Ashwinn Krishnaswamy

Growth-stage DTC brands know that scaling is a financial tug-of-war — every department is pulling for its share of the (budgetary) pie 🥧 In our most recent expert guide, Matt Weiler, founder of Second Star Ventures and interim CEO of Wells Group of New York, shares five tactical tips on strategic cross-functional finance: 1️⃣ Decide between tangible growth and buzz Balance investments in short-term ROI with hard-to-quantify activities. Collaborating across teams to align on needs will help you measure intangible results and focus on net profits per initiative. 2️⃣ Assess your decision risk Evaluate each business decision by mapping out assumptions for probability and measurability. Then consider how easily it can be reversed if it fails, and * only * proceed if the cost of failure is manageable. 3️⃣ Prepare for success just as you plan for failure Whip your ops into shape before you action on strategy. That way, when growth occurs, you can deliver what you promised your customers. For example, a successful product launch can still fail if you don’t have enough stock to meet demand. 4️⃣ Pay back your CAC quickly Tracking your LTV, CAC, and payback periods helps you monitor customer growth at all times. If you can’t pay back your CAC quickly, you can’t drive near-term ROI, making it tougher to increase LTV. 5️⃣ Use Drivepoint for cross-functional strategic finance Drivepoint enables you to easily create and compare financial scenarios, build accurate forecasts in minutes, and sync sales, accounting, and marketing data across all sales channels — for a holistic understanding of your business. Want to learn more? Matt breaks it down here: https://lnkd.in/gXc-f_5x

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And my second investment at defy is in 🐶 zeroETL puppies 🐶... I mean PuppyGraph, which is all the beauty of a graph database, none of the data migration or continuous upkeep of a graph database. Sounds like magic? So are puppies 🐶 . Puppygraph is NOT a graph or a database. It is graph analytics engine that answers graph questions on your existing data warehouses, whether that is a Databricks datalake, Google BigQuery or postgres. Compared to SQL, it's faster, handles way more complexity, scales and has almost no upkeep. How did I get to conviction? 1. Tailwinds - 🌊 Lakehouses 🌊 have helped enterprises put all their data in one place, enabling Puppygraph to unlock insights previously unavailable. - 📚 LLMs! 📚AI and RAG cannot easily traverse fragmented data. Puppygraph's Graph RAG unlocks insights with their Knowledge Graph and spoonfeeds to the LLMs. 2. 👯 Team 👯 We have graph experts from Google, LinkedIn, Databricks, Tigergraph, and Instacart who are uniquely able to build this solution. 3. 💸 Customers 💸 . My alma mater Coinbase is a proud user. The feedback from my former colleagues was off the charts! A blockchain is very much a graph database and Puppygraph tracks down fraudulent transactions that go through mixers and helps identify patterns. Huge congrats to Weimo Liu Danfeng Xu Lei Huang Zhenni Wu Gary Hagmueller, defy.vc is proud to be an investor!!

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Many seed stage companies funded in 2020/2021 most likely won't make it to Series A these days. Over the last few months I watched two seed stage founders I invested in find buyers for their companies and successfully return cash to investors. In both cases the situations were dire and in both cases their existing lead investors were totally MIA. The reality for most VCs is that their best performing companies typically need their help the *the least* and the struggling ones are where it's essential to step up. For VC's, word travels fast when you aren't there to help. And for founders, working with investors who will be there when the chips are down is more important than ever.

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Learn a bit more about our DNA and how we operate at Acurio Ventures from Kate Cornell

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Starting a new fun project with Victor Lee - an AMA series with early stage founders. There are many podcast shows featuring successful, famous entrepreneurs. But what about those who are still relatively early in their journey, perhaps just one step ahead? The zero-to-one founders who have recently cracked the product-market fit and raised Seed or Series A capital. They may not have figured out everything yet, but they have fresh, relatable tips and advice to share. We’ll invite early-stage founders for a one-hour AMA session. Afterwards, we’ll create a public webpage featuring each Q&A session with media clips and transcriptions. This will be 100% free and open to the public. Our first AMA (June 11 1pm PST) will feature Will Drewery, whose company (Diagon) recently raised $5.1 million in Seed funding. We’ll get to know Will better and cover topics such as tips on raising funding in this tough environment. It will be a fun AMA, and you can register for free using the link below. RSVP now!

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💡 What’s the best tech stack for my consumer brand? I get this question a lot, especially as we head into BFCM prep and code freezes. 📅 Whether you’re getting organized or just curious about the tech behind your favorite DTC brands, we’ve got you covered. At HSR, we’ve done the heavy lifting and identified the must-have components for an early-stage tech stack that every founder should know before the most critical quarter of the year. 📈 Ready to power up your business for Q4 and unlock the secret tools? 🚀 👇 Dive in here: https://lnkd.in/ga6BQQXS #DTC #TechStack #BFCM #BusinessGrowth #Scalability #Entrepreneurship #ConsumerBrand

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Ep. 007 of The Feedback Loop is here! It's the first half of startup pitches from New York Tech Week, and from an almost-all-AI batch of companies. Joining me on this episode: returning fan-favorite, Jenny Fielding of Everywhere Ventures! For those not familiar, every week, a guest venture investor joins me to give granular and unfiltered feedback to founders on their storytelling and their concept. It's all about helping founders construct a better narrative for their move-forward -- because across fundraising, sales, recruiting, and company-building, it's the core narrative and pitch that can often hold startups back. And Jenny currently holds the tenure jacket as my guest co-host, with this being her 4th time on stage delivering quick insights and context you just can't find anywhere else. Massive shout-out to the founders featured: Matt Shenker building MatterMore, Karl White building Wroom, Trista V. building Nunchi, and Jeremy Da building Acrylic! Relevant links below.

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Let the wave begin! Pioneer Fund company Recall.ai *grew their revenue 10x* in the past year, has 300 enterprise customers, and just raised a $10M Series A led by Ridge Ventures. David Gu and Amanda Zhu dropped out of college at age 19 to start the company. They've grown it exponentially with a tiny team. They make it easy to build meeting bots that are cross-platform. They're aggregating all these different APIs into one unified API, the way Twilio did with cell phones. At first it "sounds" easy to build a meeting bot -- just integrate with the Zoom API. But in fact there's a huge long tail of things you need to build, security and privacy pitfalls, automations, transcription complexities, integrations, the calendar invites where someone is using Google Meet or Teams, staying up-to-date with the libraries, etc etc. Recall takes care of all of that. It's WAY easier to build on top of Recall.ai and focus on the features that make you unique. Congratulations to the Recall team!

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I’m excited to share that Motion has raised $30M in Series B funding, led by Inovia Capital with participation from Threshold Ventures as well as our existing investors Headline, Abstract Ventures and Sugar Capital. In recent years, as audience targeting on ad platforms became algorithm-based, growth leaders shifted their focus toward creative. Very quickly, creative became the biggest lever for success in paid social. Terms like “creative is the new targeting” were popularized across the industry and we entered a new era of digital advertising. In a sense, it’s a pivot back to the old-school advertising principles of the David Ogilvy era. Conducting customer research, storytelling, and craftsmanship are all essential once again. But while the principles are timeless, the digital world is a very different environment. The creative strategist is the modern-day Ogilvy. They know how to blend art and science to ship winning ads. They are as creative as they are analytical and they bridge the gap between media buyers and creative teams. They live by data but know how to move beyond the numbers and let creativity run. We believe the creative strategist is the most critical role in performance marketing today and will be even more so in the age of AI. Soon enough, AI will drive the cost of new creative production to near zero. Which means that the most valuable question teams need to answer is: what to create? We raised this capital to accelerate our product roadmap and to build the command center for creative strategists. Motion’s customers are the best-of-the-best in paid social, and creative strategy is at the core of their workflow. Our goal is to build the tools that creative strategists need to succeed their craft. Over the last 12 months, we've doubled our team to 50 people and we've grown ARR by 3x. The Motion team is on 🔥 and we're hiring across the board. We are fully remote and looking for the most talented people anywhere in the world. If that's you, please get in touch with me or Libby Moyer and tell us about your superpowers!!

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Hot take on a lot of early-stage digital health companies out there: You're not a tech company. Most tech-enabled care companies I've seen over the past two years are only tech-enabled in the sense that they use telehealth as their delivery mechanism for care. There are exceptions to this, of course - companies who build computer vision and applied AI tools to better the doctor-patient experience, companies who build tooling around risk scoring and stratification to enable more personalized medicine, companies who build truly novel intakes to better route patients to the appropriate care, etc. These companies have real technology chops and, if they sell it right to the market, can get credit for this from investors. But if you're truly a telehealth provider, you need to realize now that the goal post has shifted dramatically from 2021 and you're going to be valued at maturity at something like 3x EBITDA. That's profit. Not revenue. Throw a revenue multiple out the window. That's not the world we live in if you're a virtual doctor's office. Think of how that impacts venture math. If you're raising a seed round at $15M post-money (or $12M pre-money), it means you'll have to generate something like $150-200M in annual EBITDA to be a fund returner for your seed investors. Maybe even more with dilution, since telehealth businesses are not traditionally capital efficient and will likely need to raise material additional capital to reach that scale. You need to be ridiculously profitable (probably on $800M-$1B in annual revenue since you're likely going to be a 40% gross margin business). Here's the good news: you can set yourself up well (and probably be a contrarian founder relative to your peers), by talking about EBITDA growth and how you can grow into a fund-returning outcome based on realistic mature market comps. This will stand out for the investors you're pitching, even at the early stage. This is how you can beat the malaise of the tech-enabled care market. Focus on the right metrics and the right type of growth. You don't have to have all the answers (no founder does), but you need to make sure the ship is headed in the right direction. A focus on profitability for "tech-enabled care" (*ahem* telehealth) businesses is a good first step.

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WHAT WOULD DAVE DO? At the time, I didn’t realize how influential he’d be. A little back story: Long before we started Belmondo, I was working in-house at a big tech company. Out of many creative agencies we hired, one was quite unusual. The founder of this boutique studio was a guy we'll call Dave. (Not his real name—because he's retired, doesn't do social media... so we'll let him enjoy his privacy.) He had a novel way of doing business. Unannounced, he’d visit headquarters and roam the hallways, striking up conversation with anyone. Salespeople, developers, PMs, you name it... Eventually everyone got used to it. He had a way of disarming you with his deadpan humor and asking you about your life, your work, and how things were going in general. I liked the way he treated the in-house creatives and marketing folks. He treated them as equals and involved them in his agency’s design process. So what did this actually do for us? The truth is, we didn’t work with Dave because he did great work at a decent price. (Even though it was excellent work, well scoped, well priced) It was because he took the time to get to know our people and our business, and he brought *joy* to the process of collaboration. Looking back on it, it's funny to see how my younger self was getting a masterclass...without even realizing it. At the time, I had no way of knowing that in ten years I’d be co-founding an agency... and signing up for the biggest rollercoaster ride of my life. Along the way, we've helped innovative companies find their brand voice and connect with audiences in all kinds of media, from ads shot on film to interactive kiosks. We love what we do, but it's not without challenges. Sometimes the solution to a problem doesn't reveal itself right away. You have to roll up your sleeves and work hard, side by side, with your client and see the world through their eyes. Whenever I find myself needing a little inspiration, I ask myself: What would Dave do?

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Do you have a venture studio playbook that I can use? Can I get a playbook from an established studio? I get asked this all the time And I typically don’t provide  an answer that studio founders love Here’s what’s wrong with that question? Looking for a playbook from another studio… (In order to build your own) Is like asking for a McDonald's Operating Manual while looking to build a Subway It’s like taking a Medtech studio playbook  and applying it to build consumer businesses ”It won’t make any sense” (Every studio is different) And even if you are planning to do it You won’t find a full studio playbook anyway So… what’s the alternative? Take some of the best practices from Studios  that are public about some of their processes… ”Adapt” them to what “you” are doing (Because it’s always going to be different) ”Adjust” your playbook as you “start” building ventures And remember… You can’t build the perfect playbook As by the end of the day ”No concept survives reality” 

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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

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Blind optimism vs. pragmatism, the psychological patterns that lead to failure, the future of "moats" in the age of AI, and images of me apparently staring wistfully into space.... Thanks Brian Ondrako for a great podcast!

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Someone broke down the estimated costs of a $15 Sweetgreen salad. We need these cost graphics for digital health to help future founders. Especially for tech enabled cos, the greatest cost is labor. Much of the "value created" is in curation and matching, which means the gross margins are reliant on labor arbitrage. Pay someone $X, but get paid $X+Y% per visit. The challenge with healthcare is that you often have to pick one of two business models: 1. specialized, low volume, high cost, low gross margin % 2. generalized, high volume, low cost, high gross margin % I'd argue founders should focus on gross dollars over the lifetime of the customer (like Jeff Bezos said) instead of gross margin %'s, but we'll leave that for another time. The challenge is that many tech enabled digital health cos have high cost of goods sold (labor) and moderately high product, design, and engineering budgets. We must build differentiated solutions for patients, clinicians, and clients to be out incumbents, however, we're realizing that companies are ultimately valued on the discounted value of future cash flows. And the high SG&A costs at most organizations might be inbalanced to the unit economics of the business. I'm not sure the math pencils out for everyone unfortunately. But I'm just a guy on the internet, would love to hear the thoughts from those smarter than I (you!). Comment below. --- p.s. I have no idea the accuracy of the graphic and not an investor in Sweetgreen. Cheers. Credit: David Crowther

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I’m so excited to announce the new name of the vetted community for startup founders I'm building: Village Lane Village Lane connects ambitious early-stage startup founders, both in-person and online, who have at least $100k in ARR or $250k in funding. The name Village Lane is deeply personal to me... It's the street I lived on after business school, in an apartment with my friend Andrew - the kindest, most welcoming, supportive person I’ve ever met, who sadly passed away suddenly a few weeks ago at only 31 years old. It’s also the place where I went full-time on Just Go Grind for the first time when it was a daily podcast and then joined VITALIZE Venture Capital. It was a special time and place and where I took a giant leap in my career. I envision Village Lane (the community) being similar - a special place filled with kind, supportive members looking to take a giant step forward with their businesses. Several experiences have led to the creation of Village Lane: - A transformative MBA experience at USC - Working at VITALIZE Venture Capital for 2.5 years - Growing my social media audience to 40,000+ followers - Building this newsletter to 21,000+ subscribers - Hosting 400+ podcast interviews with founders & investors - Creating an angel investing community with hundreds of members Now I'm focused on helping founders connect, build their personal brand, and create more successful businesses. Village Lane's in-person events will include things like: - Co-working - Social activities - AMAs - Retreats The online component of Village Lane will include: - A member directory - Slack group - Vendor suggestions - Tech stacks - An investor database - Media exposure and amplification - Personal branding assistance We'll also phase in monthly digital peer groups as membership grows. This will all be built around our members and their needs. I’ll share more details as this evolves. Interested in joining? Learn more and apply below.

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Maven is having a killer quarter after a strong last 12 months. People rarely share this publicly, so here's an insider look into how we've navigated product/market fit: Maven’s initial launch was wildly successful. We started a movement. The phrase we coined, “cohort-based course,” showed up in countless startup pitch decks. We were on a $4M GMV run rate in 3 months. It was intoxicating. After the launch energy faded, we faced reality. We had no product: we were hand-holding instructors behind the scenes. This resulted in a 73% instructor revenue retention rate, and many instructors were telling us we weren’t critical to their business. Today: It took 2 years, but we’re now at 120-140% instructor revenue retention. Our business is growing despite a tough market, and professionals are actually using (and loving) our product to speed up their careers. We made a few critical decisions that led to 3 big breakthroughs: Breakthrough #1: We started by looking at follower counts; now we focus on real professional expertise. Our first persona was creators with 100ks of followers, but Maven was often their 3rd or 4th priority. Simply put, they didn’t NEED us, but they were bringing in a ton of revenue. We shifted away from creators to experts, eventually losing 95% of our first $4M in course sales. This shift took 2 years, but it worked – Maven now has hundreds of “subject matter expert” instructors who have spent 10-15 years in their field. Today, Maven has its killer value proposition: we offer ambitious professionals access to the experienced operators to take their career to the next level. Lesson: Persona is key. Focusing on who really needs your product is more important than short-term traction. Sometimes the early signals are wrong, and you need to course correct. Breakthrough #2: We started as a platform; now Maven is a marketplace. When starting Maven, I envied the Substack business and modeled Maven off of it. Maven would provide software while the creator would bring the users. This was a failure of “business by analogy.” In the course world, instructors didn’t value software the way creators did in the newsletter world. They demanded we create a marketplace, and students were increasingly asking us why they couldn’t easily find great courses on Maven. I knew from my time at Udemy and Lyft how hard it is to build a two-sided marketplace, so I resisted this for 1.5 years of heavy internal debate. Eventually, we launched the Maven marketplace. Now, hundreds of thousands of students browse Maven’s courses to find something that can help them in their careers. 25%+ of all course sales come from Maven’s marketing, which has been critical to our instructors and students. Lesson: Find your own path. You can be inspired by other companies, but ultimately every market and situation is different. Be willing to change even the big things when your customer demands it. I reached LinkedIn's character limit so check the comments for the rest!

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Creator-led brands are leading the next wave of $1B+ consumer brands like Feastables and Skims. Want to learn how? Come join us tomorrow (Thursday) at VidCon at 10:45a. I'll be joined by an amazing panel -- Jacquelyn Kalić, Saurabh Shah, Jon Leland, and Lauren Schnipper as we dive into these trends (and how to get started!) Whether you want to sell hot sauces, candies, apparel, digital subscriptions, or more, we're here to discuss how to grow your brand from $0-$10M, $10-$100M, and eventually $100M-$1B. And how creators-led brands are at the forefront of driving this success.

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