Greg Rublev

🚀 Venture debt covenants might sound like a small part of the deal, but they carry huge implications for your startup’s future. 📈 You need to be strategic in your negotiations to avoid any pitfalls down the road. It’s all about setting yourself up for success, not stress. Dive into more details in the original Kruze Consulting post. The link is in the 1st comment. 👇

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Do you know any companies that are stuck or going through a rough time? At Palm Venture Studios, we believe some companies close that don't deserve to. Our mission is to identify these hidden gems and provide the support they need to thrive. We specialize in investing in and scaling companies, leveraging our expertise to turn challenges into opportunities. If you know a company in need of a lifeline or a fresh new chapter, let's connect and explore how we can help. #BusinessGrowth #Investing #CompanyTurnaround #Founders

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I believe two of the big winners over the next 10 years in the SMB category will be PE who are rolling up the businesses and GenAI powered software that makes running these businesses significantly more turnkey and/or profitable. Thanks for having me on Jay Kapoor. If you want spicy takes fast forward to 25 min mark. If you want to get deep in market analysis buckle in for the whole thing. https://lnkd.in/d8M7Jyrx

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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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My convos this week at Venture Atlanta confirms my vision for the future of AI and humans working together. How so? The AI enabled workforce is going to change the way startups define their go to market approach and everything in between. Instead of defaulting to the old playbooks written for companies 10 years ago, there will be a new wave of humans taking the lead with AI expertise. I believe millions of new AI jobs will be coming in this next decade. It will be difficult to land an AI job, because the competition will be high. These workers will be rewarded handsomely, displacing many many other employees along the way. If you aren’t learning about how AI is going to affect our world, now is really the time to get started. #aijobs #ai

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A few of my thoughts on the future of marketplaces. Joe Magyer is both a great podcast host and investor! We didn’t even get into AI here but I am very excited about the marketplace frontier. The model remains the same but the GTM, product experience and supply to be aggregated have shifted. I am always looking for Marketplace+ models where it is a marketplace plus something else. This takes many forms but it is a strategy that I have seen to be successful. The future is going to increasingly look like Marketplace + SaaS. This is inevitable as the cost of software creation trends down.

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3 years of pricing lessons at Equals condensed into one blog post. Since starting the company, we've tinkered a lot with pricing and packaging. It's one of the single most impactful levers early stage companies can pull. I think folks *don't* experiment with pricing enough, or take big enough bets when they do. We've tried free. We've tried completely sales led. We've tried not listing pricing on the site. Matt Hodges details all the plans we've had, why, and what we've learned in our latest installment on Wrap Text. https://lnkd.in/ecckEDba

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When we asked CPG founders who they wanted at Founderland... Their answer was clear: People who can help them grow their business & achieve their goals. Specifically: - The top retailers - The most founder-friendly investors, and - Other founders they can learn from and share with This conversation that I'm hosting at Founderland is a perfect representation of this group, plus one BIG bonus. We're also including Joel Toledano and ChargeUp.ai which is one of my favorite tech companies that is supporting consumer brands today. They automate the retail deduction and chargeback process for brands, saving them an insane amount of time and money. Such a cool co. Excited to teach, share and connect...and get some deals done, while of course having lots of fun. Joel Toledano Jen Zeszut Kim Coffin Deb Conklin

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Navigating the second product problem. I had a great chat with Chad McAllister, PhD, a top podcast interviewer and a true expert in innovation and new product development. Check out the insightful interview here: https://lnkd.in/evFZkR7r #innovation #newproductdevelopment

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Let's talk for a minute about how Harbor compares to Nanit on pricing. Ultimately, Harbor comes with a 10" tablet and beats every other product on functionality many times over... but here are a few points on pricing. Nanit offers two tiers (as of spring 2024) at $120 or $300 per year PER CHILD. If you have two children in their premium tier you're looking at nearly TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS across two years! Harbor has one flat membership per household. For just one child, Harbor is just $33 more across two years than Nanit's camera, floor stand, and Memories plan. It comes with a dedicated 10" tablet and a level of reliability, security, and quality that no WiFi camera app based system can match.

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When I first started investing in AI a decade ago, enterprise software meant digital filing cabinets. Salesforce built a $35B business on this simple premise: Humans input data, Software organizes it. Sales reps who focused on closing deals rarely updated their CRMs. When they did, the data lived in rigid structures, missing the rich context of actual sales activities happening in the wild. 2020 marked a turning point. By 2020 LLMs were enabling software to process unstructured data—no more waiting for manual inputs. These systems started processing emails, calls, and documents on their own. They made decisions. They took action. Now, software has hit an inflection point: AI is working together in a System of Agents. These AI teams mirror elite human organizations, with specialized members handling distinct functions. Software becomes the worker itself, capable of understanding, executing, and improving upon traditionally human-delivered service. Think about the money at stake here. Most software companies fight over IT budgets. But Systems of Agents can tap into something much bigger—the $4.6T companies already spend on their workforce. Here's what gets me excited: technical founders who build AI teams (aka Systems of Agents) that never sleep, get smarter with every interaction, and nail real business metrics are going to capture an entirely new wave of enterprise value. I can tell you confidently—the scale of this shift is unlike anything we've seen in software. 💬 What do you think? LMK in comments.

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Knowing where your bread is buttered is an essential life skill. If you are a B2B #CMO and you don't believe you work for sales, heed the words of Jaleh Rezaei from Mutiny below. Some marketing leaders get caught up in trying to be "strategic," thinking that revenue is tactical. There is nothing more strategic than revenue, and the only way for #marketing to be strategic is to bring the pipeline.

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Tomorrow, I'll share another entry in Estuary, my newsletter about building GTM partnerships with VC and PE firms. The topic? How to approach the power dynamic between a startup and a VC when you've determined that a sales partnership is a good idea. Estuary has 8 subscribers and a 100% open rate. 😛 Sign up link in the comments!

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New ideas are always exciting, the key is to validate that it’s not just an idea but a real problem. You can only do that by talking to customers.

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New Customer Alert: LUNO® ⛺ lunolife.com is now blocking coupon extensions from leaking and auto-injecting codes at their checkout! Camping, reimagined for comfort and ease. Gear thoughtfully designed by campers, for campers. Have coupon code leaks and over-paying commissions been a problem? Let's chat! #eCommerce #Shopify #Veeper #dtc #stopcouponleaks

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I find it surprising that founders and executives worry about the time commitment required to create content. But here’s the thing: as a leader, you need systems that scale, because time is your most precious resource. What if you could multiply your time infinitely? A video that takes an hour to shoot can be watched by thousands—customers, suppliers, partners, employees—creating a personal connection akin to a face-to-face conversation. It doesn’t get more scalable than that—except maybe with software. So before echoing the usual excuses, ask yourself: wouldn’t it be smarter to stand out by doing what others aren’t?

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Weekend podcast recommendation: The Acquired podcast episode featuring Costco Wholesale. https://lnkd.in/gk_ZpVak. This episode has it all - the invention of: discount retailing, loss leaders, private label, membership clubs, and the founding of: FedMart, Price Club, Walmart, Amazon, and more. Big thanks to Christian (Chris) Bach for flagging this episode!

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Achieving profitability is the hardest part of building a startup.  The second hardest part is developing scalable infrastructure. We are tackling both head on right now. A little over half way through the journey to cash flow positive, I expect to hit it right around our initially projected timeline.  As it relates to scalable infrastructure, this one is a short term beast for us. We have our swords out and are making progress in slaying the beast every day.   We are developing our own project, order and digital asset management system tied in with salesforce. As our model is unique and still evolving we’ve opted to go a route that will require a cutover down the road but prefer to further understand customer and actual market needs prior to deploying capital. The past three weeks have yielded significant progress. I imagine we are still another 5-9 out from our MVP flowing the way we want. At the same time we are rolling out a new finance squad and workflow also tied into the above. My gut instinct is that we will be 3x more productive at a minimum when we get on the other side of this and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is 4-5x or more. We‘ll have gone from proof of concept, to validation to ready to full on scale in under 18 months. Shooting for 100% + CAGR ‘24-‘28 which will put us at a $50MM run rate. But we won’t let CAGR goals get in the way of optimizing the integration of work with life. If we hit $40MM instead of $50MM, are profitable and have the best community in emerging CPG for what we do than that’s ok too 🤘 It’s easy to want to move behind the early and challenging days of a startup but before you know it you’re reminiscing on them. For the first time in 18 years I can truly say I am embracing the journey being the destination. To all the other folks out there crazy enough to be building or working in a startup, keep going and don't forget to step back and smell the 🌹 once in a while 🫡

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