Kim Win’s Post

🚀 Y Combinator's application deadline recently closed… A lot of startups are on the lookout for the quickest ways to accelerate growth. Given that VC funding has been tougher to secure the last couple years, many are focusing too much on reducing burn rates rather than increasing marketing spend to elevate their brand. We've worked with some of YC’s biggest successes—Algolia, Brex, Fountain, Xendit... And we’ve seen time and again how just one video can give startups leverage in several key areas: 💸 Investor Pitches: You've got about 60 seconds to grab attention. No more lengthy 10-minute pitch decks. 📞 Sales Enablement: Create short, strongly branded videos that communicate your product's value and engage your audience effectively. 🔍 Simplifying Your Message: Early stage SaaS founders are typically highly technical people. Great at building products, but marketing? Not so much. A well-crafted video makes products easy to understand and resonate with your target audience. Any others you'd add? You can watch some of these below ⬇️

Today's post is about navigating the land of M&A as an early stage startup as we see an uptick in activity and consolidation at pre-seed and seed stage. A few takeaways from my time at Bread and Butter Ventures, Rise of the Rest, and Google: 💡 Always be building relationships - understand that building potential M&A relationships is just smart business. 💡 Prep for and run a tight process, the same way you would a fundraising process. 💡 Get context on what this deal might look like in the current market. 💡 Assemble your deal team and be an exceptional communicator throughout the process. 💡 Keep an open line of communication with your investors. 💡 Negotiate the key terms up front at the term sheet stage to lessen the length of negotiation cycles later. Full post here: https://lnkd.in/gF9fMUF9 #seedstage #earlystage #venturecapital #M&A

🚀 Exciting news! I’m available on Intro to help founders and operators scale their businesses and raise capital. Want to chat with someone who helped scale a company to $970M valuation? Let’s connect. As the former COO of a Sequoia backed scale-up, I co-led $300M+ fundraising and helped scale both consumer tech and B2B SaaS businesses. Now, I’m excited to share my insights and help you grow. We can cover: ✔️ Operations and scaling ✔️ Raising capital from angels and VCs ✔️ Go-to-market strategy ✔️ Building a killer pitch and deck Honored to be alongside world-class experts like Paul Greenberg (3-time CEO with $250M+ revenue), Miki Agrawal (Founder of TUSHY and THINX), Corey Coto (Former SVP of Product Development at Pluralsight, valued over $2B), and Kevin Jurovich (Co-founder & CEO of Circles, ex-NFL Player). Let’s get your business to the next level. Book time here: intro.co/aadivaidya

At the Rare Founders Demo Day this week, so many of the questions to founders were around Go-to-market strategy. And yes, I asked a few of them. But it's not just me - investors really need to buy into this and so many founders aren't doing enough to prove it. And even if you're not raising, growth is the element that feeds into the burning question "when can I actually pay myself a real salary" It's one of the things I end up working on with founders in 9/10 of my coaching sessions. Not just how to grow, but how to do it sustainably, and with budget constraints. So I was very excited when my wonderful IfWeRaise co-founder Tim Deeson arranged a free webinar with 👨🏻💻 Andy Budd on this very topic! Andy has seen it all as an investor, including as a venture partner at seedcamp and has written a brilliant book called the Growth Equation all about creating this engine of growth that can take you from 1 > 10 > 100 > 1000 >10000 customers. After the session you will know how to: - Find your first 10, 100, 1000 users - igure out your go-to-market strategy - Scale to $1m revenue and beyond - Hone in on product-market fit So join us on the 28th October for what I know will be a brilliant session (I'll have my own notepad at the ready! Link in comments to sign up

Shout out to Scale Venture Partners for last week’s GTM Summit. The Pipeline & DemandGen Council was time well spent.  A “we’re all in this together” sense of camaraderie, sharing struggles and hot-buttons, generating ideas and cross-pollinating strategies and tactics to test. I’ll blatantly plagiarize David Dulany of Tenbound - he nicely summed up one of the presentations with this comment: Especially interesting was a presentation by Scale VC's on the current effects of the macro economy on the start-up ecosystem. Short answer- it's brutal out there. You can play around with the benchmarks here https://lnkd.in/gme76SR2 It's a "back to basics" year in B2B: - Invest in your ICP - Visibility into what’s happening is just as important as making it happen - Analyze what’s happening and find the patterns - If Marketing & Sales aren’t aligned… don’t expect good things to happen

Attended a GrowthX® session with Vikram Aditya. Beautiful session - crisp, solid, very friendly for early stage founders. I’m generally very low key on speaking out on what we’re doing and what we’ve achieved with Galli - but yesterday’s session help me shift a view. This post is for my connections. If y’all are building startup’s or interested in the eco-system. Follow the guy and even the platform for that matter. Less chatter, help talk more. Cheers!

Let's face it, the world of VC is often depicted as a high-stakes chess game played by sharks in tailored suits – endless data crunching, fierce negotiations, and boardroom battles. But here's the secret: VCs have a great sense of humor too! Beneath the surface of serious due diligence and term sheet wrangling lies a reservoir of witty banter, playful jabs, and even the occasional (well-intentioned) prank. Let's delve into one such incident where a Benchmark partner pulled a prank on Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber. On the day when Kalanick was scheduled to pitch at Benchmark’s office, one partner opened the Uber app and noticed a black car waiting outside Sequoia’s nearby headquarters. In those early days at Uber, black cars were scarce, and the partner guessed that this one had taken Kalanick to pitch at Sequoia, assuming he planned to take the same car from Sequoia to Benchmark. Deciding a prank was in order, and wanting to show Kalanick that he understood his product, the partner tapped on his smartphone and summoned a car. Soon, his screen showed a tiny black icon pulling out of the Sequoia parking lot. Sure enough, Kalanick arrived on foot at Benchmark’s office, sweating and late. That night, Benchmark sent him a gift: a pair of running shoes. The founder was not too full of himself to take a joke. The Benchmark team felt that the chemistry was right with Kalanick, and within a few days, Benchmark presented a term sheet to Kalanick. After a bit of back-and-forth, the partners led Uber’s Series A round, paying $12 million for one-fifth of the equity. #venturecapital #privateequity #investments #startuplife #funatwork #uber #traviskalanick #prank #humor #culture

Last week, I attended the TechCrunch Annual Founders Summit in #Boston, and it was an enlightening experience. Meeting other founders provided a unique environment to exchange insights and support one another through our entrepreneurial journeys. Many of the speakers also delivered invaluable wisdom across different stages of a founder’s journey: Jess Lee offered a comprehensive framework for assessing product-market fit and crafting compelling value propositions for different types of markets. Edith Yeung provided a crash course on leveraging our online presence and branding to attract investors, customers and partners. Lily Lyman taught us how to approach investor conversations when building relationships vs raising funds. Jake Cohen shared candid advice on how to grow a venture without VC funding, or to do so in a way that keeps the founding team and its employees set for long-term success. Sara Choi emphasized the importance of conducting due diligence on the individual we pitch to, and not just the firm they represent. Daniel Kang outlined strategies to help founders optimize their cash flow and maintain financial prudence. Rudina Seseri shared insights on founders’ journey to validating product-market fit and scaling to $1M ARR after closing their seed round. Special thanks to the people I met at the Summit! Ryan Stohl Anoushka Ramkumar Justina Samanta Akhil Daphara Daniel R. Shaurjya Mandal Cloey Wong Aaron Joshua Pinto

Some tough love for founders: stop building so many copycat data tools. The data tooling and infrastructure world has exploded—from 139 companies in 2012 to 2,011 in 2024 according to research from Matt Turck. That's a 14.5X increase. If there are already multiple tools in the category you're considering entering, take the time to ask yourself: "Are we the absolute best founding team with unique and differentiated experience that drives a key insight in the way we're attacking this problem?" If the answer isn't a *resounding* yes, don't pursue building that startup—no matter how much money VCs are willing to throw at you. And if it is, send me a DM with your pitch Zero Prime Ventures.