Kevin Tian

PSA: If you send a founder product nits + feedback with concomitant screenshots/mocks you instantly vault into being an S-tier user. (Friction logs are even better, of course.)

2

As a General Partner investing institutional venture funds in B2B SaaS at seed stage since the the year 2000, I saw a lot of cycles: the "dotcom" crash (started April 2000, bottomed out October 2003), the financial crisis (started August/Sept 2008, bottomed out 2011) and the "mother-of-all-over-hyped-valuation" era that ended in late 2021. Today, we are still seeing 75%-90% markdowns on Unicorns like Carta or worse, shutdown of Unicorns like Olive AI (from $4 billion valuation to ZERO$, $800 million raised--and apparently wasted...). Many more to come just like those. All those great reported returns for venture funds from that era's wild markups? The venture funds are marked down right along with their portfolio companies. Easy come, easy go. I feel very fortunate that Valor VC's first institutional venture fund was invested after that "vastly-over-hyped" period that culminated in 2021. Valor's new fund, Valor Fund 3, is vintage 2024. The valuations for seed stage companies? They have entrepreneurs recalling wistfully 2021. Today, seed stage investors are "licking their chops!". Vintage 2024 should be a record returns vintage year! There are so many VCs licking their wounds from 2021’s peak to today’s trough, there are many not investing in new deals at all, and, for nearly 30% of all VCs, they will not raise another new fund, ever. It is GRRRRRRREAT! time to be investing in B2B SaaS at seed! This next era, AI/ML, is literally the most profound technological revolution in history. It is happening when, at the same time, seed stage is completely rational in its valuation in a way I have never seen it before. Great founders, doing great things and scaling rapidly with rational valuations, rational capital consumption/burn and very clear paths to profitability! I couldn't ask for more! PS Yes, Generative AI is wildly over-hyped and over-valued. However, applied AI in B2B SaaS? It is way undervalued given the triple-digit growth rates of so many applied AI investments in Valor's portfolios!

19

2 Comments

In this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I discuss the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA) and its potential impact on the digital ecosystem with Alan Chapell, a lawyer and digital privacy expert. To listen, search for "Mobile Dev Memo" in your podcast platform of choice.

11

1 Comment

The state of venture capital is wild right now. We are witnessing a surge of innovation across the spectrum: - Funds merging - VC doing PE - PE doing VC - Secondary funds - Buyout funds - Spin-out funds - Debt funds - Continuation funds - Infrastructure funds - GP turnover - Hard Tech surging - Family Office uptick

60

8 Comments

The journey from $1 to $10M in ARR is typically an exercise in finding your first channel-market fit as a GTM/Marketing leader and/or founder. After prioritizing the top 1-3 channels you believe are most likely to be a fit for your product, finding channel-market fit is typically an exercise in experiments and iterations. If you’re flying blind bc you don’t have the systems, processes, and data hygiene setup to measure and test quickly inside a framework, it’s going to be a difficult journey. Check out the podcast I did with the team at Evron for more mistakes to avoid on your journey from $1M to $10M ARR.

41

5 Comments

Going from Zero to Product Market Fit is like getting out of a Bermuda Triangle For every direction that works out, an equal and opposite direction works too It is shocking how few get to product market fit Only 15 out of 100 SaaS companies get to a million dollars in revenue When you have PMF, it is an awesome feeling Everything is going smoothly for you It also feels scary and out of control You push one unit, and ten units of progress happen But when you don’t have it…. You push ten units of effort, and not even a unit of progress happens It feels like a Sisyphean punishment Moving a boulder up the mountain In the GenAI age, I hear arguments that go “The focus should be on the core functionality. Like how musicians concentrate on the music itself” This is clearly a faulty analogy Businesses providing playback formats (cassette tapes, CDs) are obsolete today Gen AI brings AI below the API No more does one need to stand up a team in ML Spend a few million dollars to “translate languages” or “transcribe accurately” GenAI now assures that Getting to PMF boils down to the basics - Do you understand the problem deeply - Can you build a 10x better solution - Can you execute & iterate faster - Don’t die in the process (cash) What has worked for you to get out of the Bermuda triangle?

16

4 Comments

Want a front-row seat to the frontier of tech? We’ve got the role (or two) for you! We’re expanding our frontier-tech team at Blackbird by hiring a Frontier Tech Investments Associate and Foundry Fellows! Got questions? We've got answers... 1️⃣ What are the roles? 🧪 Associate = a full-time VC investment gig in our Blackbird Investments team, working directly with me. We’re looking for someone with a science and/or engineering background and more curiosity than they can handle. You’ll grow your own investment brand and practice, support our portfolio founders, and will help build Foundry, our early-stage frontier-tech accelerator. ✨ Foundry Fellow = a casual/contract gig in our Blackbird Investments team, ~15h per week for 3 months. The Fellowship is ideal for PhD students and ECRs who want to learn more about startups and VC. You’ll go deep on emerging areas relevant to your expertise (or curiosity!), get a front-row seat to groundbreaking companies in those areas, build out your non-academic network, and develop a solid writing practice. 2️⃣ Why are you hiring? We love frontier tech, and we’re ready to grow our team. 3️⃣ Wow, it’s so great that you’re starting to look at deep tech! Look, we get it: we don’t make a lot of noise about our frontier tech investing. Buuuut we’ve been deep-tech investors since we backed Tim Kentley-Klay to found Zoox back in 2014—we’ve been on incredible journeys with PsiQuantum (building the world's first utility-scale quantum computer right here in Australia!), Inventia Life Science (transforming drug discovery with high-fidelity cell models), Remedy Robotics (surgical robots for remote endovascular procedures), Opto Biosystems (minimally-invasive neural implants to treat cancer), and more. We believe that frontier technologies, and great frontier-tech investing, will be part of the solutions to the greatest problems humanity faces today. 4️⃣ When do applications close? May 31st at 11:59pm AEST. 5️⃣ I have more questions! I’m sure you do! Clare Birch and I are hosting an AMA to answer any and all questions about these roles. Want to know what a week in the life of our team looks like? What’s keeping us up at night? What our ideal candidate looks like? Come along and find out - registration link in the comments 👇 Apply for these roles: Associate - https://lnkd.in/gCfj4EUJ Foundry Fellowships - https://lnkd.in/gj6ATZVZ If you know anyone that we should meet, send me their details! Cameron Elise Ben Andrew Robin Joseph Adelaide James Olivia Lucinda Raghav Jesse Christie Mohamed Tom Amee Pablo Haya Loong Hon Joshua Benjamin Megan Harry Denzil Matthew Diana Daniel Tom Deanna Justin Amar Lilly Stone Thomas

114

4 Comments

Well said, Jen Abel. And even beyond these ARR guardrails, startups often instinctively throw in enterprise and SMB as dual strategies. Or direct and PLG. Outbound and channel. And more! #startup #sales #GTM #SMB #channel #enterprise #PLG #directsales

12

3 Comments

I swear, sometimes as a founder you feel like everybody else is doing better than you. So it feels good to read EmCap's study and seeing that we're in the top quartile (in some cases, very comfortably) of startups on most meaningful metrics. What really popped out are the burn multiple metrics. Some founders are really flying dangerously close to the sun here...or maybe they have no choice as they have to choose either to grow inefficiently or not grow at all. https://lnkd.in/evkKCUJd

10

2 Comments

Did you know that 68% of small businesses report having cash flow problems, and many small businesses rely on the owner's personal funds to stay afloat? Relay exists to solve this and the best part is it's actually working! Which makes this announcement even sweeter: We raised a USD $32.2 million Series B round. What does this mean? - More spend management tools to improve financial visibility - More products to give small business owners flexibility - More integrations to streamline operations - And ultimately more businesses making better and smarter financial decisions Exciting times ahead! PS We're hiring: https://lnkd.in/gMT2mN25

34

1 Comment

Super helpful #Startup #Equity Calculator to determine the equity for early hires, thanks to Pear VC head of talent Matt Birnbaum! Thanks for sharing Pejman! 🙏🏼 You can read more here How to structure startup equity for early hires: https://lnkd.in/ggmpT5-Y Google Doc: https://lnkd.in/gjsvths6

13

I recently talked with Paz Yanover, VP of Product at Amplication, about creating and managing effective docs. Here is his developer docs success formula (check 1st comment): In this interview, Paz shares his formula to creating developer docs that drive product adoption. You'll learn: - The important role docs plays in support and attracting devs - Tips for balancing technical accuracy with user-friendliness in your docs - Strategies for effective collaboration between technical writers and product teams Check the first comment for the full interview. --- Enjoy this? ♻️ Repost it to your network and follow Derick Ruiz for more.

19

1 Comment

Let’s geek out on name matching algorithms in the midst of a world full consent orders and burned out compliance teams.  An example to illustrate: There are lots of people named Jose Lopez or John Smith in the world, so when you are trying to automate names to watchlists, common names can yield a lot of complexity. Socure uses many novel approaches for name matching algorithms.  One example is the use of Siamese Neural Networks with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) layers. These models are designed to learn and compare sequential data, such as text or time series, and are particularly useful for tasks like name matching, sentiment analysis, or speech recognition, where the order of the input sequence matters. We use Siamese LSTM models because they are: 1️⃣ Well-suited for name matching from their ability to capture and learn the sequential nature of names. 2️⃣ Able to effectively capture long-term dependencies and contextual information within names, such as the order of the characters or the presence of specific patterns. 3️⃣ Enabled to learn robust representations for names and accurately compare them, even when dealing with variations, misspellings, or different name orders. This is one of thousands of examples of what innovation looks like in an industry that has not seen innovation in far too long.  Joshua Linn, Debra Geister, and Ganesh Kumar- we appreciate your leadership and dedication for always innovating.

71

2 Comments

HITRUST chose Vanta as the first pre-built HITRUST e1 solution, which means Vanta comes "out of the box" with the necessary controls, documents, and policies for an e1 assessment and eliminates the manual “do-it-yourself” approach that other platforms require. Up to 80% of requirements are automated by: *️⃣ Guidance around requirements: 44 new controls and 72 automated tests to ensure comprehensive and continuous compliance. *️⃣ Documents and policy templates: 80 new documents and 10 policy addendums to outline practices around managing sensitive data. *️⃣ Automated evidence collection: With over 300 integrations, Vanta automatically and continuously collects evidence from an organization’s technology stack. Our platform also applies overlapping, implemented controls from other supported frameworks, including up to 50% of SOC 2 and ISO 27001, to eliminate duplicative work across compliance programs. Coming soon, our partnership with HITRUST will expand into an integration with their audit portal, MyCSF, so customer evidence is transfered automatically from Vanta to MyCSF, further streamlining the HITRUST validation process Really excited for this collaboration!

251

14 Comments

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

172

16 Comments

SaaS Capital's most recent retention benchmark presentation had this chart that caught my eye. 2023 was the year revenue growth and profit growth trends flipped. Investors still rewarded top-line growth, of course, but investors also started paying up for companies that could demonstrate profit growth, after years of punishing that sort of behavior. Without any dramatic changes to the overall macro environment, specifically any loosening on strategic M&A outcomes, I would expect more companies to demonstrate they actually "flip a switch" and go into the black to make themselves more appealing to financial buyers

11

Are you an angel investor, allocator, or thinking about starting a VC fund? Looking for insights on the VC market and areas within the US early-stage tech market? Look no further! Our distribution list is open for angels with software engineering experience outside of high-tech, GTM specialists, and allocators. Join us using the link in the comments. Gain more insights and explore the venture asset class from an LP's perspective by tuning in to the Swimming with Allocators podcast. Listen to top industry allocators share their experiences and learnings. Plus, show your support by rating us and purchasing our exclusive merch! #venturecapital #angelinvesting #startupinvesting #SeriesA #investingopportunities

41

2 Comments

Launching a new cold outbound campaign? Here's a breakdown of an OKR to hit >3.5% trial conversions. 1️⃣ Craft manual messages to current users — identify where they live and how to capture nuanced personalization points. 2️⃣ Dive into data from our last 10x paid users -- most important JTBD? First actions in the product? 3️⃣ Use the above to select optimal channels and digital surface area to inform personalization, craft a template campaign 4️⃣ Warm up domains with 300 leads, then scale to 1k+, documenting every step in our v1 Playbook. What key results have worked best for you in outbound campaigns? #SalesStrategy #OKRs #LeadGeneration"

7

6 Comments