Ziv Wangenheim

As a B2B SaaS VC 👩‍💻 and a huge data nerd 🤓, fewer things bring me more joy than a truly statistically significant analysis (600+ companies surveyed) of B2B SaaS metrics across early stage companies. Great work by our team at Emergence Capital! See comments for full report, and please let us know how we can make this better in the future!

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In case you missed it last week, one of my favorite SaaS benchmark reports was released. Thanks to High Alpha and OpenView for the work and having us as a partner! This thing is stuffed full of insights on everything from growth rates, net revenue retention, ARR per FTE, and more. You can't build a great SaaS business without it! https://lnkd.in/ghKT_tBY

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Really sick episode. My favorite parts: 1. The discussion on Lyft’s mentorship program, rental program, and other interesting ways they were able to boost driver supply while also supporting other aspects of the business. 2. The call-out of behavioral econ as a useful lense to look at markets and problems(I’m biased because it was my major). 3. The discussion on how a lack of labor mobility in Europe manipulates the incentives of startups. Probably one of my favorite episodes so far.

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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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Picks Picks Picks! VCs using Harmonic find stealth and seed-stage founders 6-12 months ahead of those using the competition. Here are three exciting examples found on Harmonic and shared by Data-Driven VC in their Picks of the Week. 🇺🇸 Palantir Technologies, McKinsey & Company, and Stanford University alum Sam Bolian left her post as Head of Product at Plural in April to start something new. 🇩🇰 Serial entrepreneur Jakob Olund Kristensen was an early employee at Pleo, where he last served as Product Lead. He's now working in stealth after moving on from Weld, which he co-founded. 🇫🇷 Osium AI (YC S23) enables the development of better materials, 10x faster. Founders Sarah Najmark and Luisa Bouneder have added six people to their team since raising a seed round in late 2023. Investors include Kima Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Singular, Y Combinator, Atomico, and more. Check out the full Picks of the Week by Dr. Andre Retterath and Jérôme Jaggi at DDVC in the comments.

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They say you have product market fit when your customers pull the roadmap out of you. If that’s the case, we have product market fit with Carta + Tactyc. There’s not a single integration I’ve been asked about more than this one. And it makes sense. I’ve gotten to know Anubhav Srivastava over the last three years. He is brilliant. He built a powerful way for funds to model their portfolio and fund forecast. The depth of the tool is impressive. There’s nothing else like it on the market. Now take the best in class fund forecasting/planning tool, Tactyc, and combine it with the system of record that is Carta. I think we have magic in the works  🪄 🪄 🪄.

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I swear, sometimes as a founder you feel like everybody else is doing better than you. So it feels good to read EmCap's study and seeing that we're in the top quartile (in some cases, very comfortably) of startups on most meaningful metrics. What really popped out are the burn multiple metrics. Some founders are really flying dangerously close to the sun here...or maybe they have no choice as they have to choose either to grow inefficiently or not grow at all. https://lnkd.in/evkKCUJd

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Wooooow! Who could explain it pls?! O_o zero budget for advertising, SEO, context, social, etc - zero, no money at all. The image&data provide analytics for a link https://lnkd.in/eSAT_9VF, which redirects to my new book on https://amzn.to/3NYxnSc Amazon page. Here’s a breakdown of what is displayed: Human clicks - 14,000 (Redirects: 22,000) Date Range: November 8, 2024 – December 8, 2024 (The peak traffic occurred on December 5, 2024 with 2,601 clicks - why?! O_o) Top Countries & Top Cities: Singapore: 86% (12,000 clicks) Woooow O_o United States: 12% (1,756 clicks) Other countries include Indonesia, Belgium, India, and more, each contributing marginally. London: 11% (1,580 clicks) Other cities include New York City, Jakarta, Santa Clara, Mumbai, etc. Top Browser: Chrome Mobile Web (93% of clicks, 13,000 users). Top OS: Android (98% of clicks, 14,000 users). Most traffic comes from unidentified sources (99%, 14,000 clicks). A small portion (0.3%) from nansen.id. Most social traffic is unidentified, with a small fraction attributed to Google.

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The journey from $1 to $10M in ARR is typically an exercise in finding your first channel-market fit as a GTM/Marketing leader and/or founder. After prioritizing the top 1-3 channels you believe are most likely to be a fit for your product, finding channel-market fit is typically an exercise in experiments and iterations. If you’re flying blind bc you don’t have the systems, processes, and data hygiene setup to measure and test quickly inside a framework, it’s going to be a difficult journey. Check out the podcast I did with the team at Evron for more mistakes to avoid on your journey from $1M to $10M ARR.

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🚀 Attention Founders: The Power of Pro Rata Rights 🚀 Having been on both sides of the table - as a VC and a founder - I can't overstate the importance of pro rata rights in seed-stage investing. Why it's a win-win: +It keeps early believers invested in your success 🤝 +It helps maintain a balanced cap table 📊 +It can lead to smoother future funding rounds 💰 Why it's a pain for founders: -Later-stage investors may try to block seed investors' pro rata -Founders need to manage this dynamic carefully! As you navigate your funding journey, remember: fair terms build lasting partnerships. Maybe this round is hot, but what about the next when you need an extension? Keep your earliest supporters close and bought in! Go deeper into this topic with Scott Orn, CFA's insightful article - link in the original post. #StartupStrategy

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💼 Ready to take your startup to the next level? Explore our extensive list of 220 #VCfirms in New York! Get all the details you need to connect with potential investors. Dive in: https://lnkd.in/d_mb-2n9 #startup #startups #venturecapital #funding #vc #managementconsulting

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What do you get when you cross an Instacart with an Uber? Big trouble for DoorDash. Instacart is now the 2nd biggest online grocery platform. They’re a monster in a rapidly growing market. So why wouldn’t DoorDash want a piece of the action? The tech, infrastructure, and model or virtually identical. DoorDash’s move into grocery has been slow and steady. But it has quietly carved out 11.6% of the grocery delivery market. That on top of its 66% share of the restaurant delivery market. So what’s Instacart’s grocery delivery countermove? A virtual blitzkrieg into DoorDash’s own market. Through a partnership with DoorDash rival Uber eats. Instacart’s customer base, Uber Eat’s infrastructure. Maybe think twice before betting against Instacart. If you haven’t taken Instacart seriously yet…. Now might be a great time to start. ——— 🔹Driving retail velocity in Kroger, Whole Foods, Albertsons, Costco, Walmart, Sprouts, and More 🔹DM me or book an appointment for help! hashtag #ecommerce hashtag #retailmedia hashtag #retailvelocity hashtag #retail hashtag #cpggrowth hashtag #instacart hashtag #cpg hashtag #tradespend

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We've mapped the 250 most relevant early-stage startups within the European data ecosystem! 🚀 Our coverage spans categories like Data Collection, Storage, Integration, Security & Privacy, and Platform. Discover how these startups are leveraging AI 🧠, the most active sectors 👩‍💻👨‍💻, and key funding trends 🏦. Don't miss the simple table listing all the companies! 😀 #AI #Europeanstartups #MMCresearch #vcfunding Advika Jalan

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I loved Hannah Clark and Daniel Danker 's recent podcast episode. The best piece of advice was on scaling product organizations. Daniel mentioned that when scaling, he avoids the trap of more of the same and instead figures out what they should be doing as he scales. To paraphrase, what are the 10X ideas that they should incorporate? Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/guYMfMm3

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Founder intuition eats unit economics for breakfast. Yet, understanding go-to-market fundamentals is necessary before raising and deploying capital. A helpful question to ask is "how much do we spend per $1 new ARR?” (Screenshot is from our dashboard at Unloc) It's a useful metric that indicates how a business will likely perform after raising capital, and more importantly that helps founders calibrate spend. But beware: Spreadsheets are only theoretical and never capture reality. Founder intuition is the true leading indicator. Founder mode all the way.

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There are so many vendors, and so much noise in the market right now. It's hard to tell what anyone does, harder to figure out who’s delivering value, and impossible to differentiate one from the next. I’ve been talking to a lot of VCs lately, and they all feel it in their portfolio companies - even good companies w/happy customers, great products, and strong net retention - just can’t get the market to believe (or pay attention to) to the success they are delivering for customers. It’s a huge problem - everyone is struggling to generate pipeline and opportunities, and struggling to win new business when they do get conversations. So what are we (as a market) doing about this noise problem? YELLING LOUDER (and more often) More emails. More calls.  Emails informed by intent data.  Emails informed by AI w/intent data context.  aiSDRs. Auto-dialers, AI-driven video at scale. Inbox creation/rotation/warming.  Signal-based emails. Microcampaigns. “Quick question”.  “Are you the right person?” “Q4 Priorities at %%Company_Name%%” You can have the most advanced technical outbound setup in the world w/Clay linked up to Unify linked up to HeyReach w AI Layers and Human Layers and waterfall enrichment, and all this (pretty damn) impressive/clever tooling, and could have downloaded the entire brains of Brendan Short and Mark Kosoglow and then trained an AI on them on how to set this ^ all up... But… the gains are only incremental at best, b/c the bigger problem is the channels (ie email, LinkedIn inbox, soon to be phone) are just bombed out. My inbox certainly is a mess - but interestingly enough - I’ve gotten so good at scanning/deleting an email about lead generation services that’s clearly AI-generated in about .35 seconds - that ironically I don’t actually get that many well thought out human emails. So what’s my prediction for what works for cold outbound in 2025? Well nothing really - again the channels are bombed out and anything that does work won’t be a silver bullet and will only be a small incremental improvement.  But if there is one thing that might sort of work in 2025… I think it’s a return to manually written, well-thought out outreach. And a whole bunch of dials :) Long-term I think we need to rethink the underlying problem of trust and attention in B2B though - there’s a whole lot of energy being wasted.

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🌆 Looking for funding in the Big Apple? We've compiled a comprehensive list of 220 New York VC firms! Find everything from portfolio links to social media handles. Start your journey here:https://lnkd.in/d89M9Kjz #startup #startups #venturecapital #funding #vc #B2B

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The SaaS industry is still growing. But much more slowly. Last month I shared an Aleph statistic. Over the last 3 years we have invested in 17 companies. Only 1 out 17 was a classic horizontal SaaS company. SaaS was the single best business model of the last cycle (2008-2021), but the category has since entered a maturity stage (see graph below). This new report from the wonderful software team at Avenir clearly illustrates it. Growth rates for the combined SaaS industry are quickly declining as we are entering the later stages of maturity. In other words, there’s already an established software company in most sectors - and there’s very little room for entirely new software categories. At Aleph we still believe there’s an opportunity to build successful SaaS companies, but new entrants would have to carve out market share in existing industries and displace existing vendors. Vertical software is one area where lesser competition makes it more attractive, but entrepreneurs in crowded horizontal markets would have to work harder than ever before. Another key takeaway from the report - there are only 72 publicly traded companies (with market cap > $5Bn) with a combined market cap of $5.8Tr. However, 56% of this value is attributed to Microsoft alone, followed by a very long tail of lesser performing companies. Moreover, only 2 of the largest 11 companies were funded after the year 2000 (ServiceNow, CrowdStrike). If you are building or investing in SaaS, you should definitely read the full report by Jared Sleeper, Hannah Bao and David Prilutsky (link in the first comment).

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Have you heard of #CapVC? It’s an application platform designed specifically for the use of #VC firms. Essentially, it’s a robust #AI-powered tool made to simplify the daily operations of managing a #fund. Isn’t that something, a VC funded start-up designed to help improve the productivity of VC funding! According to this article from TechCrunch, Cap VC is looking to become much more than just an ‘operating system’ — the company aims to be a simplified and extremely efficient way to run a VC firm: reducing digital clutter by turning PDF files, income statements and balance sheets into readable data, automating company suggestions based on the context of a VC’s portfolio, and more. Cap VC is currently developing native apps on Mac and Windows, alongside releasing an API so that developers can build on top of their foundations. So, are any of my fellow VCs interested in using this software? If not Cap VC, is there any interest for similar software to be created down the line? Are there downsides to using a third-party application like this? I want to know what you all think.

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