Nanda Yadav

Ten years ago, I stepped into a role that would forever change my perspective on software. As the newly minted PM for connectors at Avalara, I discovered complexity on a scale I hadn't encountered before. With 700+ connectors "off the shelf", this strategy drove Avalara's growth through their 2018 IPO. But behind the scenes? It was a different story. I saw no leverage, no opportunity for strategy or innovation. Just grind at an increasing frequency. Two weeks in, I was demoralized and lost hope. The sheer volume of work required to maintain and expand these integrations seemed insurmountable, even with the largest engineering team in the company. Luckily, I jumped at the opportunity to rollout PLG in partnership with Steven Dunston, and went on to lead the flagship AvaTax product, among other fun and high-value contributions. But the integration problem? I kept that idea at arms-length. Or, so I thought. Over the years, most of the products I've built have had a heavy integrations component. I've tried it all - no-code platforms, iPaaS, unified APIs, outsourcing to dev shops. Nothing scaled. Many flat-out failed. In 1:1 coffee chats, my engineering partners would confide how they still struggled to scale integrations. It's a universal pain point. Every software company has to provide integrations because their customers demand it. Many need integrations to drive their partnerships strategy. And every single one of them struggles with how to deliver on this promise. Until now. I'm thrilled to tease that we have solved integrations. Full-stop. I don't have the words for how excited I am about what's coming up. We're not just iterating; we have an entirely new way to integrate that is 10x better than existing options. It's been a decade-long journey, but the destination? It's going to change everything for software. Stay tuned. The integration revolution is here, and it's going to be a wild ride. Let's go! #SoftwareIntegrations #StartupLife #Integrations #AI

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Polls can be a cheat code for earned media, and a great way to build authority. But there are levels to this. Here's how one of the best I've seen - Capital One - does it. (And what I'd do differently to increase earned coverage). Led by Shena Ashley, PhD, Capital One's Insights Center is a masterclass in leveraging polls to create unique insights that would do incredibly well via earned syndication. Here’s what they do great: ✅ Content that sticks: Crucial issues > fleeting trends. Focusing on topics like financial stability, mobility, and entrepreneurship, it's easier to rationalize investment on topics with a longer shelf life. Their insights + stories can drive coverage for months to come. ✅ Visual storytelling: Data doesn’t have to be dry, and Capital One presents original insights through clear and eye-pleasing visuals that are easy to understand. Publishers like charts, they love colorful charts, and they LOVE colorful charts that are easy to understand. Check, check, check. ✅ Strong methodologies and extensive polling numbers: Capital One frequently involves 7k+ participants in their studies - they are not half a**ing it. Well explained methodologies are table stakes to get your polls covered, and Capital One does a great job outlining their data collection process, sample size, and research methodologies.   ✅ Easy to steal: Each report has multiple easy to take stories/soundbites, and are also written as full pieces of content, which can be taken as whole. Finally --- if I could change one thing... Add a byline. Brand publishing NEEDS a byline - no news outlet wants to cover a story that can't be credited back to a human. All in all, polls can be incredibly valuable for driving earned syndication - check out Capital One's Insights Center in comments for killer examples.

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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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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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I recently created a chain on Memo asking for feedback on programming using AI. My concern is that software engineers, a big chunk of our workforce, would be expected to use AI in the near future, like git, to be more productive. If that's the case, I feel the responsibility as CEO to provide as much training as needed. What are your predictions and/or expectations on how AI will influence software engineering. You can checkout the chain here:

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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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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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~40% of Frec’s customers are engineers working in tech, many of whom expect frequent and large capital gains. They also prefer to self-manage their money, which makes Frec an ideal platform. Meet Evan: an engineering leader who upgraded from investing in ETFs to direct indexing. Direct indexing appealed to Evan because it offers comparable returns to his ETFs while saving him money on advisory and ETF fees. “ETFs are true and tested, and giving folks a different way of investing in the market while saving more money is really appealing.” He’s used many other robo-advisors and other fintech tools, but “Frec seems to maximize tax loss harvesting opportunities better than any other product that I’ve used.” He also likes Frec's transparent fee structure.  “I feel like with a lot of other companies, that’s muddled in with the cost of investments,” he told us, “and you don’t really know how much you’re paying or how much you’re not saving as a result. I think Frec does a really good job of laying all of that out and giving you a true understanding of the cost of these investment products.” Read more about his Frec journey here ⬇

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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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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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I advice 1-2 CEOs each week on how to select their CTO or founding engineer The average tenure of a startup CTO is < 2 years But the impact on the company - positive or negative lasts a long time after they are gone -> Early-stage companies lose momentum by choosing the wrong CTO So it is mission-critical to look for the right attributes in your first/next CTO: 1/ Hands-on capabilities Should rollup their sleeves and get into the dirty details from day#1 2/ Experience working with offshore teams Such CTO can handle cultural & language barriers much better 3/ Obsessed about creating value every week Huge red-flag if they focus on fancy tech And complex architectures or expensive tools 4/ Clearly connects with your mission Startups are a slog A clear connection with your mission goes a long way 5/ BONUS: Has some entrepreneurial experience Can empathize with the tradeoffs a CEO has to make every day If you need more help selecting your CTO DM me with the message “world-class CTO”

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If you're connected with me, you know I scream about how necessary integrations are. Check out this piece where I explain more for insideBIGDATA!

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In our upcoming release 913.ai, we’ll be introducing Smart AI Agent Integrations. These go beyond typical AI integrations—our agents can autonomously read your emails, process leads, analyze any data, and even handle attachments, then act on it for you. This isn’t just tool calling or a simple API—it’s a fully capable agent doing the work for you. Plus, we’ve built in full control over what data the agent accesses, so you can tailor its actions to your needs. Take a peek at one of these smart integrations—our Gmail Reader feature.

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We moved 4 customers over from Jira to Unthread this month. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗲𝗱: 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝘀𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 “𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗸𝗲𝘁” 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗱. Legacy software treats internal tickets as table rows in a relational database. You fill out a form, enter some details, and wait for a human to get back to you. They can shoehorn in an AI bot, but the ticket itself remains static. With Unthread, we’re treating tickets from a chat-first and AI-first perspective, which means a ticket and the “jobs-to-be-done” change fluidly in the context of a conversation. This means AI agents need to be smarter at collecting and analyzing conversations, and the hand-off between AI and human agents needs to be seamless. In most cases, conversations don’t need to be “tickets” at all, and we’re seeing our customers deflect 60-80% of questions and requests before they reach a human. Traditional ticketing wants you to fill out forms and manage static tickets, but agentic, conversational AI is bringing us to a zero-ticket future that’s better for users and agents.

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Think about the last time you got confused or needed help using a software product. It may have gone something like this: 1. Open a new tab and search for their support docs 2. Search for the problem you're experiencing 3. Peruse through their beautifully written support document, find your answer 4. Look back up and see 37 open Chrome tabs 5. Forget what you were doing in the first place 6. Go downstairs and make a sandwich The best software products keep users engaged by providing helpful, personalized support right in their products. And now Appcues is making that easier. Our new version of Launchpad just went into open beta. You can use it to build a personalized resource center in your product without a single line of code. Give people the help and guidance they need, when they need it. The vision for Launchpad is for it to be the first click a user makes when they need help of any kind. There's way more to come from it soon! Give it a try. Your chrome-tab-navigating, sandwich-craving user base will appreciate it.

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Me, Josh Segall, and 80 engineers hanging out 😹 We started throwing events exclusively for software engineers 1 year ago. I had 2 goals: 1) Find talented engineers and convince them to work at startups. 2) Find engineers who had their own ideas that wanted to build startups. While this event is somewhat tangential to startups, engineering talent is so SO important and I’m really seeing the results from hosting these after finding 2 CTOs and a few other key players too. I give folks this advice all the time- if you wanna build a tech company, go hangout with engineers and share what you’re building. If you’re a student, hangout at your engineering school. There you will find awesome partners critical to your success. Outside of my personal mission here, we’ve ended up building a really cool community. Surprise, I don’t like most networking events, but this is a space that I feel exceptionally comfortable in and I’m so happy we made it for others too.

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This is a cool project, and another example of the emerging "replace stateful storage with S3" trend. I do wonder at what point someone will package this sort of thing up into a FUSE filesystem to make it generally usable across existing services. Or maybe every service has unique enough needs that it's better to handle it custom each time. https://lnkd.in/etcVBfVf

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A design principle we've had at Census since day one was "Don't Build Silos". It's been a hard tendency to fight. The reality is that storing data in a place the developer controls is just easier than storing it where our customer has the controls. But that doesn't make it the right answer. So we took on the hard work to figure out that architecture. And over the years, we've expanded that approach. Today, we're formalizing it even further with Observability Lake. Logging is critical when debugging, but it's also dangerous if mishandled. Observability Lake backs our now debugging tools by giving our customers a way to safely store as much (or as little!) as they want. This is a very natural application of a data lake pattern, but an under-appreciated one today. I expect we'll see a lot more SaaS adopting the pattern of giving the users a simple fast path to reading/storing their data wherever they choose as we see more adoption of Iceberg in the coming months. #datalake #observability #apacheiceberg #dataarchitecture

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