Allison Schneider

SDRs, you're not fooling prospects with your title. SDRs in the fintech space aren't finance experts SDRs in the insurtech space aren't insurance experts. SDRs in the payments space aren't payments experts. SDRs like to use every title except... SDR. We are experts in other things, like... -Prospecting -Cold Calling -Relationship Building -Uncovering Pain -Portraying Value SDR doesn't have to be a dirty word. Let's embrace it. ❤️

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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

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Sharing some insights/trends we are seeing in the first half of 2024: - The majority of startups HQ’d in NYC & SF founded in the last two years are hiring most if not all of their employees in the office (at least 3 days a week) - Less than 5% of those are mandating 5 days a week in office. - Most top candidates are optimizing for hybrid with remote up to 3 days a week - Compensation across the board for early-stage startups has remained relatively flat since 2023 - For startups located outside of core major tech hubs, there is more openness and even preference for remote to tap into broader markets and compete for top talent The overview is that local talent and teams are making a comeback and salaries are not rising as drastically as they have in the past 5 years. Make sure to choose your next move based on fit, impact, passion, upside, growth, and not purely on comp. #startups #venture #VC #seed #Engineering #Hiring

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Vertical LLM Agents with vertical specific business context are the new $1B SaaS opportunity. This is why our laser focus on the $1.3T Insurance industry - built on the foundation of the team’s decades of experience in this industry, with a deep understanding of the nuances of the insurance industry, the technology systems that power this industry, trust from the real humans that work in it, the business processes that create real LAE, Opex and ultimately Combined Ratio impact - allows us to reach real scale with AI Agents and gives me conviction in our purpose.

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Excited to welcome Coldcart into the Behind Genius Ventures portfolio! Coldcart, a perishable logistics software company, was founded by CEO Jason Park, who previously started and scaled Allstate Identity Protection from zero to $100 million ARR, and Blue Apron founder and former CEO Matt Salzberg. Honored that Jason Park let us squeeze in at the last minute to their oversubscribed seed round led by Collide Capital & including Great North Ventures, Alumni Ventures. The opportunity is enormous - in 2023 alone, U.S. companies across industrial, food, pharma, and sciences shipped approximately 3 billion perishable parcels – spending over $76 billion in warehousing, packaging, and transportation costs. Part of our enterprise thesis at Behind Genius is backing "clipboard companies" - verticalized companies serving mission critical purposes in spaces that still use clipboards to operate. Helping food, science and pharma companies navigate the fragmented perishable logistics space, Coldcart's platform reduces perishable logistics costs by 15-50% per shipment and refundable shipments by 40-60%. Side note: no book has blown my mind recently like Nicola Twilley's Frostbite, a book I picked up in Palo Alto recently on my way to lunch with Pankaj Kedia & shared with Jason, which is a journey through time and many refrigerators to share the inside scoop on the artificial cryosphere we've built to house our food, pharma, and many other surprising things. As a result, I've been absolutely nerding out on the impact of cold storage as one of our most important hidden systems I've been most excited about recently. https://lnkd.in/gCFtf-Mv

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Interested in investing? This is one of my must reads:

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As a B2B SaaS VC 👩‍💻 and a huge data nerd 🤓, fewer things bring me more joy than a truly statistically significant analysis (600+ companies surveyed) of B2B SaaS metrics across early stage companies. Great work by our team at Emergence Capital! See comments for full report, and please let us know how we can make this better in the future!

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Advisors are stuck doing double duty—and it's killing their productivity. Let’s break it down: Advice Creation vs. Advice Delivery. Advice Creation is all about sitting down with clients, getting to know their unique situations, and crafting personalized advice to help them succeed. Advice Delivery is the follow-through—using tools to model scenarios, rebalancing portfolios, opening accounts, and so on. The big promise of wealth management platforms is to take the burden of Advice Delivery off advisors' shoulders so they can focus on what they do best: helping clients. But there’s a problem: Advisor tech isn’t cutting it. The RIA platforms are helping reduce the burden, but the tech still falls short. It still expects advisors to handle both creating and delivering advice. It's not made for this new model and since there is no 'one size fits all' approach to advice, the tech can't be personalized enough. It’s like a server in a fancy restaurant taking orders, then running to the kitchen to cook the meals themselves.. or worse if they took the orders and shouted them out back to the kitchen from the table, while all the other servers were doing that. Not the best experience for everyone involved, huh? The firms having the most success? They have closed that communication gap between Advice Creation and Delivery by reducing the back and forth and creating one way for advisors to request delivery for their advice. That’s the key to scaling, especially when teams are spread out across the globe.

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We believe in extreme vetting of our founders. You can't build a unicorn if you spend time on silly stuff, like seeing family and friends. Grow up, and focus on investor returns. #vc #startups #investment

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The key to #prospecting, #discovery, and #customersuccess is rooted in empathy, not pitching what your company's tool or feature does. Most buyers, champions, users, and the 10+ other stakeholders involved in deals (i.e. finance, procurement, leadership, etc.) are trying to understand if they need to address a problem and, if so, how would they go about it? 🤒 An old boss said it well: "I was just going to stay at home with a cough, but you've helped me realize it's '123' and I have to address it, so now I'm going to go to urgent care right away!" Keep in mind you are likely not the only solution they are exploring. They might not have a problem worth solving. They could just be educating themselves should things change. The point is not to 'manufacture' pain but rather, as sellers and providers, our job is to educate prospects and customers; to create an environment where they can make a well informed decision. 🙌 When reps call me with empathy: I'm always happy to say "I'm actually not a fit for this, and I'm not sure if this is a priority for us. I recommend reaching out to this VP of Demand Gen. Feel free to call or text if I can help." 🤮 When reps start talking about their customers, their AI, their integrations, their superior pricing, their xyz...I say "Sorry. Not a fit and won't be for a while. Good luck!" As a seller, you are a tiny percentage of the process. First impressions last and, for existing accounts, outcomes + customer and user experience trump budget every day of the week!

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I've been chomping on an idea for a bit. I'm thinking there still is a HUGE blindspot in the M&A space for proper technical due diligence. We've all heard the stories about how some CEO's and Founders lie about their tech just to ram through the acquisition. Does anyone think an AI product to root out the tech, the numbers, etc would be welcomed in the industry? Imagine a tool that not only decodes tech infrastructure but also highlights potential risks before contracts are signed. It could save companies millions and spare them from unexpected pitfalls. Wouldn't it be game-changing if investors had a clearer lens for seeing what they're really buying into? The transparency could transform how deals are made, turning due diligence into an insightful, accurate process. I'm curious about what industry leaders and tech experts think. Is this the future of M&A? Would love to hear your thoughts on this potential revolution. #startups #Mergersandacquistions #Innovation

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A post from Rob at Balderton Capital pointed me at this piece from TechCrunch, and it perfectly aligns with what I've seen in the market: When things (aka: building businesses) are getting harder, founders seem to be more aware of how to structure ownership within their team. I've recently seen a few transactions where mostly experienced founders insist on longer vesting schedules for them and their team (👋🏻 Mario from Enpal revealing this week the whole company runs on 7y vesting schedules). Avoiding dead capital on the cap table is one of the key priorities we try to make founders aware of when raising rounds - be cautious with part-time, non-operative 'co-initiators', professors, accelerators or angels that don't add much value beyond the very initial stages, or co-founders that decide to move on. Enforcing strong (read: long) vesting mechanisms including cliffs (no need to stick to the 1y cliff market standard either) can be a simple mechanism to align interests for the long-term.

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Peak OS was developed after working with hundreds of VC-backed teams for 20 years... and that's too much info for a blog post, so I wrote a book. Check it out on Amazon. #venturebacked #vcbacked #venturecapital #leadership #ceo #founder #operatingsystem #peakOS

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How Insurtech is Changing the Game: • Personalized Policies: Goodbye, cookie-cutter plans! Insurtech leverages data to craft personalized policies that fit your unique lifestyle. Why pay for coverage you’ll never use? Companies like Lemonade are leading the way with tailored insurance that feels more like a conversation than a contract. • AI-Driven Underwriting: Traditional underwriting can feel like playing poker while blindfolded. Enter AI, analyzing data faster than a caffeine-fueled squirrel. Zego is one of the players using AI to streamline underwriting processes, getting you covered without the nail-biting wait! • Streamlined Claims Processing: Remember when filing a claim felt like preparing for a marathon? Insurtech has turned that into a sprint! With automated claims and user-friendly apps, Hippo lets you submit claims while enjoying your coffee. Talk about multitasking! Final Thoughts: Insurtech isn’t just a passing trend; it’s a revolution! It’s making insurance more accessible, efficient, and dare I say, enjoyable. Are you ready to kick that awkward uncle to the curb and embrace the future of insurance? Let’s chat! 💬 #Insurtech #Insurance #Fintech #Innovation #FutureOfInsurance #Lemonade #Zego #Hippo

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📈 Curious about the startup scene in Massachusetts? Explore our detailed funding list featuring startup names, HQ locations, and investor info. Perfect for investors and entrepreneurs alike! Check it out: https://lnkd.in/dAp3xj-Q #startup #startups #venturecapital #funding #vc #managementconsulting

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I saw a founder share their thoughts on the seemingly obvious decision to accept an investment from Y Combinator — even though the $125k investment diluted the founders by 7% The rationale being that the 7% dilution is more than offset by the value boost that any company gets when they go through YC While dilution is an immensely important metric for founders to manage, it is also surprising to me that more founders don’t consider it in the cost/benefit context presented above If an investor can help increase enterprise value, revenue, etc. for your business at a level that surpasses the dilution event, then why wouldn’t you, as a founder, accept that investment every time (assuming fair terms)? That’s what we, at BankTech Ventures, strive to deliver with our 100+ bank LPs who effectively serve as buyers of the technology we’re investing in — we aptly refer to it as our value-creation flywheel!

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Cara's first integration launch plan: Step 1: Launch End. But luckily, before I went ahead and executed this "plan" I figured I'd ask our angel investor, Andrew Johnston, whose done a lot of partnerships and knows way more about launching an integration than I do. When Andrew read my first draft of the Bear App integration post, his first question was "What's the main value that Bear users get from the integration?" It's the ability to collaborate from a note they've drafted in Bear. But I hadn't made that clear. I also hadn't written step-by-step instructions to get started from the perspective of someone who already has Bear open and has never heard of us. Andrew gave me the blueprint and as a result, we've gotten thousands of new users from the integration (including some of our happiest and stickiest users). As founders, we get the advice all the time to leverage our network. I'm lucky to have amazing mentors like Andrew that are ready to jump in and have the expertise to be helpful. When I ask targeted questions like this, I've been amazed at what I can learn. Thanks, Andrew 🙌🏻

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Where are you stalling out your fundraising process? 1) The constant rejection? 2) Feedback that you need to be a better storyteller? 3) The "Ick" about asking for warm intros? 4) The neverending work on the deck? 5) Your fundraising has gone on for 6 months and isn't working? 6) You had a handshake deal with a VC for a term sheet...and then they ghosted you? I can help you cut out the noise, deal with the rejection and keep moving towards a positive result. Imagine what it will feel like after your last investor has wired...and you've got money to grow your team and crush your milestones? Book time with me if you want to close your round by September. https://lnkd.in/eKTy99bS

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