Nicolas Vandenberghe

Insightful look into bioplatform strategy, and what it takes to raise a Series A from my partner, Omri Amirav-Drory: https://lnkd.in/dFv7GbF6

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We gathered dozens of operators from the MGMT Boston Operators Club and local founders alongside the 186 Ventures team this October to discuss the evolution of our dear software markets, the status of some predictions for 2024 (all looking good!), and what’s on deck for next year. General Partner Giuseppe Stuto led us through the following predictions for 2025 to share with you all.. ↕ We will see more vertical AI applications manifest themselves within the Enterprise in a similar ways that SaaS moved from horizontal to vertical use cases 🔔 We will see services business models more common and software budget purchasing models less common - SaaS may even be given away for cheap/free as a “way in” ⚖ Capital efficiency, on a relative basis, will almost be required to create enduring & compounding defensible enterprise value. Details like procurement cycle lengths and creativity with non-dilutive financing, like leveraging revenue based financing tools for example, will all matter 💡 Specific to AI, premiums will be placed on applications that can actually get “reasoning” right. All purpose LLMs still have a ways to go and there are multiple approaches with the “jury still out” on how to get context and reasoning right. Infrastructure solutions that use general purpose or customizable knowledge graphs to help application developers get to 100% (enterprise acceptable accuracy) will emerge OR savvy application developers will fill the gaps themselves. We will likely see both, depending upon the specific case! Thank you Giuseppe, Julian, and Sophie for a great discussion and evening!

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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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For all emerging managers out there who are trying to understand the world of LPs: This 10X Capital episode on "How to Pick Top Decile Venture GP’s" is awesome. Albert Azout of Level Ventures candidly shares some amazing insights on how LPs evaluate emerging managers, what separates the best GPs from the rest, common pitching pitfalls etc. Thanks David Weisburd for hosting this. Link in comments!

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Last week, we shared the first part (1/2) of our perspectives on vertical SaaS (vSaaS), more specifically on which metrics define the performance of vSaaS businesses and outlining the benchmarks for each of these metrics. If you have not yet read the piece, give it a read here - https://lnkd.in/d94n2bgN This week we published the second part (2/2) where we call out certain strategies deployed by successful vSaaS companies like Procore Technologies Toast ServiceNow Zenoti and others that can be used to improve the metrics that matter. Read on to layer the numbers with the strats- https://lnkd.in/dPkmWFax Do reach out if you are building in the space or want to exchange notes / feedback on the perspectives. #fintech #verticaSaaS #embeddedfinance #investments

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The New York ecosystem for dual-use technology is small but strong and growing rapidly. Thanks to companies like Decisive Point and @a16z who continue to support the community with networking events for founders, investors, and community members. More and more founders are recognizing the value in partnering with the DOD as a strong way to support the country's national security interests while hopefully decreasing the tax burden on citizens regarding government spend as commercially available technology becomes more available and affordable for government organizations. Not only this, but the DOD serves as a great test bed and sandbox for emerging technologies and talent. #dualuse #emergingtech #defensetech #Kilsar

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Is the SaaS Era Really Coming to an End? 🤔 We've been living the SaaS dream for over a decade: Recurring revenue, (near-infinite)-scale. But, according to Josipa Majic Predin some key voices are now questioning if SaaS truly delivered on its promise. 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗴𝗺: 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝘀 𝗮 𝗕𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗪𝗲𝗮𝗽𝗼𝗻 ➝Instead of treating software as a standalone product, visionary companies are now embedding it into operations to gain competitive advantage. (In other words, we’ll see more in-house tech-enabled service businesses...) Nothing too new here! If they are right, we’ll get a reversal—companies will start building their own software again, and we’ll pair that with large roll-up strategies/merges to create market-dominating players. What are your thoughts on the SaaS model’s future? Will we see it evolve, or is this the beginning of the end?

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This San Franciscan has landed in the Big Apple for #NYTechWeek! Here’s why it was important to me to be out here this week and I view NYC as a sister city. ((scroll down for 2 events The Council is hosting today!)) 🏭🏥 Reminder: The Council Fund invests at Pre-seed in Software’s Third Act, the transformation of the essential economy. Our investments span healthcare and industrial sectors like manufacturing, logistics, construction. 🐂 I’m eternally bullish on NY & SF and hate how many pit the two cities against each other. The reality is that a lot of capital and talent flow back and forth between the cities. They need each other to thrive! 🗽🌁 Cities like NY & SF attract young and mid-career talent because of their population density, transient nature, beauty, and reputations as cities where someone new on the scene can make a name for themselves. For the areas we invest in, I’m *specifically* excited about NY because of: 🏗️ Closer proximity to industrial hubs which are scattered across the Midwest / Rust Belt 🏛️ Closer proximity to DC where a lot of regulation around VC, startups, healthcare, onshoring initiatives, and industrial sectors takes place 💰 Many of the large financial institutions that are backing hard tech focused funds and major healthcare initiatives are also headquartered here in NYC 🎯 We’ve got several startups here who are hitting it out of the park, like Dirac and Siena. This has further validated my belief in this ecosystem to support young companies! Today we are kicking off with 2 events on Day 1 of #NYTechWeek 👉 AI Demo Day: The Council, Next Wave NYC, Lynx Collective, Flybridge will host 8 founders and 200+ investors and founders for a pitch competition this evening! Luma: https://lnkd.in/gbdYiJMw 🔜 Can still join the waitlist! Small & Big VCs in Hard Tech: The Council joined General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Iron Prairie Ventures, AlleyCorp, House Of Ventures, Steel Atlas for 2 back to back panels on industrial innovation & collaboration across the capital stack Luma: https://lnkd.in/gj6D4-Au ⏰ Event has passed

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Pitched to 60+ VC partners & principals Key Takeaways 👇 - At pre-seed stage the team is critical. This means you 100% need a stellar CTO. Don’t even think of raising without a CTO - If you don’t fit a certain bias, your expectations have just doubled. So having more is always better. More customers, more traction, more validation! - ALWAYS get warm intros to investors. Rely on your network. Go build one bcz cold pitching never works! - Lastly be prepared to fail. Markets are brutal right now. Have a backup plan! #startups #founders #fundraising

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As AI-powered software takes flight we're seeing stress emerge on SaaS business models. Outcomes > seats and the shift to services-as-software means we need more nimble ways to price, bill, and take payments. A few threads we're pulling on: 🔹 Software builders need more flexibility - it's a shame to build incredible software or have new tools at your disposal only to have pricing / business models restrict adoption and innovation. 🔹 As companies add AI features (often on top of OpenAI or other models) they need to fundamentally rethink pricing to ensure they maintain margins and don't have flat fee users scaling usage disproportionally. Unit economics are under threat. 🔹 This becomes even more crucial as we introduce AI agents into workflows as the volumes of automations will skyrocket. And, the multi-agent teaming economy will be fascinating (forget your smart fridge paying for groceries). More here: https://lnkd.in/ezYq-XPx 🔹 AI is making software more effective and employees more productive. Seat based pricing isn't set up to share in value creation, especially when companies can avoid having to hire new folks / can reduce headcount. 🔹 Modern database, data streaming, and unstructured data infrastructure is making it possible to power new models, make use of existing data, and for vendors to often know a company's data better than the company does. More here: https://lnkd.in/e5JpJiJH 🔹 Modern FP&A tooling is now capable of ingesting data at scale and reducing the headache on finance. More here: https://lnkd.in/ejrQGcun We're actively working on an Activant Capital Research report on usage based billing and would love to share learnings with anyone actively using or considering a shift to UBB. Please reach out to Richard and I if you want to chat --

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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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Here’s a question investors are often asked: When evaluating early stage companies, how much time do you spend on due diligence around future exits? It’s not surprising we hear this question a lot. Also not surprising: it’s got a wide range of answers depending on the firm. Some don’t spend much time here at all. Others make it a point to put meaningful time in as part of their process. Our current thinking: take the time to do the work on public market comps. At Alpaca VC, we spend significant time understanding how public market investors will  realistically value a business based on margin profile, product, business model & TAM. In short, we want to know: how will this company be valued at scale when we get taken out? Yes, we can acknowledge that the journey toward exit is a windy road and that there may be pivots along the way, but there are still public market companies that have a business model similar to the early stage company you're evaluating. And you can always look at gross profit multiples if you think the margin profile will change over time. So we still do the work on the comps. Quantitative metrics we look at when making the comparison to public market comps include EBITDA multiple, revenue multiple, Gross Profit multiple or all of the above. As part of this process, it’s also important to factor in the public market company’s year-over-year revenue growth as this will also significantly impact the multiple it trades at. Simple example: if you have two public market companies with similar business models and similar margin profiles, but one's growing 100% year over year, and one's growing 50% year over year, then obviously the DCF (discounted cash flow) analysis is going to spit out a very different valuation for the one that's growing faster. Why this matters: When you take all of that information into account as you evaluate an early stage business, you can begin to create a realistic picture of how this company will be valued in the public markets at exit - or how an acquirer will value the company for an acquisition. Strategic acquirers may, of course, pay a premium, but we won’t underwrite for that. This allows us, for example, to form conviction around valuation based on revenue and gross profit predictions. If we think they can do $100M of revenue five years from now, we use this diligence process to form a thesis about whether the characteristics above (product, margin, business model, etc.) will cause the company to be valued at $200M vs. $500M vs. $1B at exit. Curious how other early stage investors think about underwriting an exit and how much time they’re spending on public market comps even though these companies are in their infancy.

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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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john waller Jeff Bocan - this might be a new podcast y'all might really enjoy! Summary coverage from the most recent 3 shows: In recent episodes of the BG2Pod podcast, hosts Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner explore the evolving landscape of tech investments and innovation. They discuss the changing dynamics of the pre-IPO market, with larger funds and increased capital affecting company behavior and IPO timelines. The hosts analyze the impact of AI advancements, including OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 and Google's Astra, on various industries and debate the potential for AI to disrupt or enhance existing software companies. They also examine the challenges faced by private unicorn companies in achieving liquidity events and the factors contributing to the current dearth of IPOs. Additionally, the podcast touches on broader themes such as the role of capitalism and immigration in driving innovation, the debate around AI regulation, and the implications of recent tech earnings and market conditions. CC Kim Burgaard #podcasts #ai #investing #vc

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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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#thisisnotadvice Day 384 Today's question: “What is the best way to give feedback?” Michelle Volberg is the founder and CEO of Twill, a venture backed technology platform that makes hiring easier by allowing talent to recommend their peers & friends for open roles. Previously, Michelle founded and ran a nationally recognized executive search firm recruiting talent for startups and public companies. She started her career in sales working at The Daily Beast, Digitas, NBC, etc. We're here on #thisisnotadvice to answer all your questions about how to thrive at work. If you have any questions you want us to answer next time, drop us a comment below or on X (formerly known as Twitter). For more, check out our community-edited, comprehensive reference guide on how to work: www.thisisnotadvice.work.

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If you’re looking for a distraction from political content this week… look no further… allow me to introduce: VC podcast content :) I was so excited to finally be on Minnie Ingersoll and TenOneTen Ventures’ LA Venture Podcast. She grew this platform massively while I was on the operating side and it was such an honor to have this be my first interview since returning to VC. Minnie and I chatted poolside in her backyard in Pasadena and covered a lot of ground: - 🚀Why I think distribution and GTM is potentially a greater early moat than product in an AI-native world - 1️⃣ Is first mover advantage still a thing?! -🕵🏽‍♂️ How I think about channel vs integrated product partnership dynamics and why most of them dont work! -💰 What is (and isn’t) exciting to me and Fika Ventures in marketplaces, supply chain, commerce enablement, and more - 🧐 Why we love investing in subject matter and domain experts at Fika more than technology experts learning new domains - 🤝 What makes our partnership and team special at Fika Ventures and how we think about working with founders - 🪢 and finally, why Pejman Nozad and I have more in common than I do with most VCs! Shout outs to friends and colleagues like Tianxiang (TX) Zhuo, John Chen, Gabriella Brignardello, Route, Michael Tam, Troy Henikoff, and more in this one. And most importantly, thanks for having me, Minnie Ingersoll!

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I have room for one more partner at Goldenhour Executive Forum -- an invite-only gathering of the 50 leading CMOs in technology -- happening on September 19 in SF. The program was well-loved last year (earning a respectable NPS 63), and although it was our first year, the curriculum is a format that Kaley Klemp and I have been developing for a decade now. Here are 3 reasons why you should consider doing it: 1) Your team will build relational equity with an influential audience. The format for GEF is inspired by YPO and intentionally designed to curate meaningful relationships for attendees. Your brand representative will be at the table, building trust and connection with the leading marketing executives within our industry. 2) We'll save you three seats to invite your own prospects / customers. Given the intimate nature of the discussion (and our focus on quality conversations), we intentionally keep program attendance capped at an invite-only list of 50. We'll save your brand three seats so you can provide rich value to high profile prospects or customers. 3) It's happening during Dreamforce. If you haven't already planned your presence at Dreamforce, this is an incredible opportunity to partner on an activation at a tier-1 venue in San Francisco with little operational overhead. Details in the image. Send me a DM if you're interested. Note we are down to our last partnership slot -- would be happy to get on a call next week to answer any questions. PS. If you're a CMO and want to request an invite, let me know :)

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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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