Elena Verna

Today, GTMfund’s is excited to announce to launch of Operator, its first incubated company. Max Altschuler (founder of GTMfund) teamed up with co-founder Adam M. (design engineer and 0-1 builder) and co-founder Mark Kosoglow (Outreach employee #1 and former SVP of Global Sales) to create Operator.ai alongside an insanely talented team Pleasant Middelhof, Jeremy Jonas, Carl Gunderson. We've entered a period called “The Great Ignore”. Spam and irrelevant, poorly-automated outbound campaigns are running rampant.   Operator gives you an easy-to-use Growth Engineer that allows you to build and enrich lists with accurate data, and run experiments and queries using AI to generate highly targeted outreach.    Check out their website to get updates, early access, and see how they are taking the world back to 2 touches meant to attract buyers into conversations that convert, instead of 20 touches meant to make sure you hit your activity number: https://www.operator.ai/

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Rolling into another day of the Primary Summit. Hit me up if we should connect onsite. Kudos to the Primary Ventures team so far, as yesterday’s Pre-Seed Summit was on point. Mar Hershenson, Benjamin Sun, Chris Douvos, Zach Weinberg, and Graham Pingree all dropping helpful nuggets for fund managers. Some paraphrased highlights: - Chris Douvos (AHOY Capital) - Most fund decks are terrible. Start with your people (not your strategy) and know you have about 6 slides of his attention. - Zach Weinberg (Curie.Bio ) - beleives SF’s AI talent is a significant advantage over NY, wouldn’t build AI in NY. Also questions if VC exits can keep up with VC expansion (generally hilarious and smart Twitter follow) - Mar Hershenson (Pear VC) - VC is so much more competitive now. It’s not enough to be an ex-founder with a great network and domain expertise. Have a better “why you are different” or do something else! - Benjamin Sun (Primary Venture Partners)- still sees arbitrage in going long NY venture (vs. SF). Do the work to keep various influential networking nodes aware of what you’re doing and how you think.

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Many SaaS solutions resonate most with directors/VPs/department heads. For the past 5+ years the approach for selling to these folks was to get them very excited about your solution and price in such a way that they could get a deal done with minimal sign off. In enterprise this could run as high as 500k. Now, there is scrutiny on 25k deals. Smart sellers realize this and are running a totally different play. A little different flavor of the traditional top down model. These folks are still doing well. Folks running the old playbook? In struggleville. P.S. - when times are hard it’s actually easier to do big deals…if you know how to sell transformations.

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VISION => TALENT => TEAM Founders: The strength and clarity of your vision precedes your ability to attract great talent, which in turn precedes the construction of teams who will build great products. If you think you have a team problem, you likely do... but the root cause is that you have not effectively crafted your vision, ambition and business model in a way that will attract the best talent.

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What do you do when your customer’s success metrics don’t actually align with business value? Something I see a lot: -AE/CSM teams anchoring on a set of metrics that their primary champion has said are important -These metrics being heavily task oriented and not easily rolled up to a c-level business outcome How do you manage this?

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Carta’s new QSBS offering for investors is one of the most exciting launches of the year. How it works 1. Investors can refer their portfolio companies. 2. Carta will prompt companies to get a QSBS Attestation to determine qualification. 3. If a company qualifies and receives QSBS Attestation, investors will receive an Attestation letter highlighting which securities held are QSBS-eligible. It’s that easy. With QSBS, investors can save millions and have peace of mind knowing they can provide an attestation letter in the event of an audit. More here: https://lnkd.in/eyX4BU-7 #investors #portcos #investment #captable #QSBS #carta

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What's your businesses sacred cow? In Q3 Stacker's marketplace product hit $5m ARR, and we got their by prioritizing the side that doesn't even pay us. Took longer than I’d hoped, but we've built a really strong playbook that extends to any marketplace. 3 things I've learned about building a b2b marketplace these past 4 years: 1) Figure out which side of your marketplace is the sacred cow A marketplace takes 2 sides to tango, but in reality one side is your sacred cow. For Stacker, (who brokers a relationship between orgs contributing content seeking distribution, and news outlets syndicating content to bolster their site's coverage) publishers are that sacred cow. We realized early on that if we lost brand partners, we could find new ones... but if we lost the trust of publishers, the whole thing would fall down. One of our company values is literally "Publisher First," and we make sure this is ingrained in every decision we make. 2) Figure out which side your marketing is for When people land on your site... who are you talking to? You can't be everything to everyone. For Stacker, we realized that brands (who are our paying customer) were the harder side of the marketplace to continue building, and therefore our website copy is aimed primarily at contributing brands. Pro tip: this can change over time... So make sure you're checking with yourself.... which side of the marketplace needs marketing? 3) Quality over speed At a certain point, you will have "figured it out," and start getting inbound on the supply side. It will be really tempting to open the firehose. Don't. Maintaining quality on the supply side is key, and though it is frustrating to slow your growth... it will be worth it in long run (see #1 - sacred cows). Think this can be applied to so many areas, and its been fun spending 20 minutes thinking of a marketplace, and figuring out what their answer to the above probably is. Here's to the next 100 partners, and the next $10M 🥂

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One of the most common questions I get from customers is about developing a PLG strategy and how we implement PLG at Amplitude. To be honest, there's nothing I would tell you that isn't already in this #Amplitude guide. Seriously, it's that good. Let me know what you think! Check it out here: https://bit.ly/498xoLz #growth #plg #productanalytics

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Three lessons from building and launching a P2P payments app without doing the proper customer validation first (despite knowing better): 1) Building something you need is a great starting point - but not enough to validate an idea. As someone drawn to building solutions, I’m an early tech adopter. This led me to overestimate consumers’ willingness to onboard, especially with a P2P payments app that requires KYC/KYB compliance and relies on a network effect to be useful. 2) Manual solutions are often best to start with It’s good business to be in business - transitioning from ideating to operating as early as possible is the BEST way to learn effectively. While the move fast and break things mindset has attracted well-deserved skepticism, getting stuck in a multi-year build trap distracted me from critical real-world validation. 3) Consumer appetite shifts quickly In my case, the proliferation of free and instant P2P payment options like Zelle added additional pricing pressure that I couldn’t compete with. This disincentivized the consumer event/payment collection market, turning my bottom-up go-to-market strategy upside down. Pitch (https://www.pitch.fun) is currently on the back burner as I’ve begun building custom solutions in various industries to sharpen my skills, solve specific problems, gain a hands-on understanding of operations, pain points, and workflows, and build a network of experts to lean on as I keep my eyes peeled for high-impact opportunities.

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Today, we’re sharing an inside look at ro.OS – the Ro Operating System. To understand this technology, it helps to understand why we built it. https://ro.co/os/ The most inconvenient truth in healthcare is that there are too many people who need care and too few to provide it. As a result, today, high-quality care is a hand-made luxury good. The only way to change that, so that tens of millions not tens of thousands get high-quality care, is through technology. From the printing press to the automobile to the iPhone, technology is how we’ve turned luxuries into commodities. The healthcare system is obsessed with quality but is not equally obsessed with how to scale that quality. Scaling high-quality care, especially to the extent required, makes some uncomfortable. Doing so, while meeting or exceeding the bar for quality and for provider satisfaction, seems impossible. It is possible. We must believe that to be the case. It will take innovation. This possibility is what Ro’s team has spent years laser focused on. We challenged ourselves to build technology that makes it easier for patients to get the most effective healthcare. That technology is ro.OS – which has already helped millions of patients achieve their goals and we’re just getting started. Learn more about ro.OS from my co-founder Saman Rahmanian. https://lnkd.in/eUSzAqBQ 

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