Michelle Volberg’s Post

From co-founding a startup that was later acquired by Snap Inc for $166 million, to joining as an employee, Greg Tkachenko's story is remarkable. I'm honoured to interview Greg at the investor conference hot on everyone's lips in Mayfair on Monday April 22nd. I will be sitting down with Greg during the Rare Founders Demo Day. We will be on Founder Stage 1 from 16:30 to 17:15. Greg will share the behind-the-scenes stories of scaling, acquisition, and life as a corporate employee. Get ready to be inspired and informed by one of the industry's incredible brains. This is the event everyone is talking about, due to the sheer passion, energy and fun injected by Vasily Alekseenko & Seven Jacobs. With 100+ investors and some LPs, as well as dealflow of select fundraising founders, this is one not to miss. Come and join us (link in the comments). What is one question you would like to ask Greg? #demoday #pitching #investment #founders #investors

Introvert Founders: Introvert founders often find themselves underestimated. The very job description of founders require being extrovert; they need to sell to customers, to investors, to employees, to bankers... Generally there are at least two co-founders, and I have seen the more extrovert one take on the public face to deal with the outside world. From my deals, Snapdeal and Grofers (Blinkit) immediately come to mind. The advent of the virtual world has levelled the field to some extent, but still its relatively tough for solo founders. #founders #venturecapital #vc

If you’ve talked to me this year, you’ve probably seen me light up when I talk about my job. Working on a company like Clay was never part of my master plan, but I'm so glad for it—I’ve never loved a team more than I love my friends here—and we just announced our $62m funding raised at a $500M valuation from Meritech Capital, Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, BoxGroup, and more ❤️ Link to our internal memo in the comments! We help B2B businesses grow by reaching customers who care about their products. With Clay, companies can research, qualify, and reach out to the perfect-fit leads—without footing a massive bill from data providers or manual labor. Clay's growth is a startup operator’s dream: we've 10x'ed YoY each of the past two years, with 2500+ customers including Anthropic, Intercom, Notion, Vanta, and more—and an entire ecosystem of businesses, consultancies, and job postings around our product (some making more than $2m/yr). But my favorite part of work by far are the creative, soulful people here: we play music, perform DJ sets, make short films, write poems, make pottery (of course), and much more. We're hiring across every function—please reach out to learn more :) And if you're in NYC, we're hosting a huge party on Friday, come through!

My prediction: This will be our #1 most listened to podcast episode this year! Founder and former CEO of Docsend talks about his recent exit to Dropbox for $165M. Thanks, Russ Heddleston, for doing this with us (and for sharing a sneak peak of what you're building now at Distill)! #entrepreneurs #owners #exits #startups #exitstrategy #investors #ceo #founderstories #success #founderstories #success #Saas #growth #winning #mergers #acquisitions #business #businessjournalism #industrytrends #IRR #fundreturns #returns #venturecapital #venture #pivots #crushing

If you did not make it to the StartupExperts panel as part of NY TECH WEEK by a16z, our panelists (Venture)Crushed it (a pun for my friends at Lowenstein Sandler LLP). My favorite takeaway: Most folks agree that early/growth-stage employees should always be vesting equity. Typically, for regrants (especially for top performers), I've heard to do 25% of the original grant around 2-3 years in, which always felt random to me, and, worse, percentage thinking tends to drive inequity as people who came in earning less, get smaller bumps. Matt Hoffman shared a strategy focused on giving that employee the equity they would earn if they were hired today in that role, doing it at roughly the 3.5-year mark. Genius and simple. Love that. Michael Munroe and Megan Monson brought up other avenues such as smaller yearly grants (also genius and simple) and performance-based equity tactics (be careful but def interesting). Feeling FOMO? Come have breakfast with me and Christelle Rohaut tomorrow! Sign up: https://lnkd.in/dUFxnm4X

We’ll be hosting an online session on 'Building Your Founding Team' this Thursday evening. If you’re looking for co-founders or early employees, this will be the right fit for you. You’ll discover others who are also looking for co-founders and founding teams, while experienced founders and mentors share frameworks and stories of how they found their co-founders and built founding teams. Want to join? DM me or drop a comment, and I’ll send you the details. #TheStartupCode

A rough ride for half of new hires: that is not just a waste of money but also of potential. 💔 That is the reality in many start-ups and small-or-mid-sized companies. 😢 But with all your support in the Project Brains community, we can bring an end to this wasted potential. 💪 Read more in Business Money 💓 #Futureofwork #mishiring

Why did I decide to take on a more substantive role at Sendspark? It comes down to three key things. 1. Team One of the benefits of being a fractional contractor prior to joining a team is the ability for you to really get to know the team, and work out what the culture is like. From Day 1 I have been really impressed with everyone at Sendspark. The passion and energy surrounding the company is phenomenal! Made it a no brainer when Bethany Stachenfeld asked me to come on board to do more. 2. Product There are other video platforms in the space. But Sendspark is building for a niche, for sales, and thinking about things totally differently from our competitors. There are some amazing things being launched over the next month, that I think are going to blow peoples minds. We are already first to market with dynamic videos, I firmly believe we are going to make it easy to include video as a part of every sales reps workflow. 3. Potential Joining an early stage company is a risk always. But in these first few days talking to customers about the product, and the results they are seeing. Its hard not to get excited. The potential is MASSIVE. Will be taking a leaf out of Max Greenwalds book and building in public as we go! Excited to share as we go! #sales #video #growth

Super fun way to start the morning at the Everywhere Ventures #NYTechWeek pre-seed founder breakfast bringing together some of the best early stage builders in the ecosystem. Always a joy to team up with Tai Hutchinson, Richard Kerby and Scott Hartley - who are long time supporters of NYC tech. A few themes we heard from the founders: ✔ Fundraising benchmarks are a moving target and that makes runway and planning tough. ✔ Stacking Safes and cap table mess keeps on getting messier with VCs less inclined to actually price rounds. ✔ Hiring is getting slightly easier as early employees have reset expectations on comp and equity. ✔ NYC is still super expensive and the city / institutions can be doing more! #LongNYCTech

‘Don’t Complain. Build.‘ -Balaji ‘Don’t pizza. Walk’ -Me Too much mixers are around food, need to move em bodies. Chloe Tan and I are organising a Walk + Talk for VC Platform folks! If you are in the value creation space for VC, do join us on 20th June for a Walking Mixer around Marina Bay. 📍Sign up here: https://lu.ma/dwtdob21 Pssst, fyi, value creation platform roles in VC refer to professionals that support portfolio companies post investments, which include: strategy, GTMBD, community development, hiring, fundraising, operations optimization, people strategy, marketing. P.S. We curate all attendees to ensure our community remains focused on supporting platform folks in the VC space:) #vcplatform #valuecreation #venturecapital #networking