Priyanka Sharma

Great session James Newell and thanks for hosting Jon Prentice and SVB! In terms of the answers and perspective shared from Voyager Capital and James…. The Good (for Seattle investing and VCs) —— * the opportunity in Seattle (and the wider PNW / Cascadia region) that Voyager is still capitalizing on, is that there is a ton of potential in Seed to Series A investing that isn’t as accessible elsewhere. * SF and other markets are saturated and less engaged as investors at this stage. * talent pool here is massive, especially on the engineering and product side. What would be a “Game Changer” for Seattle —— * there is a talent shortage especially in terms of sales and marketers locally. * Few sales and marketers want to do $0 - $1M journey again if prior successful. * Angels are more private here, and may not feel the need to give back to the start up community if that isn’t how they made their wealth Outside of Seattle specific feedback: —— * Founders need to be doers, not “leaders of leaders” (an issue with those coming from big tech); talent need to meet the stage and act accordingly. * AI as a tool and business foundation is only important in terms of delivering business value. * AI powered firms need to show they have an ability to access proprietary data or be linked intimately to workflows or both to be a sound investment [this is established consensus among investors] * Investing, especially very early stage, should be run as a process. Be your own best BDR for fundraising. And finally …. The top 2 pieces of advice most often given to founders…. 1) Try to avoid VC capital to the degree you can [which means you have a capital efficient business]. 2) find a co-founder to complement your skills vs doing it all on your own.

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🚀 Exciting Opportunity: AWS Marketplace Bootcamps hosted by VeUP! 🚀 VeUP are thrilled to share more information about the Marketplace Bootcamps we're hosting for Climb. If you're looking to accelerate your AWS journey, this is for you! 📍 Location: Manchester 📅 Dates: Bootcamp 1: Monday 8th & Tuesday 9th of July Bootcamp 2: Thursday 11th & Friday 12th of July Each bootcamp is limited to 15 companies, and although participation typically costs £5k, we're offering it for free for Climb. 🔍 Bootcamp Agenda: Day 1 - Technical Day: Companies get listed on AWS Marketplace and go live on the day, a process that usually takes 3 months. Day 2 - Commercial Day: We outline Marketplace best practices and look to enable companies to maximise their relationship with AWS via ACE and APN. ✨ Post-Bootcamp Support: We offer each company cloud desk support, managing their listing for a 12-month period. 🌟 Benefits of Listing on AWS Marketplace: * Increased sales pipeline from AWS * Reduced sales cycle * Simplified procurement process * Access to the Amazon Partner Network Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to elevate your business on AWS Marketplace. Secure your spot on the calendar https://buff.ly/44RkAc2. #AWS #MarketplaceBootcamp #CloudSolutions #TechTraining #BusinessGrowth #AWSMarketplace #Climb

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🚀 Exciting Opportunity: AWS Marketplace Bootcamps hosted by VeUP! 🚀 VeUP are thrilled to share more information about the Marketplace Bootcamps we're hosting for Climb. If you're looking to accelerate your AWS journey, this is for you! 📍 Location: Manchester 📅 Dates: - Bootcamp 1: Monday 8th & Tuesday 9th of July Bootcamp 2: Thursday 11th & Friday 12th of July Each bootcamp is limited to 15 companies, and although participation typically costs £5k, we're offering it for free for Climb. 🔍 Bootcamp Agenda: Day 1 - Technical Day: Companies get listed on AWS Marketplace and go live on the day, a process that usually takes 3 months. Day 2 - Commercial Day: We outline Marketplace best practices and look to enable companies to maximise their relationship with AWS via ACE and APN. ✨ Post-Bootcamp Support: We offer each company cloud desk support, managing their listing for a 12-month period. 🌟 Benefits of Listing on AWS Marketplace: * Increased sales pipeline from AWS * Reduced sales cycle * Simplified procurement process * Access to the Amazon Partner Network Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to elevate your business on AWS Marketplace. Secure your spot on the calendar . #AWS #MarketplaceBootcamp #CloudSolutions #TechTraining #BusinessGrowth #AWSMarketplace #Climb

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🚀 Exciting Opportunity: AWS Marketplace Bootcamps hosted by VeUP! 🚀 VeUP are thrilled to share more information about the Marketplace Bootcamps we're hosting for Climb. If you're looking to accelerate your AWS journey, this is for you! 📍 Location: Manchester 📅 Dates: Bootcamp 1: Monday 8th & Tuesday 9th of July - Bootcamp 2: Thursday 11th & Friday 12th of July Each bootcamp is limited to 15 companies, and although participation typically costs £5k, we're offering it for free for Climb. 🔍 Bootcamp Agenda: Day 1 - Technical Day: Companies get listed on AWS Marketplace and go live on the day, a process that usually takes 3 months. Day 2 - Commercial Day: We outline Marketplace best practices and look to enable companies to maximise their relationship with AWS via ACE and APN. ✨ Post-Bootcamp Support: We offer each company cloud desk support, managing their listing for a 12-month period. 🌟 Benefits of Listing on AWS Marketplace: * Increased sales pipeline from AWS * Reduced sales cycle * Simplified procurement process * Access to the Amazon Partner Network Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to elevate your business on AWS Marketplace. Secure your spot on the calendar . #AWS #MarketplaceBootcamp #CloudSolutions #TechTraining #BusinessGrowth #AWSMarketplace #Climb

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V2MOM, SMART, LRP. PCT. Behind those acronyms are actionable concepts that helped Manu Gurudatha, Engineering Leader at PagerDuty skyrocket engineering productivity. And he shared his exact process in an in-depth article where you’ll learn: ◾ How to implement V2MOM (Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measures) and plan better. ◾ Why setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals can bring you clarity and success in eng projects. ◾ Tips for effective Long-Range Planning (LRP) that aligns daily operations with your long-term business goals. ◾ How to reduce Process Cycle Time (PCT) to accelerate project delivery. Click on the link below to go from slipping to shipping, with real life examples at PagerDuty 👇 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eHUAc6qJ

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Many people have asked that I share the keynote presentation from Coatue’s East Meets West conference from this past June. This gives a great perspective on both public and private markets and how we see the impact on investing. #coatue #venturecapital

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We're launching the inaugural edition of Beyond Benchmarks, a deep dive into the metrics and trends observed across the early-stage enterprise cloud market. This is the first look at some of the business data around GenAI in SaaS. Some initial observations: 1) 60% of SaaS companies have already integrated GenAI into their offerings (60% of these as part of their current product and 40% as a new product), and an additional 20% are planning to do so this year. Almost half aren't monetizing these features. Those that are are primarily experimenting with both usage-based and flat fee pricing models. 2) Most companies are utilizing OpenAI as their primary LLM, but many are experimenting with multiple models - and we are noticing an early trend towards intelligently routing GenAI inference requests to different models based on cost, performance, and security. 3) Though we are in the initial innings of GenAI, we are seeing some positive signals - companies that implemented GenAI had 7% higher NDR than those that did not. Still early days, but we'll be doing this benchmarking report regularly to track and share how things progress in this new era. Link to report in comments.

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AI toolsets are evolving at breakneck speeds allowing the power of LLMs to be leveraged by your SMEs and taking some of the mystique out of building powerful AI applications for business. The article below from Gusto parallels what I am seeing in AI's ever evolving state and is very exciting. Thoughts?!

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One of my favorite people is Bob Van Nortwick. He started & built AWS for Startups in 2010. Let me share a story about Bob. It’s 2012. By this time I’ve known Bob for a few years - he was the AWS liaison to our portfolio at a16z. Credits, technical support, meeting Werner Vogels, you name it, Bob got it done. He built this team to over a thousand people by the time he left ten years later. This is a HUGE role. Startups are a large part of AWS, which is the growth engine of Amazon. You’d expected Bob to have self-portraits adorn his home, start off meetings with grandiose introduction, & relentlessly name drop founders & investors. Not Bob. He’s hilarious & humble, a combo of dad jokes with f-words sprinkled in. He listens to you with complete attention. Even when I call Bob, I can HEAR his focus. He sees me even when he cannot see me. Most of all, Bob was (& is) RESPONSIVE. Anytime I’d email him, he’d reply in five minutes or less. If I explicitly wrote “this can wait” he’d STILL reply in five minutes or less. Back to my story. It’s about 11pm ET on a Tuesday in NYC. I’m in my hotel room winding down. I should sleep but jet lag. Then I see the email no one wants.   A founder emails me about how his entire infrastructure melted down an hour earlier. I’m not technical but I understand adjectives. This is disaster. And, he’s launching his new ipad app this Thursday.   Less than 48 hours.   Which will be featured on the App Store. To millions of people. I immediately email Bob but I’m sure we’ll have to delay the launch and therefore lose the feature. As usual, he replies in five minutes, asks to be connected directly with the founder. I email the founder the next day. No reply. Not a good sign, but understandable. I email Bob. No reply. Shit. What I didn’t know was that Bob & his team were meeting every hour, pulling all nighters, do everything possible. They probably needed a week; they did it less than 48 hours. On Thursday, the founder emails “WE’RE ON THE STORE!!” The launch is a success! Whenever I share this story about Bob, he smiles & says “We’re just doing our job.” Amazingly, everything I just wrote is not the best part about Bob. He’s a fantastic dad with three grown & accomplished children. But of course he’d be a great father! He’s humble, hard working. Even though we’ve never worked formally together, when you work with Bob, you feel like you share an email address with him.   Why did I write this?   Do I owe Bob a poker debt? Is this a sponsored post by AWS? No, I just caught up with him, reminiscing about old times, & he has the same warmth, same deep attention, same dad humor. Our industry has wild & extreme personalities.   I’ve worked with some of them. It’s fun but exhausting. BUT there are very decent people here too.   They don’t get headlines. They don’t want them. But their stories,  their achievements, their character,  deserve sharing. If you know Bob, please tease & embarrass the shit out of him. 😁

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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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I’m less enamored with Lean Startups than I was 16 years ago. I think it was a good philosophy when people were first starting to take advantage of the plunging costs of building software due to open source and the cloud. The idea of product-market fit is the most recognized concept to come out of the Lean Startup movement. Everyone wants to achieve product-market fit even if most people cannot define it.  I guess you know it when you see it... Every startup is in a rush to say they have product-market fit because that is what is demanded of them. Saying you haven’t achieved PMF is like broadcasting you’re incompetent. But the opposite of product-market fit is not failure or incompetence. You could be researching, learning and iterating (or pivoting). For early stage investors especially, those activities sound like they would build a lot of future value. As Steve Blank (quoting Tolkein) says, “not all those who wander are lost.” To build better companies, especially outside of software (eg deeptech) we need to value the wandering. It has to be wandering for a purpose. The timing of when a startup finishes wandering might not neatly line up with how we name funding rounds. True innovation usually resists standardized frameworks. Read my full post, Sceptic Mode Part II: https://lnkd.in/g2HqneVV

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Goldcast's startup journey has perfectly mapped the last 4 crazy years of SaaS. Palash Soni and his cofounders first started the company in 2021 to build great, customizable virtual event solutions for enterprise marketers. While their business kept growing past the pandemic, it was clear that overall spend was shifting back to IRL events fast. However, video consumption continued to rise and quickly became the best way to build your brand and an audience in software - if you knew how to operationalize video marketing. Goldcast's product evolution from a virtual events platform to an AI-native video marketing solution has been incredible to watch. The company had its best quarter yet, adding customers like OpenAI and Coupa Software and I couldn't be more proud. Here's Palash talking about their product evolution and the future of video marketing in an AI-native world.

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If anyone is in North County San Diego, on Thursday May 2nd, we will be hosting a tech entrepreneur and investor meet up at 5:30pm. We’ll have a couple speakers, one of which is a fin-tech start-up raising a round, followed up by a presentation on the state of the stock & crypto market. We host these events quarterly and usually get a lot of founders and investors to attend. If anyone is interested, please message me and I can send you the details. LaunchPad San Diego #startups #startupincubator #entrepreneur #investing #crypto #meetup

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Very excited to share Galileo 🔭's $45M series B led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Premji Invest as well as partners Databricks Ventures, Citi Ventures, Amex Ventures, ServiceNow Ventures, SentinelOne, and existing investors Battery Ventures, Walden Catalyst Ventures and Factory. Clem Delangue 🤗 from Hugging Face and Ankit Sobti from Postman participated as well. Atindriyo Sanyal, Yash Sheth and I started Galileo in May 2021 with a singular focus: 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗲 𝗔𝗜'𝘀 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀. Over the past two years, it has been incredible to see Language Models not only become more popular, but become a powerful OS that developers are building with! Yet, with human vibe checks (still❗) being the first line of evaluation defense, AI's measurement problem is more critical to solve than ever before. Since our Series A two years ago, we have been hard at work across 3 fronts: 1️⃣ 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝗜 𝗘𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 You cannot evaluate what you cannot measure. To give our users best in class evaluations, we have invested millions of $$ into LLM evaluation research. Galileo’s Luna Evaluation Models have emerged as the core need for AI developers. 2️⃣ 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗰𝗿𝗼𝘀𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗿𝗲 𝗔𝗜 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗟𝗶𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘆𝗰𝗹𝗲 With Galileo AI developers can go from fine-tuning LLMs with high quality data, to evaluating complex AI systems, to monitoring them in production at scale, to providing a proactive AI firewall against user harm. It was essential to take an end to end approach to truly provide user value. 3️⃣ 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮 𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺 Over the past 12 months, revenue has grown 843%, dozens of customers have come onboard, including Twilio, Chegg, ServiceTitan, as well as 6 of the Fortune 50 (in a fraction of the avg deal cycle). Unlike other 'GenAI-native' startups, we don’t have sky-high compute costs and crazy valuations – we’re building a business for the long term, with 80%+ gross margins. ⚡⚡ We have some exciting product launches to announce during Galileo Productionize on Oct 29. Would love to see you there: https://lnkd.in/eVH49zde NONE of this would be possible without the fearless team of Galileans 💜! Everyday I am totally blown away by their smarts, camaraderie, grit, ideas and humor. We’re growing (highly selectively) across engineering, AI research, sales, marketing, ops and customer success. Interested in joining this kick-ass team? DM me! Thanks Richard Nieva and Forbes for covering the announcement: https://lnkd.in/eUmG6yST More details in our blog: https://lnkd.in/eZGKrDgg

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At the beginning of this month, the infra team at Orb gathered for our Q2 infra offsite at HanaHaus in Palo Alto. Orb's customer growth in Q1 far exceeded even our optimistic projections — and is often the case in any org, this put a tremendous amount of load on Orb's infrastructure stack. Here's what is top of mind for our team as we look to the next few months: 1. We take uptime & reliability extremely seriously and have a strong track record of this — we proactively invest in our stack to avoid scrambling when issues happen. Over the last six months, we've invested in read/write workload isolation, more robust rate limiting, and making it much easier to spin up tenant-specific clusters of our core services and datastores. This has been a huge win already for our largest customers and in Q2, we're driving towards complete tenant workload isolation all the way from the API layer down. 2. Infrastructure often gets saddled with a really tough oncall rotation. At Orb, we share this workload across engineering with a larger rotation, but infrastructure owns the horizontal platform to make product engineers successful. In Q1, the infra team invested energy in aggressively making oncall better, and in the last month the number of overnight pages has dramatically decreased. Example investments include automated alerting and triage for long transactions and expensive queries. 3. When we first started building out Orb, we were careful to be pragmatic in where we spent energy with respect to scaling efforts. One of the choices we made was to use RDS Postgres as a job queue — although this has worked very well up to thousands of asynchronous jobs each minute, we've hit the EOL signs you'd expect (https://lnkd.in/gyQVEhKQ). We're spending time on moving to a different job queueing solution this quarter. 4. In Q1, we rearchitected parts of our ingestion and compute services to more aggressively pre-compute data, to avoid variable load through the API. We're finding that this is also going to help us ship much faster alerting features in Q2, enabling Orb customers to more efficiently power flows like spend management on Orb (without needing to pay for dedicated provisioning). If you're interested in joining this small but mighty infra crew, we'd love for you to apply (DM me, or look for link in the comments)

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There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to scaling a business, but the key is making intentional decisions about how you choose to grow. 🥾 Bootstrapping gives you control but might mean slower growth 🏦 Venture capital fuels fast growth but comes with trade-offs 🔋 A hybrid approach can balance both—but it requires discipline. At York IE, we believe that your growth strategy should reflect your goals, values, and market reality. Don’t chase hypergrowth for the sake of it. Be pragmatic, preserve optionality, and stay in control of your company’s fate.

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What does bold leadership look like in 2024? In this latest Product Thinking episode, I sit down with Margaret (MJ) Jastrebski, the SVP of Product at Tegus. We dive into the key strategies for uniting teams, breaking down silos, and leading with transparency. Margaret knows the investor research space inside and out from her work at Tegus, a platform that consolidates key company intelligence to help investors make smarter bets. With experience spanning product, sales, and marketing at companies like Stylitics and TXI, Margaret brought a unique 360-degree view. We discussed: ►Uniting fragmented teams behind one vision ►Breaking down silos between product, marketing, sales, etc. ►Leading with transparency to build trust and alignment Margaret emphasized the need for product leaders to externalize their decision-making process. By communicating rationale openly, you empower teams to truly understand and even constructively challenge your calls. Whether you're an up-and-comer or a seasoned pro, you'll want to hear Margaret's insights on casting a clear vision, tearing down organizational barriers, and inspiring teams to achieve big outcomes. What strategies have you found effective for aligning teams and leading with transparency? Share your insights below! Listen Now: https://lnkd.in/gAdV7k56 #ProductLeadership #Alignment #Transparency #BusinessStrategy

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We’re thrilled to announce we’ve raised $2.5 million in seed funding to bring AI and automation to farm!. The oversubscribed round was led by Hyperplane, with participation from Slow Ventures, MHS Capital, and Service Provider Capital. Read all about it in this article on TechCrunch: https://lnkd.in/e4JCHgMH The Farmblox farm automation platform combines a plug-and-play sensor ecosystem and customizable automation capabilities giving farmers a simple dashboard to quickly identify operational issues like irrigation leaks, weather risks, or equipment failure and automate based on their needs to operate more efficiently. We’re proud to have bootstrapped to 55 live farm customers covering more than 14,000 acres and having deployed more than 3,000 sensors across the US and Canada already. With this funding, we'll be expanding into vineyards and orchards, and help address critical challenges posing threat to our global food supply. This new funding will bring us closer to achieving our mission of a practical farm-scale digital platform for producers to reduce labor and deploy the latest in climate and water sustainability practices at the press of a button. We focus on immediate real-world benefits to farmers who are hard hit by labor shortages and the daily effects of climate change.

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In his latest piece, Paul Graham dives into a thought-provoking realization sparked by Brian Chesky's memorable talk at a recent YC event: **what if the conventional wisdom on scaling companies is fundamentally flawed for founders?** Graham dissects why advice that works for professional managers often fails founders, leading to disastrous results. He introduces the concept of "Founder Mode" — a distinct approach to running a company that clashes with traditional management practices. Graham argues that embracing this mode could be the key to unlocking greater success for startups, potentially revolutionizing how founders scale their companies. Made me think. https://lnkd.in/exHmEE5M

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