Gavin Nachbar

Inspired by what we’re building at Build Momentum. We realized tech recruiting is broken—non-technical recruiters struggle to find and attract the best talent. That’s why we’ve flipped the script and developed a community-based recruiting approach: a trusted network of elite engineers, embedded within Latam’s top tech communities. The best engineers know the best engineers, and we tap into these deep, authentic connections to deliver top talent faster and with better fit. Want to see how we’re doing it differently? Check out our post

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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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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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🚀 Scaling New Heights: Cribl's Strategic Growth 🚀 In a remarkable stride within the competitive market of data infrastructure, San Francisco-based startup Cribl has recently clinched a substantial $319 million in its latest Series E funding. This momentous investment spearheaded by GV (Alphabet’s venture arm) pushes Cribl to a towering valuation of $3.5 billion. 🌟 🔍 Here's Why This Matters for Startups and Small Businesses: 🔹 Innovation and Expansion: Cribl's trajectory illuminates the potent impact of innovative solutions in data management amidst an ever-expanding corporate data environment. 🔹 Significant Growth Potential: With the company boasting an impressive portfolio including 25% of the Fortune 500, the journey reflects significant growth potential and scalability that startups can aspire to. 🔹 Strategic Partnerships: The involvement of heavyweight investors like GV and others underscores the importance of strategic partnerships in accelerating business growth. Key Takeaways: - 🌐 Adapting advanced data solutions is crucial in leveraging the voluminous data generated today. - 📈 Embrace growth by seeking impactful investments and forming strategic partnerships. - 🚀 Aim for scalability by continuously innovating and expanding your solution offerings. Stay updated, engage with current trends, and continuously seek to innovate. The path Cribl is carving out highlights the robust possibilities within tech and data management sectors. For a deeper dive into Cribl’s funding news: https://lnkd.in/gQhmrYUK #DataManagement #StartupGrowth #Innovation This post was generated by an AI. Please contact us for more information.

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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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After the first deep dive discussion w/ founders I often hear a comment "I wish I had heard about this alternative [to all-in must-become-a-unicorn] way to build a startup earlier as I have wasted years in pursuing the wrong thing". Our mission is that no founder would ever need to say that again as it is such a waste. Us preaching the gospel 1:1 just doesn't scale, hence we use mass media to multiply our efforts - that's how Gorillacast came to be. The 1st episode is out, featuring yours truly. "How can you know what food you like unless you taste everything" said a chef. How can founders make informed choices about the best strategy for them to follow unless they know of all alternatives? This might not be of interest to you but pls spread the word so that the founders who should hear it can find it. I have a dream!

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Impactful Biz, Ops & Investment Roles at Early Startups & VCs: • Chief of Staff to Ex. Head of Product at Google • Founding GTM at the most YC product used by other YC companies in the past four years • Chief of Staff to a Partner at a Top-Tier VC Fund • Head of Platform of a NY State Backed Accelerator • Investment Associate at a Seed Stage Fund Investing in Category-Defining Companies • Partner at a Defense-Focused VC Fund • Chief Revenue Officer of a New Space Company in El Segundo • Venture Capital Analyst at a fund investing in overlooked geographies • Investment Associate at a Spirit-Focused Fund • Strategy & Ops Lead at a Company Focused on Helping Improve Autism • Senior Product Manager at a Company Focused on Building Shopify for Content Creators • Program Manager for a Space Security Company • Open-ended Investment Position at a Top-Tier Accelerator • Biz & Ops Lead for One of the Most Loved Digital Consumer Products 💸 All companies are well-funded and backed by top-tier investors. ⬇ You can find links to the roles above, plus many more, in the comments.

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DeepCast shipped a number of really cool new features recently in advance of a broad outreach push to podcast listeners. One new feature is our new Daily DeepDigest tool that sends you a concise daily email including any new episodes from the trailing 24 hours from any podcasts you Subscribe to (on DeepCast). Think daily podcast cliff notes or podcast news ticker tape, with a hint of Morning Brew various brews or PitchBook News—it's increasing information throughput when you're pressed for time. And this feature is rapidly evolving to distill other key extractions from shows you're already interested in, but also exposing you to other shows you might be unfamiliar with that also have nuggets to share—and thus increasing your aperture yet still conscious of your time. Want to go deeper on any given episode? Click the episode detail and you're off to an episode on DeepCast, where you can subsequently read a longer form distillation of that episode or go straight to the source and listen to the episode. (And podcaster friends, these pages are definitely increasing indexing and thus Google entry points to your shows!) I'm loving this feature as a user, personally. Can't wait to see what others think! #BuildingInPublic #Podcasts #AllTheWorldsInformation #HowYouWantIt

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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

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This is an interesting article from SaaStr sharing data from ICONIQ Capital about revenue per employee. “These are useful yardsticks for folks scaling: At less than $25m ARR, actually SaaS start-ups aren’t any more efficient than in 2017-2019, at $130,000 per employee / FTE. Although that’s still more efficient than the Boom Times. At $25m-$100m ARR, SaaS scale-ups are about 25% more efficient than they used to be, at $172,000 in revenue per employee / FTE. Time to get real at $25m ARR, apparently 😉 And at $100m+ ARR, they are 20% more efficient then they used to be, at $249,000 in revenue per employee. On the path to the $300k+ we see in public SaaS leaders.” At Worksmith in October, our annualized revenue per employee was $238K. https://lnkd.in/gqkkpjEW

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Tem ‎Nugmanov, CEO of Optemization, was on the podcast this week. Ironically… he cautioned Notion users on the idea of OVER-OPTIMIZING their workspaces. At LA Tech Week, some VC and founder types hit him with a question that stopped him in his tracks. — ”How do you take a workspace that is already a 4/5 to a 5/5?” Apparently, that's not a situation Tem deals with on the regular. But it got his gears turning, and he realized something key. The answer? Keep it simple, stupid. Tem sees tons of folks getting a little too excited about all the crazy stuff Notion can do. They get sucked into this never-ending cycle of tweaking and optimizing every little thing. But here's the reality: There's a point where all that extra effort starts to give diminishing returns. At some point, you just gotta call it good and start actually using the workflow. And here's the kicker: Even a "good enough" setup is going to get you most of the results you're after. So Tem's words of wisdom for all you Notion nerds out there? Don't get too carried away with all the bells and whistles. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. — What is the silliest over-optimization you have ever seen? How do you keep your Notion workspace simple? If you wanna hear more of Tem’s expert takes on Notion, catch the full episode, now live.

In case you missed it last week, one of my favorite SaaS benchmark reports was released. Thanks to High Alpha and OpenView for the work and having us as a partner! This thing is stuffed full of insights on everything from growth rates, net revenue retention, ARR per FTE, and more. You can't build a great SaaS business without it! https://lnkd.in/ghKT_tBY

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I enjoyed going on Nick Telson-Sillett’s podcast, Pitch Deck by Forward Pursuit. Nick is a serial founder and investor (founded and exited DesignMyNight) so knows both sides of the table which always makes for an enriching chat. Some things we discussed: - The perceived power dynamic between VCs and founders can hinder productive conversations. - A compelling product demo can significantly influence investor interest. - Founders must focus on solving real customer problems to succeed. - Hiring standards are crucial for building a successful startup team. - Behavioural roadblocks can prevent the adoption of new solutions. - Validation from potential customers is key for pre-revenue startups. - The early-stage funding landscape has become more efficient and selective. - Pace of execution is a critical factor in attracting investment.

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Check out three M13 portfolio companies currently hiring - Bento (gobento.com) & Lifeforce are making strides in the future of health, while the team at Rho is building the future of fintech. Scroll through to learn more about each and how you can fuel their missions 🚀 #hiring #brightertogether #m13 #bento #lifeforce

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Are you looking to break into VC / PE / being a CEO? Are you frustrated at job applying process? Do you want to surround yourself with the best and brightest and build a network that includes investors, 10x founders, and other hellbent on changing the world? Do you run a start up that needs some hypergrowth? The job market has changed, applying for jobs is dead, its all about creating jobs via entrepreneurship or possessing executive skills to create a job at a company. Come join us at IOTA Labs MBA bootcamp; a donation based month long part time, program that puts infront of VC/PE deal flow with the intention that if you can follow the program, you will be contributing to large deals and getting paid for the work. The point of this program is to rapidly convert highly motivated individuals to high performing executives by surrounding them with the training, network, and skills they need to be successful @ IOTA or beyond. With training from tenured product manager @ Google, VC Fund managers, investors, 10x founders, CxOs (15+ at GM, Salesforce, Accenture), legal experts, and other subject matter experts https://lnkd.in/eSgHkB9u Seats will fill up fast just as an FYI , do please repost this so we can help as many people as possible.

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Once you’re in it, you’re in it. #Startup #founders don’t just take financial risk - they invest years of their lives. For many, it’s absolutely worth it. To me, the first task is the most important one: to define your target and make absolutely sure it’s one worth that level of investment.

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As we dive into 2024, the Series A fundraising landscape is becoming increasingly daunting. Investment standards are soaring, and fewer startups are making the cut. Series A investors are finding many seed stage companies too premature. The median valuation jump from seed to Series A skyrocketed from $19.5 million in Q1 2022 to $28.7 million in Q1 2024. Investors now demand stronger revenue performance, targeting $2 million to $3 million in ARR, up from $1 million to $2 million. Alarmingly, only 12% of Q1 2022 seed startups secured Series A funding within two years, down from 31.8% in Q1 2020. #venture #earlystage #seedtoseriesa #seed #seriesa #inspireglobalventures https://lnkd.in/gW4bkcNy

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I really enjoyed breaking in our new studio to sit down with Temporal Technologies Co-Founders Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev for the latest episode of Founded & Funded. Temporal was founded in 2019 based on an open-source microservices orchestration engine project but is the result of a more than decade-long partnership between the two co-founders that spanned their time working on different iterations of the same thing at AWS, Microsoft, and Uber. In this episode, Samar, Maxim, and I dive into the challenges of building an open-source ecosystem while also working on a commercial offering and scaling a successful company, how to navigate and adjust a product roadmap in an ever-changing world of AI and large language models, and how to successfully build an early startup team, navigate through a CEO transition, and bring on a startups first independent board member. It's a very compelling conversation and a must-listen for every builder out there. Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gymf9sES Find other platforms and the transcript on our website: https://lnkd.in/ggRtnKtM Be sure to subscribe to our channel for more deep dives into cutting-edge technologies and the minds behind them. Don't forget to like, comment, and share this conversation if you found it valuable!

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Insightful breakdown from my great Partner Omri Amirav-Drory on the simple factors that really separate the top 1% of investors from the rest, and how more operators should become investors! https://lnkd.in/gEiZdT2h

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