Guhan Venguswamy

𝗔𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘆-𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰 𝘀𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀! We're conducting a benchmarking study to define success metrics specifically for vertical software companies. 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀: Existing SaaS benchmarks just don't cut it for your unique industry needs. This research will provide the data-driven insights to measure and optimize your vertical software business. 𝗖𝗮𝗻 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗛𝗲𝗹𝗽? A few minutes of your time can make a big difference.

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Here's how we bootstrapped ossa.ai from $0 to nearly $600k revenue run rate in less than 5 months... Things have been moving incredibly fast here at ossa.ai. Recently, I had some time to reflect at my desk and pondered: "How did we get here so quickly?" The answer was simpler than you might think: I surrounded myself with people who have been there and done that. If there is one truth about business, it's this: You can spend your entire life learning lessons yourself, or you can surround yourself with people who have already learned those lessons. I choose the latter every single day. When Brennan Duncan and I first started building ossa.ai, we thought we would have to do everything ourselves. We believed we needed to hold the entire pie to create something valuable that could change people's lives. Over the last two years, I have learned the opposite to be true. My thought process has shifted to, "How can I find ways to..." Speaking of individuals who have been there and done that, today at 12pm PST, I will be joined by Ben Murray, also known as The SaaS CFO on Linkedin Live. Back in Q3 of last year, Brennan Duncan and I joined one of Ben's SaaS Metrics Foundation Live cohorts. In that course, I learned many frameworks and lessons that still guide the financial health of the business today. Today, Ben and I will be discussing the current stage of ossa.ai and what is next to take us above and beyond a $1M revenue run rate. We will also discuss the fundraising environment and our plans to potentially seek fundraising in the coming quarters. You can register for the event here: https://lnkd.in/g6kf-ATN See you at 12pm PST! :)

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Talk to Buildstash and Robbie Cargill if you want to manage your game or app binaries.

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Last week, Zach and I headed to Seattle for 2 days of our executive offsite. The goal? To set our vision for 2025. We focused on: → Solidifying our vision, → And allocating resources across our 3 product lines. We answered critical questions like → How can we get our customers to find even more value? → How can we be the rising tide that lifts all boats for our target industries - moving & insurance → How and when can we scale Yembo beyond our first two verticals I think this was our most productive offsite yet! Looking forward to executing on these priorities in 2025 - making ideas into code and into customer life improvements!

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Two posts I shared with my team this week about LLM's impact on SaaS. SaaS has always been about solving a problem. Engineers I interview often ask me "Why spend so much time on the LLM stuff?". Aka, "Why are we working on all the hard stuff that is barely working, when there's plenty of problems to be solved the old way?". Brett Queener's tweet about the UI. He talks about a world where most of a software product's user interface will be a prompt or a recommendation. "..its far better user experience than forcing people to hunt and peck across your tabs, list views, form views and dashboard for them to get done what they want to. It also means that what you used to compete on / differentiate on traditionally (I have these capabilities / better easier to use screens / yada yada yada) are kinda irrelevant" Matt Turck's LinkedIn post, "Is SaaS dead?" SaaS vendors are currently perceived as “last generation” despite best efforts to add AI quickly. Customers trying to build themselves, since it's pretty easy to get started. He says what happens next: "* customers realize that “build” is a headache, not always good * OpenAI / Azure etc can’t / doesn’t want to build hundreds of problem specific/ vertical specific apps * Takes time, but legacy and new SaaS companies truly become AI-first (not just marketing), abstract away complexity of deploying LLMs * macro environment eventually rebounds * AIaaS becomes the new SaaS - what is old is new" Both are linked in the comments. #who-moved-my-cheese

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Building a reliable RAG system isn’t just about performance—it’s about trust. Matt Turk's blog post breaks down the importance of this for both technical and non-technical folks—highlighting how Cleanlab's TLM, paired with Pinecone’s vector database, delivers high-quality data retrieval, accurate, context-aware responses, and scalable performance to meet growing demands. 👏

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I love data. Especially people data. It helps answer those lingering..."is it just me...or?" late night questions. The OpenView SaaS Benchmark Survey is one of those annual ones I always read and reference with the founders I work with. That's why I'm so excited that High Alpha is partnering with OpenView, Paddle and Kyle Poyar to launch the 2024 annual SaaS Benchmark Survey. And guess what -- it's live! If you want early-access to the report, be sure to participate and we'll be back in November to share insights. Link to survey below. https://lnkd.in/ey9FAgYV #SaaSBenchmarks

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Today, I am happy to announce our $35M series B funding round, led by Craft Ventures . The Craft team is well-renowned for its work with amazing SaaS companies. Michael Robinson is bringing the SaaS DNA to our board as we scale our customer base. 🏇 We remain laser-focused on building Onehouse as the most open and interoperable data lakehouse platform, with lightning-fast incremental data pipelines and unmatched cost efficiency, working seamlessly across clouds, warehouses, compute engines and data table formats. ✨ Customers have been clamoring for an open data architecture that decouples data into open formats from compute engines for over five years now. With recent support for open table formats across all major players and the mainstream focus on interoperability, the market feels right for this big shift. 🙌 In such a world, Onehouse will continue to be the agent of change, advocating for using the right engines for the right workloads on your data. On the personal front, building an independent company with an ambitious vision in a large market like data is not for the faint of heart. I sincerely thank everyone on the team, my family and my friends; this could not have been possible without their support. Until next time, back to work for our customers and the open-source data community. Checkout the full blog here https://lnkd.in/gvqVyUdH #dataengineering #bigdata #data #datawarehouse #datalake #datalakehouse #datamanagement #streamprocessing #datascience #machinelearning #opensource #startups #cloud

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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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It's been 10 days since I started working alongside Gabe Naviasky to build the GTM approach for Leadbeam. (The guy is a legend - give him a follow!) Earlier this week, I caught up with the other co-founders Soham Tikekar and Kennan Murphy-Sierra too - they walked me through the vision, the roadmap, and gave me a glimpse of what they've been cooking up (some super cool updates coming soon). Also been chatting with some sales leaders in the space this week, and their feedback is a testament to what the team is building. When Gabe and I talked about outbound and getting the brand out there, one thing I insisted on was getting us on Dimmo 🦖. Big fan of what Sarah Brazier and Troy Munson are building. LeadBeam is now on Dimmo - https://lnkd.in/gSXeSfX2 If you manage a field sales team, you definitely want to check us out and safe to say we're here to change the CRM adoption game for Field Sales teams :) . #leadbeam #fieldsales #outsidesales #salesforce #hubspot

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Interesting post from Vanta's CEO recently. I’m one of those founders she talks about and I’ll happily give them the plug for helping us get our initial SOC 2 report in motion at a reasonable cost. Vanta makes every part of that initial process easier. The first SOC 2 audit you do is exactly that: an audit. An external firm evaluates you over the course of three months to see whether you firmly follow the policies you’ve put in place. If you’re small enough, a detailed founder or two can make sure you color within the lines during that time period. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that it’s not just about getting compliant. It’s about **staying** compliant. Vanta helps here, too, but in a much more limited capacity. The longer term process can look one of two ways:  1️⃣ Build and document repeatable processes (ideally automations and workflows) that ensure your policies are adhered to and create an audit trail.  2️⃣ Do not do that. Build janky homegrown workflows. Spend lots of time scrambling and chasing down information. Be very, very sad come audit time. Oh, what do you know, this looks like the perfect place for a YeshID mention. That’s because YeshID is the peanut-butter to Vanta (or Drata or Secureframe)’s jelly. Our workflows replace spreadsheets, Jira tickets, and Zaps with automated, documented, and consistent processes. So if you’re up there in the second group, let’s talk.

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Story time: I talked to Plaid's DevRel team last month I learned 30% of devs who get API access NEVER onboard because they never make it through the integration process. Imagine you're Plaid and you worked super hard to get developers to use your products — but then they quit and use a competitor because yours is too hard. 𝑻𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒎𝒆𝒂𝒏𝒔 𝒎𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒕 𝒓𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒏𝒖𝒆 𝒐𝒏 𝑨𝑷𝑰 𝒖𝒔𝒂𝒈𝒆. This is the problem that we're aiming to solve at Layer. We add an Integration Expert (ie. extension) on top of VSCode to help DevRel teams at companies like Plaid make onboarding devs easier.  Like a cake with icing, VSCode is better with another Layer.

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👩‍🚀 Fellow Tech People, we're exploring moving away from our custom API/websocket LLM interfacing at LEAGUES in favor of ELL. 🤔 The potential for streamlined API interactions, simplified prompt management, and reusable functions is really appealing. That said, I’m reaching out to the community: has anyone implemented ELL in production yet? I'm curious if ELL is the way to go for long-term scalability and maintenance reduction when interacting with LLMs. And what about Langchain—why choose one over the other? I'd love to hear your experiences and thoughts! #LEAGUES #ELL #Langchain #AI #TechInnovation

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As of today, Toast is worth ~1/2 as much as Square's parent company, likely somewhere around what the entire Square Seller/B2B ecosystem valuation is. 5-10 years ago this would have been a completely insane thought to have and proves how far vertical SaaS has come. Feel so lucky to have bumped into Aman Narang Steve Fredette Jonathan Grimm Chris Comparato Steve Papa Kent Bennett David Yuan and so many others that helped us succeed over the years. To the next generation of companies powering main street + vertical industries, you're on the right track and can build huge generational companies that make a big difference to the customers and industries you support. Excited to see what the next wave looks like especially with (buzzwords incoming) AI being another major accelerant beyond fintech for vertical tech companies.

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Big day for the Rails Foundation: 1Password is the first new Core member to join the board since we launched. Looking forward to working with Jason Meller on the board. You might be thinking: 1Password? Rails? YES. 1Password recently acquired Kolide, a Rails app, and integrated it into the core of its XAM. With today’s world of remote work (and the apps we rely on at work) combined with the ever-increasing threat of data breaches and bad actors, this Rails app now handles “thousands of web requests per second, authorizes millions of authentication attempts, processes billions of asynchronous jobs each month, and consistently delivers four nines of annual uptime for customers”. Not bad for a Rails app, ey?

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A lot of pre-product, pre revenue startup clients approach Calibrate to architect, design, and develop their first web or mobile app. One common theme we see among many of these ambitious co-founders is trying to launch with a larger feature set based on what they THINK their users will find valuable. In scenarios such as this, our team always advises our clients to consider pairing back the feature set to an MVP (minimum viable product). We start this process by asking our clients “what are the critical features absolutely necessary to launch your product and start getting valuable feedback from the user base?”. Anything beyond that is speculation and unnecessary. In the startup world (or even with software SMBs are launching), it’s imperative to get to market as quickly and cost effectively as possible to start establishing a POC (proof of concept) and collecting feedback; MVPs ensure that happens. Through collecting real user feedback, clients can prioritize and execute on their roadmap (aka new features) with FACTS (aka data driven insights) v. CONJECTURE (aka speculating on what users want). Check out the blog article on our site for some tips to help narrow down the feature set of a product to an MVP: https://lnkd.in/gHTeynVb

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Custom GPTs are killing a huge number of startups. And it's not hard to see why. (They don't have any proprietary tech.) If you've checked out ChatGPT recently, you might have noticed the new "Custom GPTs" panel on the left-hand side. It's like an app store for AI models, and it's spelling doom for many startups. -- As my co-founder Jacob Tucker recently pointed out, we're seeing a huge domino effect in the #AIStartup world. When ChatGPT first launched, these wrapper startups looked impressive. They were raising $2-3 million rounds, even though they had no technical moat. They were just low-hanging fruit, capitalizing on the hype around ChatGPT. Now that house of cards is crumbling. -- This is a huge win for deep tech companies that are actually innovating in the AI space. Companies like EmpathixAI, where we're building proprietary AI models from the ground up to solve specific problems, like conducting in-depth interviews at scale with #CultureChat. We're not just slapping a pretty interface on top of someone else's tech. We're doing the hard work of pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI. -- So if you're an investor or a business looking to leverage AI, take this as a cautionary tale. Don't be dazzled by the shiny wrappers. Look for companies with real technical depth, who are building solutions that can't be easily replicated or replaced. Those are the companies that will survive and thrive in the long run. The rest? They'll be washed away by the next wave of AI innovation.

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One of my favorite advantages of Y Combinator is that thousands of YC veterans have specific advice for you. Sometimes, that advice isn't public. But this essay is one of the best, and anyone can read it. Paul Graham's "Do Things That Don't Scale" describes a common thread between almost every successful company. Here are a few of his examples: Recruiting - "You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them." He describes Stripe (one of the most successful YC companies ever) not waiting to onboard users who wanted to sign up in the early days. If they agreed, one of the Collison brothers (the founders) would simply use their laptop to sign them up on the spot. Instead of being shy and lazy about it, they were bold. Initial fragility - "Almost all startups are initially fragile. Founders ... unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones." It's fine if reporters and juggernauts dismiss your startup, but dangerous if you start to dismiss or doubt your own. Delight your users - "Your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made." Wufoo (one of the early YC startups) sent each new user a hand-written thank you note. This is one of many ways you can delight them - try to make them TOO happy. Experience - "The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be the best you ever get." Laser focus on an "insanely great" attention to users. He explains that the product doesn't have to be insanely great at the beginning, but the user's experience does. That means over-engaging, which is fine. It promotes a tight feedback loop. Fire - A narrow focus is critical. "It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs." Startups who build things for themselves ("I was so sick of experiencing X, so I created Y solution") will do this without even thinking about it. Manual - "There's a more extreme variant where you don't just use your software, but are your software." Essentially, do things manually that you would automate later. A feature doesn't have to be code complete if you can get away with it at the beginning. There are more in the article - I highly recommend reading it. But my main takeaway is the most successful companies didn't automate and scale every single action from Day One. In PG's words, "startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going." That usually means manually doing things that don't scale.

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Thanks for the insightful pitch strategies. When can I get a slot to pitch to you?

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