announced that it had raised USD 30m in series A funding, led by VCs Eight Roads Ventures and Storm Ventures.Esther delves into Straker's 100-page annual report, which showed the Australia-listed LSP's 13% revenue growth to USD 22.6m for the 12 months to March 31, 2021. The duo also discusses Akorbi, another fast-growing language service provider (LSP), which recently acquired the low-code process automation platform RunMyProcess from Fujitsu.Heading to Japan, Florian goes over Honyaku Center's 2020 financial results, which saw revenues decline 14% to USD 91m and operating income nearly halved to USD 3.8m.Florian closes the Pod full circle with more machine translation news: a research paper presented by Bering Lab about IntelliCAT, an MT post-editing and interactive translation model; and, out of big tech, Microsoft Document Translation, a recent addition to their enterprise MT offerings.
FarEye, an Indian SaaS start-up that helps firms globally optimize their supply chain, and logistics operations, raises $100 million in its Series E round. The funding was co-led by high-profile backers TCV, and Dragoneer Investment Group. FarEye helps companies orchestrate, track, and optimize their logistics operations. With it's funds, the firm is looking to further expand the team, and is also open to exploring acquisition of smaller firms, in international markets. B Capital Group, the six-year-old venture capital fund formed by Facebook co-founder, Eduardo Saverin, and Bain Capital veteran, Raj Ganguly, is doubling down on China as it looks to allocate $500 million to $1 billion of its fund, into Chinese tech companies over the next few years. With $1.9 billion assets under management, B Capital is going after enterprise software providers in China, an area that has seen explosive growth, but is still only a fraction the size of the U.S. SaaS market. Resolve , a San Francisco-based start-up, in the space specializing in buy now, pay later capabilities for B2B transactions, raises $60 million in funding. Initialized Capital, led the funding round. This is the company's first funding since its 2019 inception. The funding is a combination of equity, and asset funding. The San Francisco start-up is using the money primarily to grow its embedded billing platform. Interactio, a remote interpretation platform whose customers include massive institutions like the United Nations, European Commission, and the Parliament, along with corporates like BMW, JP Morgan, and Microsoft, raises $30 million Series A. The Series A funding was led by Eight Roads Ventures, and Silicon Valley based - Storm Ventures. The funds will be used for enhancing its tech, and UX - UI, with a focus on ensuring ease of access and simplicity, and on upgrading the tools it provides to interpreters. EYs3D Microelectronics, a fabless design house, that focuses on end-to-end software, and hardware systems for computer vision technology, raises $7 million in Series A. The new funding will be used to expand eYs3D's product development, and launch a series of 3D computer vision modules. It also will work with new business partners to expand its platform and hire more talent. AcuityMD raises $7M, to better track the evolving world of medical hardware. AcuityMD, is a data platform that tracks the entire medical device lifecycle from the sale of an item, to a patient's outcome after a surgery. Microsoft, today announced Py-Torch Enterprise, a new Azure service that provides developers with additional support, when using Py-Torch on Azure. Py-Torch is a Python-centric open-source machine learning framework, with a focus on computer vision and natural language processing. French start-up Matera, raises a new $43 million Series B funding round, led by Mubadala Capital, to turn residential building management, into SaaS. The company is building a vertical SaaS, for residential property management. With the funding round, Matera plans to expand to Germany.
As you grow your enterprise SaaS startup, opportunities to engage various sales channel partners will most certainly come your way. The prospect of partnering with a leading telco or some other big corporation might seem very appealing. However, there is a lot you need to know before entering any agreements - and to make sure it works out well in the end. What are sales channel partners and how to choose the right ones? How to make sure they are successful in growing your business? What pitfalls to avoid? Watch my full interview with Christof Baumgärtner, ex-Chief Revenue Officer at MobileIron, one of the leading enterprise security companies today. Christof did an outstanding job of finding & partnering with the best sales channels that fueled the growth of MobileIron. Make sure to also: Follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RyanFloyd) for a lot more content on building SaaS B2B startups, as well as venture capital and entrepreneurship in general Subscribe to my blog at http://ryanfloyd.org/, where I talk about why I invest in certain companies and broader tech industry issues Check out my #AskAVCYouTube channel this podcast is based on (https://www.youtube.com/c/AskAVC) About Ryan Floyd Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures where he invests in, and works with, early stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and is a regular contributor to The UK Newspaper. He's host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as how to pitch to an investor and how to combat sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
Startup equity and convertible notes are about to be fully explained! Early-stage entrepreneurs have to learn a lot of new vocabulary, technical & legal details, to ensure their initial rounds of outside financing go well. In this video I am being interviewed by Fellows at ASIF Ventures, European micro-VC, focused on student-led startups, and we do a deep dive into: Comparing direct startup equity investments vs convertible notes Discussing intricacies of founder's dilution over time Tackling valuation challenges ... and much more! Make sure to also: Follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RyanFloyd) for a lot more content on building SaaS B2B startups, as well as venture capital and entrepreneurship in general Subscribe to my blog at http://ryanfloyd.org/, where I talk about why I invest in certain companies and broader tech industry issues Check out my #AskAVCYouTube channel this podcast is based on (https://www.youtube.com/c/AskAVC) About Ryan Floyd Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures where he invests in, and works with, early stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and is a regular contributor to The UK Newspaper. He's host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as how to pitch to an investor and how to combat sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
"How much to pay startup advisors" is the question I often get asked by even experienced entrepreneurs. In one of my previous episodes, I gave an intro to the topic of startup advisors - what do they do, how to find them, etc. In this one, I dive deeper into the specifics: What's the difference between consultants and advisors for your startup? How should you think about cash pay versus equity? Are you missing out on leveraging "free" advisors you might already have? After listening to this podcast, you will have answers to all these questions - and a pretty good idea of how much to pay your startup advisors! Make sure to also: Follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RyanFloyd) for a lot more content on building SaaS B2B startups, as well as venture capital and entrepreneurship in general Subscribe to my blog at http://ryanfloyd.org/, where I talk about why I invest in certain companies and broader tech industry issues Check out my #AskAVCYouTube channel this podcast is based on (https://www.youtube.com/c/AskAVC) About Ryan Floyd Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures where he invests in, and works with, early stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and is a regular contributor to The UK Newspaper. He's host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as how to pitch to an investor and how to combat sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
Episode 68 - What Is Happening at SVG? We were recently in Phoenix and got to visit the Storm Ventures Group headquarters! Anthony Delmedico gave us a tour of his new office and gave us a behind-the-scenes look into how the sausage is made at SVG and some insight on some new projects he and his team are working up. They are also gearing up for the Win the Storm Conference that takes place later this month! **The American Contractor Show is made possible because of our sponsors!** Atlas Roofing - Shingles - Providing premium quality roofing and insulation products for distribution throughout the world. Go to www.atlasroofing.com to learn more! Contractor Coach PRO - Coaching Contractors to Work On IT, Not IN It! Go to www.contractorcoachpro.com to learn more! Hail Trace - The most accurate hail mapping application in the world! Learn more at www.hailtrace.com C3 Group Inc. - Claims & Construction Consulting - C3 Group is a nationally connected team of Public Adjusters. They have been the industry experts on large loss, commercial claims for the past 8 years. For more information visit www.c3adjusters.com. RoofScope by Scope Technologies, Inc. - RoofScope reports compile all essential roofing measurements and images into an easy-to-read, environmentally friendly two-page report. Get started today at www.roofscope.com. CompanyCam - The only app every contractor needs. Document your jobs. Communicate with your crews. Cover your company’s butt. Learn more at www.CompanyCam.com. SignPost - Signpost helps contractors text their customers, get online reviews, and drive loyalty with email marketing.- To Learn more go to https://signup.signpost.com/partner/acs/. The Catalyst Group - The Essential partner for contractors! Learn more and join for free at www.thecatalystgroup.co
This episode is something I have not tried on my channel before. This is a deep dive into a specific concept - in this case, enterprise automation - from a technical point of view. We dive deep into the idea of workflows automation, talking about its definition and benefits, as well as giving specific examples. In the 24th episode of the #AskAVC channel, you can expect to find answers to the following questions: What the commonly used in this space terms - RPA, API, etc. - are all about? How has enterprise automation evolved over the past several years? What the future of workflows automation is going to look like? ... and much more! Tune in to my interview with Markus Zim, head of the strategy and business development at Workato, a portfolio company of mine that recently became a unicorn. Make sure to also: Follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RyanFloyd) for a lot more content on building SaaS B2B startups, as well as venture capital and entrepreneurship in general Subscribe to my blog at http://ryanfloyd.org/, where I talk about why I invest in certain companies and broader tech industry issues Check out my #AskAVCYouTube channel this podcast is based on (https://www.youtube.com/c/AskAVC) About Ryan Floyd Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures where he invests in, and works with, early stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and is a regular contributor to The UK Newspaper. He's host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as how to pitch to an investor and how to combat sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
Ed Zitron is the CEO and founder of EZPR, a national media relations firm. He is also outspoken in his critiques of the public relations profession. In our discussion, he talks about how and why media pitches go wrong, the reason his first job in PR was a misery, and several other provocative thoughts--you be the judge: is he right, or is he wrong? EZPR focuses on industry-leading media relations for tech (B2B, B2C, Consumer Tech, Enterprise, SaaS, DevOps, Blockchain/Crypto) companies, startups, app developers, and more with clients including Skydio, SmartNews, Wyze, Flexa, PUBG, RAVPower, and Storm Ventures. Ed has been published by Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Eurogamer, PC Gamer and PC Zone, and he has written two books - This Is How You Pitch, an early PR person's guide to PR, and Fire Your Publicist, a DIY guide to PR for just about anyone. THIRSTY? Get the official PR After Hours tumbler, here! GET THE T-SHIRT! Show you're an exclusive member of the Virtual Lounge with this cool tee! Click here! A Little Help? Please take a moment to show your support for the show by leaving a starred review on Apple Podcasts. Your review will help us attract more listeners and sponsors to keep it going. Here's how: https://digitalhealthtoday.com/support/how-to-review-itunes/ Here's the link to our show: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pr-after-hours/id1496015627 Follow us on Twitter: @HoursPR Listen to our entire first season of episodes and more on the show website: PRAfterHours.com. PR After Hours Theme: https://filmmusic.io "Bossa Antigua" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC. Sound effects. As an Amazon Associate, we earn a small commission on some of our Amazon links. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/alex-greenwood1/message
InEvent, a startup powering virtual and hybrid events, is announcing that it has raised $2 million in seed funding from Storm Ventures. That's just tiny fraction of the $125 million that online events platform Hopin raised last fall — in fact, a recent Equity episode suggested that Hopin might be the fastest growth story of […]
InEvent, a startup powering virtual and hybrid events, is announcing that it has raised $2 million in seed funding from Storm Ventures. That’s just tiny fraction of the $125 million that online events platform Hopin raised last fall — in fact, a recent Equity episode suggested that Hopin might be the fastest growth story of […]
As your startup company will become more successful, naturally there will be more and more people eager to share their advice with you. It's a smart strategy to surround yourself with people who know more than you in various business areas - be it sales or security. There are a few things any founder needs to keep in mind, however, to make sure that taking advice will help their company as opposed to hurting it. As a startup CEO, you must figure out: How to find and choose the right advisors for your business? How to separate good advice from bad? How to maintain a strong relationship with an advisor even if you reject his or her advice? How to compensate your startup advisor? There is no question that the right set of advisors will make your startup stronger. Watch this video to get answers to the questions below - and much more! Make sure to also: Follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RyanFloyd) for a lot more content on building SaaS B2B startups, as well as venture capital and entrepreneurship in general Subscribe to my blog at http://ryanfloyd.org/, where I talk about why I invest in certain companies and broader tech industry issues Check out my #AskAVC podcast based on this channel (https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc) About Ryan Floyd Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures where he invests in, and works with, early stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and is a regular contributor to The UK Newspaper. He's host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as how to pitch to an investor and how to combat sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
This episode is brought to you with the help of our good friends at Sage Intacct. You can check out the live session and many other on demand sessions at https://www.sageintacct.com/events/saas-success-series And join us next week at https://register.saastrscale.com/checkout/select-tickets/?coupon=poyavip and use "poyavip" for a free VIP Pass. Regarding this episode -- Join top consulting CFO, Tina Gregory, from Early Growth Financial Services, David Appel, Head of Software and SaaS at Sage Intacct, as well as, Ryan Floyd, Founder and Managing Director of Storm Ventures to learn how to position yourself for the next stage of growth across people, processes, and technology as well as Succeed in a SaaS company as an early hire. In this episode, we discuss the strategies, tactics and actionable tips that can help seed companies get to growth stage and beyond. Connect with David Appel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidappelsf/ Connect with Tina Gregory: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tinagregory1/ Connect with Ryan Floyd: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanfloyd1/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/uncharted1/support
In this video, I talk about the biggest enemy of all SaaS businesses - customer churn. It is safe to say that nearly every single startup faces this problem at some point or another. As scary and uncomfortable it might be, having customer churn is not the end of the world - but you do need a war plan. Have you asked yourself: How is your product contributing to the problem? What the entire team can do to make customer success folks more successful? Should you keep growing the business while trying to fix your customer churn problem? Watch the video to get answers to all these questions - and more! Make sure to also: Follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RyanFloyd) for a lot more content on building SaaS B2B startups, as well as venture capital and entrepreneurship in general Subscribe to my blog at http://ryanfloyd.org/, where I talk about why I invest in certain companies and broader tech industry issues Check out my #AskAVC YouTube channel this podcast series is based on (https://www.youtube.com/askavc) About Ryan Floyd Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures where he invests in, and works with, early stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and is a regular contributor to The UK Newspaper. He's host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as how to pitch to an investor and how to combat sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
On Episode 62, Garnet and Mark are back from hiatus with a very important episode. Frederik Groce, Principal at Storm Ventures and Co-Founder and Board Member at BLCK VC, joins us to discuss what led to the founding of BLCK VC, how Black Lives Matter started to impact conversations in tech and corporate America. And we dig deeper to see if that discussion will affect civil rights. Plus we talk about the state of investing in the pandemic, what his investment focus is and lots more.
Okay MYB Community mic check 1-2 what is this?! Ed joins me to discuss his background, how he came to America from the UK, his early days in media and public relations, how his company helps tech startups navigate media for success, and his top best practices to help you be just a little better!Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR, a Media Relations company based in San Francisco, Boston and Portland.He's written a book called This Is How You Pitch and was named one of Business Insider's Top 10 PR people in tech, as well as one of Adweek's 30 under 30. He has been published by Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Eurogamer, PC Gamer and PC Zone. He's written two books - This Is How You Pitch, an early PR person's guide to PR, and Fire Your Publicist, a DIY guide to PR for just about anyone. EZPR does industry-leading media relations for tech (B2B, B2C, Consumer Tech, Enterprise, SaaS, DevOps, Blockchain/Crypto) companies, startups, app developers and more, with clients including Skydio, SmartNews, Wyze, Flexa, PUBG, RAVPower, Storm Ventures and more.Podcast is powered by The Binge Podcast Network!
Fred Groce, Principal at Storm Ventures and founder of Blck VC, shares authentic stories of startup investments that succeeded and failed. He describes how to identify the X-factor in a founding team. He also talks about his initiatives to double the number of black VCs.Diversity is a competitive edge in the market for organizationsTech is not an inclusive industry.
Frederik Groce is a Principal at Storm Ventures and a co-founder at BLCK VC. Storm Ventures is an early stage B2B focused venture firm that specialises in building enterprise leaders. BLCK VC was formed to connect, engage, empower, and advance Black venture investors by providing a focused community built for and by Black venture investors. In this episode of The SaaS Revolution Show he joins SaaStock's Alex Theuma to discuss an often-overlooked part of the startup journey: getting from product-market fit (PMF) to go-to-market (GTM) fit.
There is so much content out there about the legal language of term sheets, valuations, etc. However, it would be a mistake to see your interactions with potential investors as purely transactional. The key is to build a relationship with a person on the other side of the table. And a lot of goes into it: - Should you be spending time with junior team members at VC firms? - How much info do you share with potential investors? - Can you negotiate a term sheet? Watch the video to get answers to all these questions - and more! Make sure to also: - Follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RyanFloyd) for a lot more content on building SaaS B2B startups, as well as venture capital and entrepreneurship in general - Subscribe to my blog at http://ryanfloyd.org/, where I talk about why I invest in certain companies and broader tech industry issues - Check out my #AskAVC podcast based on this channel (https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc) About Ryan Floyd Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures where he invests in, and works with, early stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and is a regular contributor to The UK Newspaper. He's host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as how to pitch to an investor and how to combat sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
Origins - A podcast about Limited Partners, created by Notation Capital
Frederik Groce is a Principal at Storm Ventures and a co-founder at BLCK VC. After finishing school, Frederik spent two years as CEO of Stanford Student Enterprises (SSE) with more than one hundred employees and total assets exceeding $18 million – including overseeing Stanford’s accelerator program.In this episode, we discuss Frederik's path to VC out of college, and how he's learned on the job and been promoted multiple times at Storm Ventures since. We also discuss his work as a co-founder at BLCK VC, which was formed to connect, engage, empower, and advance Black venture investors by providing a focused community built for and by Black venture investors. Finally, we touch on the role that BLCK VC plays within the context of the larger BLM movement, diversity & inclusion within tech, and what can be done to change the problems facing our industry and society at large.
Patrick Arippol (Founding Partner, Alexia Ventures) leads an informative conversation with Thomas Preuss (Partner, DTCP), Michiel Kotting (General Partner, Northzone) and Pascale Diaine (Principal, Storm Ventures). This talk was recorded at SaaStock Remote. As more and more investors look into SaaS than ever before, especially in light of the current crisis, what are the steps you need to go through in order to prepare for your next fundraising round? What are the benchmarks to measure whether you're being offered a fair price, and what is a 'fair' price in today's uncertain environment? How do you evaluate this to determine the validity of an offer? Should you hold in and cash out, or should you continue to retain control of your company and grow your businesses through alternative capital? If you're an early stage startup looking to secure your series A from the growing number of local investors eyeing SaaS, how do you secure an initial or another round of investment?
When you are ready to raise some outside capital to scale your business, there are a lot of questions that need to be answered to make the process successful. For example, there are many different types of investors you can turn to. One of the most frequently asked questions I get is - what is the difference between angel investing and venture capital? In this episode I address topics like: What do angel investors look for? Are angel investors a good idea? How much do angel investors invest? Listen to the episode to get answers to all these questions - and more! Make sure to also: - Follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RyanFloyd) for a lot more content on building SaaS B2B startups, as well as venture capital and entrepreneurship in general - Subscribe to my blog at http://ryanfloyd.org/, where I talk about why I invest in certain companies and broader tech industry issues - Check out my #AskAVC YouTube channel that this podcast is based on (https://www.youtube.com/askavc) About Ryan Floyd Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures where he invests in, and works with, early stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and is a regular contributor to The UK Newspaper. He's host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as how to pitch to an investor and how to combat sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
Tae Hea Nahm is co-founding MD of Storm Ventures, a Silicon Valley VC firm investing in tech start-ups all around the world. He's also a two-time author. His second book, Survival to Thrival: Change or Be Changed explores how all people in a startup – from the executive team to the CEO and the board – need to change their roles and skills as a company grows. Bob Tinker is a three-time entrepreneur. Most recently, he was the founding CEO of MobileIron, which in eight years grew from ‘three people and a whiteboard' to over $150M in annual revenue, more than 12,000 enterprise customers, and IPO in 2014. MobileIron was named the #1 fastest growing tech company from 2009-2013 by the Deloitte Fast 500. Before than Bob was VP Business Development for wireless pioneer Airespace, which was acquired by Cisco for $450M in 2005. In this episode, you'll learn: What are the 5 stages that a company goes through? How does one unlock growth in a company? What is the difference between the VC and the CEO perspective of the business? How can an investor's portfolio have synergy among the investments? Why are Korean startups ripe for investing right now? Help us out! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review! It takes less than 30 seconds and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Learn more about Tae Hea Nahm and Bob Tinker Linkedin Tae Hea Nahm Bob Tinker Books Website : http://survivaltothrival.com/ The Company Journey / Change or Be Changed https://www.stormventures.com/ CONNECT WITH SHAWN: https://linktr.ee/ShawnflynnSV Shawn Flynn's Twitter Account Shawn Flynn's LinkedIn Account Silicon Valley LinkedIn Group Account Shawn Flynn's Facebook Account Email Shawn@thesiliconvalleypodcast.com
In this podcast, Jeremy Glaser, Co-chair of the Mintz Venture Capital & Emerging Companies practice, and Ryan Floyd, founder and partner at Storm Ventures, discuss important points for entrepreneurs to be aware of when negotiating a venture capital term sheet.
Tae Hea Nahm is co-founding MD of Storm Ventures, a Silicon Valley VC firm investing in tech start-ups all around the world. He's also a two-time author. His second book, Survival to Thrival: Change or Be Changed explores how all people in a startup – from the executive team to the CEO and the board – need to change their roles and skills as a company grows. Bob Tinker is a three-time entrepreneur. Most recently, he was the founding CEO of MobileIron, which in eight years grew from ‘three people and a whiteboard' to over $150M in annual revenue, more than 12,000 enterprise customers, and IPO in 2014. MobileIron was named the #1 fastest growing tech company from 2009-2013 by the Deloitte Fast 500. Before than Bob was VP Business Development for wireless pioneer Airespace, which was acquired by Cisco for $450M in 2005. In this episode, you'll learn: What are the 5 stages that a company goes through? How does one unlock growth in a company? What is the difference between the VC and the CEO perspective of the business? How can an investor's portfolio have synergy among the investments? Why are Korean startups ripe for investing right now? Help us out! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review! It takes less than 30 seconds and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Learn more about Tae Hea Nahm and Bob Tinker Linkedin Tae Hea Nahm Bob Tinker Books Website : http://survivaltothrival.com/ The Company Journey / Change or Be Changed https://www.stormventures.com/ CONNECT WITH SHAWN: https://linktr.ee/ShawnflynnSV Shawn Flynn's Twitter Account Shawn Flynn's LinkedIn Account Silicon Valley LinkedIn Group Account Shawn Flynn's Facebook Account Email Shawn@thesiliconvalleypodcast.com
The prospect of asking for multi-million dollar investment in a cold email to someone you never met is undoubtedly daunting. Do cold emails even work? Believe it or not, but that's how we met one of the most valuable investments in Storm Ventures' portfolio! Even if you do manage to get a warm introduction to a potential investor, principles and techniques outlined in this video will still be very valuable to you. Crafting effective cold emails is not easy, but absolutely doable! What three elements are critical to include in your cold email? Which service you should never use while sending out cold emails? How to follow-up properly? Listen to the episode to get answers to all these questions - and more! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message
Ryan Floyd is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures, which is a Silicon Valley-based VC firm that invests in infrastructure, B2B SaaS, networking, digital technology, networking equipment, and industries. In this episode, Ryan talks about the 20-year journey of Storm Ventures, breaks apart the challenges and advantages of B2B and B2C focused startups, and shares his tips on writing a stand out email to an investor. Show-notes: http://entrepreneursinb2bsales.com/ryan-floyd/interviews
Bienvenid@s al podcast en español sobre Venture Capital, Inversión Angel y Startups de Draper Cygnus
Tae Hea describes how startups can unlock growth (find "Go-To-Market Fit") and why that requires executives and founders to unlearn.Highlights:- Why surfing? Unlocking growth feels like the transition from paddling to surfing.- Surfing to growth is a 3 step process: Catching the wave, Riding the wave and Having the right surfboard- Unlearning is critical to executive growth.Tae Hea Nahm is the Managing Director and co-founder of Storm Ventures, investing in B2B SaaS companies in the US and Europe. Tae Hea is also the co author of Survival to Thrival, breaking down the B2B SaaS company building journey. This article is based on an interview that took place in 2019.Read an in-depth report on this episode: https://notion.vc/resources/surfing-to-growth-with-tae-hea-nahm-of-storm-ventures/
In dieser Episode hörst du eine Live-Aufzeichnung von einer spannenden exklusiven Podiumsdiskussion aus dem Seeport in Pörtschach. Dabei sind drei Business Angels, die darüber sprechen wie und warum sie investieren. Unter dem Titel "3 Business Angels, 4 Meinungen" haben wir eine extrem lebhafte und unterhaltsame Diskussion geführt. Dabei sind: Michael Ströck, der selbst viele Investments getätigt hat und jetzt mit Calm/Storm Ventures, einem neuen Fonds, am Start ist. Michael ist auch im Business Angel Buch mit vielen tollen Zitaten vertreten. Ebenfalls am Panel ist Roderik van Kessenich, ein gebürtiger Holländer, der schon viele Jahre in Kärnten lebt und dort als Business Angel aktiv ist. Die Runde komplett macht Aleksander Kopac von AlpVent, ein VC aus Slowenien. Auch er hat in der Region Investments getätigt und hat dankenswerter Weise die Diskussion mit den übrigen Panelisten auf deutsch bestritten. Ihr hört in dieser Episode die spannenden Insights von einigen Business Angels, die auch im Business Angel Buch präsent sind. Das Business Angel Buch bekommst du unter www.businessangelbuch.at Viel Spaß mit dieser heiteren und super informativen Session aus Pörtschach! Links in dieser Episode: Business Angel Buch: www.businessangelbuch.at Gründer & Zünder findest du auch auf: Spotify, Soundcloud, iTunes, Google Podcasts, iOS App, Android AppSuche einfach nach “Gründer Zünder” oder “Kandler”
This episode of The SaaS Revolution Show takes us back to SaaStock West Coast in September 2019. This session was delivered by Tae Hea Nahm - Managing Director of Storm Ventures, and 3x entrepreneur Bob Tinker. They discuss how startup founders and employees need to learn and change as their company grows and scales.
Jacco is the founder of Winning By Design and author of Blueprints of a Sales SaaS Organization ( https://amzn.to/2U1TbAf ) and seven other books. He is a Sales Mentor across several VC firms such as Notion Capital, Reach Capital, Astella and Storm Ventures, where he helps accelerate the development of sales teams across their portfolios. Prior to founding Winning By Design, Jacco held roles of VP of Worldwide Sales and VP Strategy at Qumu (acquired by Rimage), Kontiki, and Technicolor. He is proud to have helped marquee customers over the years, including Amazon, AT&T, Dish, and Disney. Jacco holds a BScEE in Electrical Engineering and an Executive MBA from the University of Leicester. Jacco’s insights have been featured in Harvard Business Review, and he is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences around the world including Dreamforce, SaaStock (Dublin), SaaS Growth (London) SalesHacker (virtual), and RD Summit (Brazil).
www.vchunting.com/frederik-groce - Show notes!
Tae Hea Nahm is co-founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures and co-author of Survival To Thrival. Survival to Thrival is a mind-meld of a 3x entrepreneur (Bob Tinker) and a VC/board member (TH Nahm), and other enterprise entrepreneurs, which demystifies building enterprise startups. Tae Hea was the founding CEO of Airespace, later sold to Cisco for $450m. Currently,... The post Product and Go To Market Fit, Funding Milestones and Enterprise SaaS with Tae Hea Nahm of Storm Ventures appeared first on The Syndicate.
http://vchunting.com/ryan-floyd - Show notes!
I think most of us can agree that being curious and continuing to learn are key ingredients to being successful. But what happens when you have to unlearn behaviors in order to level-up your career? When you’re forced to change what made you successful in the first place? Here comes the understatement of the year: change is hard. Especially when you’re used to being a superstar at your company. So how do you make it easier? Spoiler alert - self-awareness helps A LOT. Listen in as Tae Hea Nahm from Storm Ventures explains why unlearning is such an important concept for leaders as their company grows, and how to make the unlearning process less painful. About our Guest: Tae Hea is co-founder & Managing Director of Storm Ventures; currently, he’s interested in AI and SaaS companies. In his free time, he enjoys playing Civilization. You can connect with Tae Hea on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/tnahm/ or Twitter @taeheanahm. Resources cited: Survival to Thrival by Bob Tinker and Tae Hea Nahm
The Project EGG Show: Entrepreneurs Gathering for Growth | Conversations That Change The World
Tae Hea is co-founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures and co-author of Survival To Thrival. Survival to Thrival is a mind-meld of a 3x entrepreneur (Bob Tinker) and a VC/board member (TH Nahm), and other enterprise entrepreneurs, which demystifies building enterprise startups. Tae Hea was the founding CEO of Airespace, later sold to Cisco for $450m. Currently, he is interested in “AI + SaaS” companies. He enjoys playing Civilization in his free time and was born in Seoul, Korea. About The Project EGG Show: The Project EGG Show is a video talk show that introduces you to entrepreneurs from around the world. It is broadcast from studios in Metairie, Louisiana to online platforms including YouTube, iTunes, Google Play, Spotify and Stitcher, and hosted by Ben Gothard. Our goal is to give you a fresh, unscripted and unedited look into the lives of real entrepreneurs from around the globe. From billionaires to New York Times best selling authors to Emmy Award winners to Forbes 30 Under 30 recipients to TEDx speakers – we present their real stories – uncensored and uncut. Subscribe To The Show: https://projectegg.co/podcast/ Get Access To: 1. Resources: https://projectegg.co/resources/ 2. Financing Solutions: https://projectegg.co/epoch/ 3. Payment Solutions: https://projectegg.co/sempr/ 4. Services: https://projectegg.co/resources#services 5. Courses: https://projectegg.co/resources#courses 6. Software: https://projectegg.co/resources#software 7. Book: https://projectegg.co/resources#books --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/projectegg/support
All of the technology that has been implemented in the last 30 years in terms f computer storage, processing and bandwidth has made starting a business very easy. Within a short window of time a website can be built advertising products and services and instantly you have access to millions of customers. Apps for smart phones are creating the way we live our lives- Think for a second if there were a billion people walking around with these devices in their pockets. If a $1 app is made and sold to just a small percentage of the owners- 20 million dollars can easily be made over night. Even though Venture firms can be found all over the world the bulk of the activity can still be found in Silicon Valley due to the unique environment that nurtures the industry. Some of the best educational institutions such as Stanford and Berkley can be found there. Many PhD's are employed doing research funded by large sums of money provided by the department of defense. These technologies are then implemented in companies such as HP and Cisco. About the Guest: Prior to founding Storm Ventures in October 2000, Sanjay Subhedar was at E-TEK Dynamics, Inc. (fiber optic component manufacturer) since December 1997, serving most recently as its Chief Operating Officer/Chief Financial Officer. Sanjay played a key role in E-TEK's growth from 400 employees to over 5000 employees in less than three years, E-TEK's Initial Public Offering in 1998 as well as E-TEK's merger with JDS Uniphase in July 2000. Prior to ETEK Sanjay was the Chief Financial Officer for StrataCom, Inc. from its inception in January 1986 until its merger with Cisco Systems in July 1996. Following StrataCom's merger with Cisco Systems, in July 1996 he served as Vice President of Cisco's WAN business unit until October 1997. Sanjay also serves on the Board of Trustees of Palo Alto Medical Foundation, Board of Directors of The Indiana University Foundation and the Governing Board of the Indian School of Business. Sanjay earned a B.S. from the University of Bombay, India and an M.B.A. from Indiana University. He was born in Mumbai, India.
Storm Ventures is a leading enterprise VC firm focused on B2B SaaS. Storm Founder Managing Partner Ryan Floyd and Senior Associate Frederik Groce spoke to Wharton Alumnae Founders & Funders. -How Storm thinks about investing and their sweet spot— post product market fit but pre go to market fit. -Federick is founder of BLCK VC, an organization working to double the number of black investors by 2024. Learn more: https://www.blckvc.com/ -The metrics that founders often stumble on: Know how many customers you have, and who is your biggest customer! -What they want to see in a pitch deck -Why you shouldn't pitch your top target investor first -How to manage the VC ego -How to communicate the big vision and explain how you can return the fund -How to run a process
Join us today as we speak with Arun Penmetsa, Partner at Storm Ventures about how digital health innovations are improving workflows.
Es común pensar que los inversores en Silicon Valley viven una vida cómoda. Que tienen ingresos exhorbitantes, vehículos de lujo, viajes exóticos, pero también viven con un altísimo nivel de riesgo. Es una actividad donde es vital seguir actualizado con lo último en tecnología y nunca dejar de aprender. Además, algo de buena suerte a veces también juega un papel importante en en el mundo de venture capital. Ser inversor no es para todo mundo. Alex es de los pocos, pero ese privilegio no le ha quitado los pies de la tierra. Alex no nació así. Se forjó paso a paso, y este episodio es un relato de ese camino. Éste es el tercer repaso de las mejores entrevistas de la temporada 2017-2018 del podcast, votadas por los oyentes premium que nos siguen aportando unos dólares por mes en Patreon. El episodio con Alex obtuvo la posición #2. Fue increíble la cantidad de emprendedores que nos contactaron buscando conectar con él. Mientras seguimos preparando la tercera temporada, Fernando saca algunas nuevas conclusiones a este episodio: El ecosistema de emprendimiento en América Latina necesita mentores de mayor nivel y accesibilidad. Lo desconocido y/o condiciones desfavorables, pueden ser riesgos medidos y no deben detenernos. ¡Nos escuchamos pronto, en el podcast de Silicon Valley en español! LINKS Alex Mendez: Twitter | LinkedIn Storm Ventures: Sitio BÚSCANOS Escucha más entrevistas y encuentra nuestras redes sociales en elvalledelostercos.com HAGAMOS CRECER ESTE PODCAST Tú puedes hacer dos cosas: Aportar unos dólares por mes en Patreon Recomendar el programa a nuevos oyentes con una reseña en Apple Podcasts, un like en Spotify, o mandando a tus amigos y conocidos a elvalledelostercos.com. MÚSICA Pablo Calvi y Demon Verlaine. Escúchala en Spotify. EDICIÓN Mariano Graglia NOSOTROS Somos Fernando Franco y Diego Graglia. ¡TE QUEREMOS! #startups #emprendedores #latinos #SiliconValley #innovación #inspiración
On the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, Alex Theuma takes a break from hosting and Irina Dzhambazova takes over, recording live at the Podcast Studio at SaaStock18. The guest is Tae Hea Nahm, co-founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures. We talk about his book "Survival to Thrival: A guidebook for building enterprise companies and leaders” which he co-authored with Bob Tinker. The book combines Tae Hea's perspective as a VC and board member and Bob's perspective as a founder/CEO and aims to provide advice to founders who want to grow. The book, split into two parts, focuses on the frameworks surrounding a successful growth and in particular what Tae Hea and Bob call the search for Go-to-market fit, and the more personal challenges associated with growing a company, namely the change of responsibilities that the CEO and VP will undergo and the loneliness that every CEO inevitably will have to face and how to counteract that. The conversation mostly focuses on the first part of the book and explores how companies should approach the search for Go-to-market fit but in the end, skews toward the change management aspect of things. Listen on to hear: What Go-to-market fit means What is one thing a company can do to find the right GTM fit What are the signs that the GTM fit includes an effective Wow moment? Tae Hea was kind enough to give us a few physical copies of "Survival to Thrival", which we would like to give to you, our devoted listeners of the show. Send us a message to podcast@saastock.com telling us what are some of your greatest challenges as a SaaS founder and which are your favourite episodes of the show that have helped you address them and we will mail you a copy of the book. You can find more information about SaaStock LatAm 2019 here Get your SaaStock18 On demand pack here
Tae Hea Nahm of Storm Ventures joins Nick to discuss Go-to-Market Fit, Tidal Waves, Category Leadership & Split-Personalities. In this episode, we cover: With your expansive experience in Venture, do you believe are changes necessary in the silicon valley mentality? You said you love to take the subway and observe what people are doing- what are some things you are spotting now and what are you spotting across the world. You talk a lot about split personalities, when did you realize this was a necessary quality and how long did it take you to develop this yourself? How has this also changed over your tenure as a CEO? How have you developed a positive attitude despite the dichotomy of feelings day in and day out? How would you advise other founders and CEO's to deal with this? How have you aligned Storm Ventures proclaimed company culture with the unofficial culture? What is your advice to other CEO's trying to find a fit? You talk about identifying problems versus disastrous in the book. Can you tell us just the first step you founders should take if a problem is disastrous? Guest Links: Survival to Thrival Tae Hea Nahm Bio Tae Hea Nahm Twitter Tae Hea Nahm Blog Tae Hea Nahm Linkedin To listen more, please visit http://fullratchet.net/podcast-episodes/ for all of our other episodes. Also, follow us on twitter @TheFullRatchet for updates and more information.
Anthony has built out a major business helping serve the insurance restoration business. He has SVG university. He started a national event Win the Storm. He built a multi-million dollar insurance business.We dive into his door approach and his best pest practices on building a door to door program
In this installment of Venture Confidential, Peter is joined by Ryan Floyd of Storm Ventures to discuss the evolution of Storm, and investing in general.
In this installment of Venture Confidential, Peter is joined by Ryan Floyd of Storm Ventures to discuss the evolution of Storm, and investing in general. The post Ep. #13, The Role of the Investor with Ryan Floyd of Storm appeared first on Heavybit.
¡Volvimos con todo! Hoy te traemos un episodio con muchos aprendizajes de cómo funciona Silicon Valley de verdad y también lecciones inspiradoras (ja) de lo que tú puedes hacer si quieres lanzarte hacia acá o aplicar en tu vida y tu empresa lo que hacen las startups más innovadoras del mundo. Los tercos nos juntamos en casa de Diego en Santa Cruz, California, para resumir los mejores takeaways o conclusiones de la primera mitad de esta segunda temporada. Vas a escuchar a: Bismarck Lepe, fundador de Ooyala y Wizeline, y por qué Silicon Valley es cada vez menos el lugar donde lanzar tu startup. Komal Dadlani, fundadora de Lab4U, y los golpazos que te puedes dar al llegar al Valle. Agustina Sartori, fundadora de GlamST, sobre los sacrificios que hacen los que llegan para intentar quedarse. Pedro Castillo, fundador de LogTrust: A veces no sirve de nada venir a Silicon Valley. Hernán Jaramillo, VP de Hampton Creek, y cómo los empleados de startups exitosas son productivos… ¡siendo perezosos! Rosa Jiménez Cano, corresponsal de El País (España) en Silicon Valley, sobre la verdad del acoso sexual en la industria tech. Ariel Poler, ángel inversionista, y cómo hacer para conseguir una reunión con un inversor de Silicon Valley. Carlos Gómez, fundador de Nebia, y qué pasa si consigues que un mega CEO como Tim Cook invierta y apadrine a tu startup. Alex Méndez, inversionista VC en Storm Ventures, que explica por qué es probable que despida a los fundadores de startups en las que invierte. Brian Andrés Helmick, fundador de Algentis y los Deltas de San Francisco, sobre cómo vender bien una startup. Linda Franco, fundadora de Machina, y cómo saber si tu empresa es un éxito o un fracaso. Agu DeMarco, fundador de Wideo, y el shock de darse cuenta que Silicon Valley no es tan idealista como parece. Así comenzamos con todo 2018, un año que será definitorio para el podcast. SÚMATE A LOS SUSCRIPTORES MENSUALES¿Quieres que sigamos existiendo? Está llegando la hora de la verdad y necesitamos tu apoyo financiero para seguir acá. Súmate a los oyentes que ya contribuyen todos los meses a que El Valle de los Tercos te siga trayendo los mitos y verdades de Silicon Valley, en la voz de sus protagonistas y en español. Y AYÚDANOS A TENER MÁS OYENTES Déjanos una reseña en Apple Podcasts, como Agustín Farías, que dijo: “Excelente trabajo periodístico y de entretenimiento sobre los pocos Latinos y Latinas emprendedores que hay en Silicon Valley. ¡Sigan adelante con este proyecto!”. OPINA (QUE ES GRATIS) Esperamos tus comentarios sobre los episodios en Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn o por email. Todos los links están en elvalledelostercos.com. RECIBE NUESTRO NEWSLETTER Sale cada dos semanas. Déjanos tu email en el sitio o con el Robot Terco. Gracias a Cliengo. MÚSICA Es de Pablo Calvi y Demon Verlaine. Escúchala en Spotify. Y también de The Plastics Revolution. EDICIÓN Nuestro editor de audio es Mariano Graglia, en Buenos Aires. Contáctalo aquí. NOSOTROS Somos Fernando Franco y Diego Graglia. Nos escuchamos en dos semanas. ¡TE QUEREMOS! #startups #emprendedores #latinos #SiliconValley #innovación #inspiración
Ryan Floyd is a founding partner in Storm Ventures--a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that specializes in investments with early stage technology companies. In this episode he talks about the changes he's already seen in the industry, what he sees coming, and what he looks for in a tech investment opportunity. Note: The sound quality on this one is a little dodgy from time to time, but hang in there--the information is worth it!
Alex Méndez, fundador de Storm Ventures, es un inversor argentino que está en Silicon Valley desde 1976… cuando nacía una pequeña compañía llamada Apple. Llegó para estudiar en Stanford, con plata para un año de universidad y pasaje de ida. Es un testigo de primera fila de la evolución del valle, pero también un actor importante de la industria tecnológica. Trabajó en IBM en los ochenta, cuando tenía medio millón de empleados, y en Cisco en los noventa, cuando la empresa creció a un ritmo que ni Facebook ni Google pudieron igualar. Desde 2000, es un VC (venture capitalist) o inversionista de riesgo que aporta capital a compañías de etapa temprana. Suele estar en la junta directiva de varias startups a la vez. “A veces me siento que soy un bombero que tengo que ir a apagar los fuegos en distintos lugares”, dice. (Para saber más sobre los inicios de Alex Méndez, da click y escucha el avance que publicamos la semana pasada). Alex ha visto pasar a cientos de emprendedores por sus oficinas en la legendaria avenida Sand Hill Road, que es donde están los grandes fondos de venture capital en Menlo Park. Y nos cuenta todo lo que piensa de los latinoamericanos que llegan hasta Silicon Valley: ¿Qué tienen, qué les falta? ¿Qué está haciendo él para ayudarlos con PuenteLabs? “Sea quien sea el emprendedor que venga de Latinoamérica –dice–, vamos a tratar de ayudarlo”. También revela: Por qué muchas veces los inversores como él terminan por reemplazar al fundador de las startups en las que invierten. Cómo es la relación ideal entre un inversionista y un emprendedor. Cómo es de verdad la supuesta vida idílica de los VCs de Silicon Valley. Cuál es la clave para saber si una empresa de etapa temprana sobrevivirá. No te pierdas otra gran entrevista del podcast de los latinos en Silicon Valley, El Valle de los Tercos. LINKS Alex Méndez: Twitter | LinkedIn | Sitio PuenteLabs: Sitio | Twitter | AngelList | E-mail Storm Ventures: Sitio | Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook DONA UNOS DÓLARES… Ayúdanos a seguir en el aire. Apoya a este podcast independiente y de alta calidad con un puñado de dólares por mes. ¡Aporta hoy! …O DANOS 5 ESTRELLAS Cuantas más reseñas, más oyentes nos encuentran. Déjanos una hoy en iTunes o Apple Podcasts. ¿QUÉ OPINAS? Déjanos tus comentarios en Twitter, Facebook, Instagram o por correo electrónico. Todos los links están en elvalledelostercos.com. RECIBE NUESTRO BOLETÍN Puedes recibir el newsletter terco cada dos semanas si nos dejas tu email en el sitio o chateando con el Robot Terco. Gracias a Andrés Snitcofsky, creador de Cliengo. MÁS GÜENOS PODCASTS Somos parte de Cuonda, la red de podcasts independientes en español, que sigue creciendo. Esta vez te recomendamos Las Raras, “historias de libertad”, desde Chile. MÚSICA Es de Pablo Calvi y Demon Verlaine. Escúchala en Spotify. EDICIÓN Nuestro editor de audio es Mariano Graglia, en Buenos Aires. Contáctalo aquí. NOSOTROS Somos Fernando Franco y Diego Graglia. #startups #emprendedores #latinos #SiliconValley #innovación #inspiración Nos escuchamos en dos semanas. ¡TE QUEREMOS!
Alex Méndez es uno de los pocos latinos en la industria del venture capital o capital de riesgo, en Silicon Valley. Es un argentino que trabajó en IBM en los ochenta y en Cisco cuando era la gran startup de los años noventa. En el 2000, fundó la firma de inversión Storm Ventures y desde entonces ya invirtió en más de 160 empresas. Ha administrado 850 millones de dólares. El jueves, nos habla de todo lo que aprendió sobre construir startups en 40 años en la industria tecnológica, de los conflictos entre inversionistas y emprendedores, y de lo que está haciendo él para ayudar a los startuperos latinoamericanos que quieren llegar a Silicon Valley. Mientras tanto, visítanos en Facebook, Twitter, e Instagram, mándanos un email o en elvalledelostercos.com. Y, si te sientes generoso, dale clic al botón “DONA” para dejarnos unos dólares por mes en nuestra cuenta de Patreon. ¡Nos escuchamos el jueves!
The Top Entrepreneurs in Money, Marketing, Business and Life
Gadi Shamia. He’s the chief operating officer at Talkdesk, the world’s leading call center software platform. It’s backed by DFJ, Storm Ventures and Salesforce Venture. Talkdesk has grown 8x over the past 2 years and has over 250 employees along with their thousand customers including Box, Shopify, Dropbox and Weather.com. Prior to Talkdesk, Gadi founded a company that was acquired by SAP and now generates $5M in global business. He was also a senior VP at SAP and a general manager at ReachLocal. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Innovator’s Dilemma What CEO do you follow? – Marc Benioff Favorite online tool? — Gmail and Slack How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6.5 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Gadi wished he knew that he would be fine so that he could stress less about it Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:44 – Nathan introduces Gadi to the show 01:26 – EchoSign was acquired by Adobe 01:31 – TopManage was acquired by SAP 01:53 – Talkdesk is a cloud-based call center solution 01:58 – It is fully-integrated 02:26 – Talkdesk charges users per license fee 02:44 – Talkdesk is a SaaS company 02:54 – Average pay per customer varies 03:01 – A company with 50 users would pay $5K-7K a month 03:28 – Per seat cost is around $65-125 depending on the subscription 04:02 – Gadi joined Talkdesk 3 years ago 04:16 – The call center space is an interesting market 04:22 – It is still dominated by all players such as Avaya, Cisco and Genesis 04:35 – Talkdesk already has a proven product 04:41 – Talkdesk has a couple of hundred customers who like the product and has been using Talkdesk for years 04:53 – Tiago, Talkdesk’s CEO, was one of the reason Gadi joined Talkdesk 05:14 – Tiago is the co-founder and his co-founder left Talkdesk after 4 and a half years 05:50 – Gadi believes that co-founders leave because they might not feel as excited as they were in the early stages 06:01 – Co-founders staying is also devastating for the company 06:10 – When a co-founder can say that he’s leaving and he has done his job, it’s a healthy company 06:44 – Talkdesk has broken the million ARR 06:57 – Talkdesk had 50 people when Gadi came in 07:17 – Tiago was the only salesperson at Talkdesk when he started it and he was able to get remarkable brands to use Talkdesk 07:43 – Gadi met Tiago through Gadi’s friend from Storm Ventures 08:06 – Gadi and Tiago met in 2014 several times 08:38 – Talkdesk currently has 1200 customers 08:48 – There are around 50K seats 09:06 – Average MRR 09:43 – Alot of Talkdesk customers are e-commerce customers and they are seasonal 10:32 – Talkdesk is at a net negative churn 11:00 – Talkdesk talks to their customers about their seasonal needs and adjusts the annual licensing fee 11:42 – Talkdesk respects Workday, Salesforce and works with ServiceNow 12:48 – The best companies will get 110-120 in aiming net revenue expansion 13:03 – Most companies that have worked with Talkdesk benefit from it and grow 13:10 – DoorDash grew from 40 seats to 800 13:38 – Talkdesk currently has a team of 250 people 14:40 – Talkdesk’s growth is mostly from new sign-ups 14:56 – Talkdesk has raised a total of $24.5M 15:01 – The last round was in 2015 15:15 – Talkdesk is neither raising rounds or talking to Salesforce 15:34 – Talkdesk focuses on building a real business 16:24 – Talkdesk is still burning cash 16:53 – Most of Talkdesk’s customers pay annually upfront 18:13 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: When a cofounder leaves, it means he’s done his job and the company is healthy Be in a company where you believe in the product and know that you can accelerate its growth. Building a real business is about the service you provide your customers in helping them achieve growth. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Hotjar – Gives Nathan a recording of what is happening on a website or where people are clicking and scrolling on the website Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
In this podcast, we decipher the mysteries of customer success, and cover how that role should play out in the overall revenue scope. Lincoln Murphy, Customer Success Architect and Mentor at Storm Ventures, and co-author of Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Can Reduce Churn and Grow Recurring Revenue, joins me on this episode.
Jason Lemkin, prior to becoming a VC, was the CEO of EchoSign, a digital signature SaaS vendor that Adobe acquired some years back. This was an excellent discussion and offers very concrete pointers to where you might look for white spaces in the cloud computing space to do new ventures.
Arun Penmetsa, Principal @Storm Ventures, talks about working as a Venture Capitalist in this episode. Storm Ventures is a Silicon Valley based early stage Enterprise SaaS focused Venture Fund, with many successful investments including well-known names such as Marketo and MobileIron. Some of the areas we touch upon in this episode include: 1. What is Venture Capital 2. Different levels in a VC firm and their roles & responsibilities 3. How Venture Capital is ultimately a relationships based business 4. Typical end-to-end deal process and what a VC does at each stage 5. How working in VC exposes you to brilliant entrepreneurs and ideas on a regular basis 6. How a VC adds value to a startup 7. Future of VC 8. Top 5 qualities a good VC needs to have 9. Interesting and challenging aspects of the job 10. Recruiting tips for interested candidates Thank you for listening!! Follow the show on Twitter @LED_Curator Website www.learneducatediscover.com/ Like us on FaceBook at www.facebook.com/learneducatediscover/ Email us at hello@learneducatediscover. We will reply!! Subscribe to the show on iTunes itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/learn…ver/id1049159321
Welcome to Episode 15 of The Official Saastr Podcast. Joining me today, I am delighted to welcome, Nicolas Dessaigne. Nicolas is the CEO and Co-Founder of Algolia, Algolia are a brilliant case study for the successful pivot, having started off life as an offline search engine for mobiles but really took off by helping companies deliver an intuitive search-as-you-type experience on their websites and mobile apps. They participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2014 batch and raised $18.3M in May 2015 from the likes of Accel Partners, Point Nine Capital, Storm Ventures and many more incredible investors. and in today's show with Nicolas we discuss: Why is company culture so important and was it fundamental for Nicolas and Julien to have this outlined from the beginning? How did Nicolas implement the vision for the company future when founding the Algolia? How does Nicolas look to balance the scaling of the business with maintenance of company culture? What were Nicolas' biggest takeaways from his time at YC? How can SaaS startups optimise the fundraising process to also be a source of business development? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Hiring Your First VP of Sales: When and What Questions To Ask? Nicolas' favourite SaaS resource? What would Nicolas do differently if he were to start the journey again? 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 Nicolas Dessaigne
The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Nicolas Dessaigne is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Algolia. Algolia are a brilliant case study for the successful pivot, having started off life as an offline search engine for mobiles but really took off by helping companies deliver an intuitive search-as-you-type experience on their websites and mobile apps. They participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2014 batch and raised $18.3M in May 2015 from the likes of Accel Partners, Point Nine Capital, Storm Ventures and many more incredible investors. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How did Jonathan make his way into tech and come to found the likes of Friendster and Nuzzel? What were his biggest lessons from working at Netscape? 2.) How did Algolia go about crafting their company culture and how have they approached maintaining it as they have gone into hyper growth mode? 3.) What des Nicolas think are the most common challenges with regards to the building and maintenance of a company culture? What pitfalls and advice would Nicolas give to an early stage founder looking to build that culture from the offset? How can investors determine the strength and sustainability of the company culture when viewing startups? 4.) How was the fundraising process for Nicolas? How did the rounds differ from round to round? What elements surprised or challenged him? For Algolia, an incredibly hot startup, how did Nicolas go about about selecting which investors to have? 5.) Talking of the highly competitive round and the very excitable startup community, how do you respond to all of this insane hype and positivity. How do you ensure that you do not fall into the trap of drinking your own cool aid and remain grounded and humble? Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode: Nicolas' Fave Blog: SaaStr Nicolas’ Fave Book: Creativity Inc As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Nicolas on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!
Jason Lemkin, Managing Director at Storm Ventures, Founder of SaaStr and champion of all things SaaS and Startups, is our special guest in this new podcast from SaaScribe
The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Jason Lemkin is Managing Director at Storm Ventures focussing on early stage SaaS and enterprise startups. Jason is an acknowledged thought leader in SaaS through his creation of the SaaStr community, connecting thousands of SaaS entrepreneurs and generating upwards of 1,000,000 views a month around core SaaS topics, with a particular focus on accelerating revenue and early-stage SaaS sales and marketing. Prior to Storm, Jason served as CEO and co-founder of Storm Ventures-backed EchoSign, the web’s most popular electronic signature service. Jason led EchoSign from inception through its acquisition by Adobe Systems Inc. in 2011. He then served as Vice President, Web Services at Adobe, where he oversaw the growth of EchoSign and Adobe Document Services to $100,000,000+ ARR in 2013. In Today's Episode You Will Learn: How Jason made his way into the SaaS and VC industry? What actions did Jason do to get his blog to 1m+ page views per month? What advice would Jason give to founders thinking of selling to large companies? What type of entrepreneur does Jason like to invest in? How does Jason see SaaS valuations, with recent enormous rounds from Zenefits? What areas of the SaaS industries are neglected or undervalued? Is the 40% growth rule broadly correct and can this be applied to early stage tech companies? What is Jason's pre-investment meeting approach like? What makes a founder insane in a good way, rather than a bad way? How are SaaS companies innovating to acquire new customers? Quick Fire Round: Apple: Hit or Miss Most exciting SaaS companies and sectors Jason's favourite book and why? Items Mentioned in Today's Episode: SaaStr: Jason's Blog Jason's Favourite Book: The Lion Who Shot Back Mark Suster: Both Sides Follow: @saleshacker (amazing content from VPs of Sales @ Top Tech Startups) Emergence Capital: Joe Floyd David Saks: Yammer Slack: Stewart Butterfield, Zenefits: Parker Conrad
FounderLine is a live weekly webcast devoted to helping startup founders succeed, hosted by seven-time startup entrepreneur and investor Joe Beninato. Each week, Joe welcomes an experienced entrepreneur or investor to discuss startup-related topics and field questions from entrepreneurs around the world. FounderLine is broadcast live, and viewers are welcome to send questions via email or twitter. For more information, go to founderline.com. In this episode, host Joe Beninato and guest Jason Lemkin of Storm Ventures answer viewer questions including: - In your experience, is there a good/systematic approach that your product Dev team should take in determining how the product needs to evolve to match the needs of the larger enterprise? - While founders would love to hire only A+ players, it's a tough market, so that's often easier said than done. What are some underrated characteristics in potential hires that you should consider when you can't hire the perfect candidate? - How can Zenefits possibly be worth $4 billion after just 2 years? - Do you have any advice for SaaS companies that are outside of the SF/SV vortex trying to get traction and raise money in a NorCal centric startup environment?