Tom Sun

Startup decks vs Business plans. It's accepted that a startup needs a deck. Dax Dasilva of Lightspeed Commerce made an important point on 20VC. Writing a business plan - including financial projections - is an important step. It requires discipline. It provides a rigorous framework for thinking deeply about the problem you're trying to solve. Harry Stebbings countered that he doesn't even want to see a deck since it's all dreams. We spent a lot of time and energy on our business plan with the expectation that we would show it to no one ever. The business plan was part of our roadmap for the company. We researched customers - including having 50+ conversations. We wanted to understand them: their background, their interests, their presence on social media. We also wanted to understand how they were evaluated by leadership and how integrated they were with the business of the company they were protecting. We researched pricing both with potential customers and other products in our industry to find out if OpEx or CapEx was a better fit. How did they buy today? How would they like to buy? We did market research to understand the verticals and map the right entry point - we were wrong but that doesn't reduce the value of the research. We looked at competitors in depth to understand what they were seeing that we weren't. Dax is right. This is an invaluable document that should be updated every year - the company is changing, the market is changing, there's more feedback about price and ICP. It's not for sharing with the outside world. It's a map for driving forward. Decks won't get you investment - VCs invest in people. We make decks but we know they don't tell our story. The deck is a calling card. Dax and Harry are both right. https://lnkd.in/e25M82xY

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India’s Oyo, once valued at $10 billion, is finalizing new funding at a $2.5 billion valuation. This marks a steep decline from its $10 billion valuation in 2019. The startup, which has raised over $3 billion from backers like SoftBank, Peak XV Ventures, Lightspeed, Airbnb, and Microsoft, has struggled to attract institutional investors. In recent months, it has aggressively pitched to high-net-worth individuals after withdrawing its IPO application twice in the past four years. Once a red-hot Indian startup active in markets including the U.S. and Europe, Oyo has now scaled back its international presence. #venture #downround https://lnkd.in/gE2GjYnM

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Truly inspiring to listen to Dax Dasilva tell the story of Lightspeed Commerce on 20VC. With $900M in ARR I was thrilled to learn that Dax bootstrapped the company for 7 years to get to $10M in ARR. I hope it doesn't take us 7 years to get Liquid360 there but it makes me feel better about the 3.5 years we've put in to date. For me these stories are deeply encouraging. When you're building something very big it can take time to get to launch. A couple of weeks ago we met with a global player in the VC world. They were looking to invest $5M - $10M and we said we weren't there yet. We'll get there but it wouldn't be the right move today. They then jumped to another conclusion. The wrong one. I get it. They have a multi-billion dollar fund and capital to deploy. We have a company to grow and too much cash will not help us do it right. We've made good decisions being lean. Our customers are starting at $500K. This is an enterprise/gov't product. We have to satisfy a very discerning customer. No bugs, no glitches. A dependable and reliable product. We are excited by the feedback. We are making the world safer. Harry Stebbings suggested that Lightspeed is one of the most misunderstood companies. It's market cap is $2.6B which seems really low relative to the ARR. Very interesting episode.

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Almost 3k people signed up within a day! 🚀 That's how quick our newest initiative (India Multipliers) scaled last month, we announced it. This was a WhatsApp community, with the intent of building a collaborative discourse and fuelling insights on the rising India Story, that so many of us are invested into. .. But, unfortunately, for reasons unknown to date, WhatsApp decided to take down the community groups just the day after the community went live. .. However, we were down, but not out. As Jayant mentioned in one of the interactions after this, builders don't break down, but build on. .. Delighted to re-introduce you to India Multipliers as a newsletter series. Subscribe here for regular doses of insights on niches and sub-niches that make the rising India Story so special: https://lnkd.in/dz3KMyFX Looking forward to welcoming you in! .. PS: We at Dexter Ventures ($50k-$500k early-stage investments) and Dexter Capital Advisors (advise $3MM-$100MM) are always eager to work with like-minded founders, angels and other members of the PE/VC/Family Office ecosystem. Do reach out to us at [email protected] keeping anuradha@dexter[dot]ventures in CC if there is anything we can help you with :) Best, Anuradha Tags: Devendra | #Startups #VC #IndiaStory #Funding

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What if there's a way to raise millions without relying on #VC funding? Aakash Shah's journey with Wyndly (YC W21) proves it's not just possible—it's potentially game-changing for your startup. From leveraging customer prepayments to learning finance tricks from restaurant owners, Aakash's story is a masterclass in creative capital strategies. He's turned conventional wisdom on its head, showing that sometimes the best funding doesn't come from Sand Hill Road → Leverage Your Customers "How Annual Plans Became Our Secret Funding Weapon" → Learn from Other Industries "Restaurant Owners Taught Me More About Finance Than VCs" → Rethink Your Cash Flow "The Power of Negative Cash Conversion in Healthcare" → Explore Alternative Financing "Why We Chose Revenue-Based Financing Over Traditional VC" → Optimize Your Balance Sheet "It's Not Just About P&L: The Balance Sheet Secret VCs Don't Tell You" → Negotiate with Vendors "How We Turned Our Suppliers into Unofficial Investors" → Think Beyond Software Margins "Applying SaaS Strategies to a Non-SaaS Business" → Build a Support Network "Why Fellow Founders Are Your Best Fundraising Resource" → Stay Flexible "The Day We Realized VC Wasn't Our Only Option" From Y Combinator to creative financing, Aakash's journey shows that success isn't just about raising VC money—it's about smart capital strategy, relationships, and knowing when to pivot. Remember: If you can avoid fundraising, you should do that too. Every business is different, but there are always alternatives if you're creative enough! Check out my full interview with Aakash Shah on Episode 51 of Fundraising Demystified.

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I’m thrilled to be announcing that Notion Capital is leading the $15m Series A investment in Cogna today. In the industry, we like to think that software has been eating the world. But when you look at the data a better description would be more of a nibble. Depending on what source you look at the software industry represents between 5-8% of global GDP. Contrast that with the services industry that represents between 60-70% of GDP and worth around $25 trillion on a global basis. Most services have been out of reach for the software industry. They have either been too complex or too specialized for off the shelf software to access in any economically viable way. But that’s beginnning to change with GenAI leading to the emergence of ‘service as a software.’ Cogna is at the forefront of this opportunity - building precision software at scale and delivering huge productivity gains for traditional industries. We know Ben Peters & Lars Mennen well having backed their previous company Five AI that was acquired by Bosch in 2022. And we’re very excited to be backing them again together with Hoxton Ventures & Chalfen Ventures Read my full blog post on why we invested here. Radu Bozga Ben Peters Lars Mennen Bryan Gartner Mike Chalfen Hussein Kanji Kirsten Connell https://lnkd.in/eh8mhcJb

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DePIN & RWAs dominance isn't as far off as most people think. Across every innovative cycle, three fundamental pillars emerge: foundational technology development, proliferation of infrastructure, and a surge in application development. As we venture into the third cycle, DePIN and RWA protocols are poised to become market leaders paralleling the dominance witnessed by infrastructure projects from 2015 to 2024.

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Excited to share our 0-1 #DevGTM Playbook for early-stage technical founders building developer tools and infrastructure! We at Speciale Invest had the privilege of working closely with many brilliant technical founders and evaluating many Devtools/Infra Cos. During our in-depth discussions, we discovered a recurring obstacle that many of these technical founders face: despite identifying problem statements and developing cutting-edge technology but crafting a clear and effective GTM strategy often proves to be a significant challenge. Recognizing this gap, we set out to create a comprehensive playbook tailored for early-stage technical builder/founders in their 0-1 journey. My colleague Aryan Pareek and I have spoken to over 50+ #DevTool founders, GTM experts, and #developers from companies like Amnic, Appsmith, DhiWise, Dyte, Esper,Hashnode,Hivel,Keploy 🐰, LambdaTest, Neverinstall, Portkey, Reo.Dev, Requestly (YC W22), ToolJet, Tailcall, Typo, Unstract , videosdk.live, Zenduty and many more. And we consolidated the best examples and learnings into our playbook. We dive deep into various aspects of #developer GTM, including defining your ICP, buyer journeys, messaging for developers, #SEO, content strategy, and more - all tailored for dev founders. Check out the playbook here: https://lnkd.in/g425vuqy Huge thanks to all the #devfounders and #GTMExperts who shared their invaluable insights and experiences with us. Special shoutout to Dev founders and all the amazing developers and GTM experts who gave us their valuable time. 🙏 📣 Special Creds to the devfounders who helped us with this: Sachin Jain Achintya Gupta Navaneeth Padanna Kalathil Vishal Virani Anirudh Murali Shiv Sundar Kshitij Mohan Sudheer Bandaru Venkatesh Radhakrishnan Harini Janakiraman Arjun Kava Narendran Hariparanthaman Sidhant Goyal Madhukar Kumar and many more.... (lol - I've exceeded the maximum mention limit) Special thanks to Freshboost for assisting us with SEO strategies. *Please tag technical founders/builders who would find this useful, and feel free to share your feedback with us over DM* P.S.: It's still a work in progress, and we'd love to hear from more technical founders about your experiences and challenges about your GTM journey. Your feedback will be invaluable in making this resource even better for the broader dev ecosystem. Arjun Rao Vishesh Rajaram #TheDeepTechVC — Build from India for the World

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Looking forward to diving into the state of the late-stage venture market at TechCrunch Disrupt next week with Karthik Subramanian. With late-stage companies facing tougher paths to exit, we’ll be debating whether the market is actually rebounding, sharing our thoughts on the outlook for future IPOs, and discussing how founders can navigate these shifting dynamics. Hope to see you there! #TCDisrupt #VC

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We solved off-ramp in India Off-ramping to India is not as easy, even if there are large exchanges like WazirX We tried paying out employees of Web3 companies in India using USDC, and partnered with local fiat off-ramps to convert that USDC in fiat. Our early users hated it. Why? Because India has a 30% "crypto tax". These web3 employees did not want their money coming in from an exchange because they were afraid they would have to report it for their tax filings as "sell of crypto", and get charged 30%+ in taxes! We solved it by doing the conversion off-shore. We convert USDC > USD outside of India, funnel that USD > INR into India. The money shows up as remittance (as it is!) in the employees bank statement. Indian government = happy, because USD is coming into the country. Employees = happy, they are not dealing in crypto. Us = happy, because this is a unique product that doesn't exist in the market.

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Weekly Recap 1. Recorded an episode with Arun Antony of YE Stack - They have a very interesting hypothesis 2. Talked with Arav Behl building BuilderCast podcast 3. Talked with Adil building WeCrack Cohort 4. Preparing for a big episode today Ft. Co Founder of Blume Ventures 5. Received a really kind message from an upcoming guest 6. Received an encouraging message from Amrit Sheneva building Flashmates, Hiremart, and more Next week is going to be an interesting one

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3 takeaways for startups about monetization from Daniel Chalef, CEO/Founder of Zep AI (YC W24) 1️⃣ Know that your pricing & packaging will change. Plan for flexibility from day 1 so that you don't lose agility. 2️⃣ It’s necessary to separate entitlements from billing systems to enable monetization flexibility. Without a flexible entitlement service, startups get stuck, unable to innovate, and ultimately frustrate their customers and sales teams.  3️⃣ Don't build monetization infrastructure. It's not core to your product, and the result is almost always something hard-coded. Our conversation was packed with insights about building startups, LLMs, & SaaS monetization (full episode in the comments). Some of the topics we covered: 1️⃣ Daniel's vision for Zep and the drive that comes from being highly curious & easily bored :-) 2️⃣ The power of small language models 3️⃣ How B2B SaaS companies should implement monetization to deliver flexible pricing & packaging from day 1 At Schematic, we've learned tons from Daniel over the last year. He's founded several companies and served in executive leadership roles across nearly every function at growth stage companies like SparkPost, a MessageBird company & Domino Data Lab. At Y Combinator-backed Zep, he's building against an huge vision to be the state layer LLM applications. If you're an enterprise building on LLMs, you have very specific needs around data retention (think integration into data lakes, integration to line of business applications, etc), and Zep allows you to instantly recall, understand, & extract data from chat histories, so that you can power personalized AI experiences.

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It was a packed house at TechCrunch Disrupt! Karthik Subramanian and I talked about one of the biggest challenges facing both investors and founders right now — a substantial amount of capital is locked up in growth-stage companies. So, what are the key ingredients a company has to have in order to go public in the near term? ✅ Hitting the Rule of 40 ✅ Growing at least 30% with 10% cash flow or 40% growth with cash break-even ✅ Ideally reaching $300-400 million ARR (a number that’s likely to keep rising)Despite the hurdles, we expect to see an uptick in tech IPOs next year as the market opens up for the best, most resilient companies. Big thanks to TechCrunch Disrupt for hosting us and to everyone who joined the conversation.#TCDisrupt24 #VC

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✨ Chet Kapoor ✨ is quite the Silicon Valley legend. Three-time founder and currently the CEO of DataStax his wisdom for founders is incredibly spot-on ✅ and timeless ⏰ ! In this most recent and probably best-ever episode of The Enterprise GTM podcast, Chet discusses what it takes to build enduring tech companies. Some 🎤 soundbites 🎤 from our conversation: 👩‍🏫 The quality of people influences the outcome of your startup the most. 🔥 You do not need smart people who sit around and pontificate. ☄ Momentum is everything. Never underestimate it. 🌟 Having complete clarity of thought at any given time is very important--who are you doing this for, and how will it change their lives? 🌈 One of the best ways to create a large company is to create a parade or join one. ☝ Know who you are. There's a high likelihood that the company will become more like who you are rather than who you want to be. 🛑 Don't make the mistake of hiring sales execs too soon. Be extra cautious about partnerships. 📣 Tune in to hear about what he has to say about AI startups getting started today, the future of the data layer, the evolving importance of data roles (data science, data engineering), and so much more! #devtool #founder #startup #data #ai https://lnkd.in/gW-58nvE

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YC is an accelerator. Faster networks, faster fundraising...it's about getting back to what you do best: BUILDING. Laduram Vishnoi isn't just talking the talk. Proof? He raised $6.5 million in his seed round, topping his entire YC batch in both funding and valuation. 💪 Could he have raised even MORE? Absolutely. But his focus? Scaling smart, with the resources to drive growth for years. YC success stories are inspiring...but THIS is the kind of outcome that gets founders REALLY paying attention. Want to hear the whole story? Watch the full episode here - https://lnkd.in/eqawwxcX . . . . . #startup #startups #founderstory #ycombinator #ycrejects #funding #seedfunding #venturecapital #entrepreneurship #techstartup #software #microservices #monitoring #observability #cloudcosts #saas #devops #cto #techfounder #middleware #lobstertalks

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Vinod Khosla, a renowned Indian-American billionaire and influential venture capitalist, is a key player in the industry, with a remarkable track record that includes founding Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures. His investments in companies like Square, Stripe, DoorDash, and Instacart have been pivotal. Mario Gabriele shares valuable insights from Vinod: - Remember, you may be closer to a yes than you think. - Focus on getting the goose, not just the golden egg. - Be prepared for resistance to innovative ideas. - Your ultimate task is to sell. Delve into top resources from Khosla to boost your entrepreneurial journey: 1. Pitch the way VCs think: [Link] 2. Master how to solve the Pitch Problem: [Link] 3. Explore "Plausible Tomorrows 2035-2049": [Link] 4. Read "Letters to a Young Founder" by Vinod Khosla: [Link] Leverage these insights to thrive in the realm of venture capitalism and entrepreneurship. #VentureCapital #Entrepreneurship #Innovation

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Excited to share Marathon Venture Capital's investment in Eva Magnisali's DataForm Lab! Construction is large enough to be measured in GDP terms, yet remains a laggard in the adoption of automation. Our buildings are still constructed manually! Offsite manufacturing, i.e. assembling buildings in factories, provides the perfect canvas for putting automation to work – still, however, robots are nowhere to be seen... Eva studied architecture and robotics, and worked with design firms, developers and industry vendors, realising first hand what's keeping the industry stuck in the past. Then she got to work... Dataform Lab's software platform translates designs to production drawings and machine code, along with optimising processes and scheduling, essentially offering a modern operating system for construction factories. The company already works with some of the most prominent offsite manufacturers worldwide. Today it announces the completion of a GBP 1.1m Seed round led by Marathon. Eva and her team are on a mission to drive automation in offsite manufacturing. If you are excited about working at the intersection of technology and construction, get in touch! Building construction has been slow and expensive for far too long. Our next homes and schools may come from fully-automated factories, delivered at a fraction of today's time and cost. Keep an eye on Dataform Lab! https://lnkd.in/dVVfnudS

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Early-Stage Startup Success Cacheflow’s CEO, Sarika Garg, shares key advice for early-stage founders on how to prepare for acquisition: Get a Part-Time CFO Early: Don’t rely solely on a bookkeeper; a part-time CFO can keep your financials clean without taking up your time. Invest in Organization from Day One: Use simple tools like Google folders, ClickUp for project management, Zendesk for support, and a well-structured CRM like HubSpot. Be Prepared for Opportunities: You never know when a potential buyer might reach out, so keep your books and reports ready-to-go. Being organized early saves time and headaches later—how prepared is your startup for that unexpected opportunity?

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