♦️Shruthi Rao♦️

Once you get to ~20M in revenue (slightly earlier for SMB, later for ent companies), the game is less about hustle and product features 🔑 Superior execution esp on GTM matters a LOT more in this phase 💪 Unfortunately a lot of founders miss this transition and find themselves doing what’s worked in the first phase and getting frustrated at the lack of results 😢 So what matters in the scale up phase? 1️⃣ stage specific people in the team — the team you build is the company you build. I am all for promoting from within but it’s important to couple that with external resources (advisors, mentors, full time hires) to make sure your team is seeing around corners vs reinventing the wheel. 👊 2️⃣ graduating from adhoc comms to an intentional approach — a lot of work discussions / key decisions in the early days happen in slack, 1:1 or in the office kitchen. Important to transition to better norms on comms across teams to lay the right foundation 🔥 3️⃣ prioritization is the name of the game — as you get more resources it’s easy to want to do everything. The best leaders force difficult choices and say no way more often than in the past 4️⃣ cross functional alignment matters more than strategy — this is the phase your teams become siloed and start to make up their own narrative and sometimes even their own data 😂 5️⃣ run amazing meetings — the necessary reality of this phase is having more meetings to keep things moving in the right direction. Running productive and FUN meetings is an undervalued skill most don’t invest 🙌 Embrace change 🔑 Find your tribe 🤗 Experiment to run your own race 🏃‍♀️ #scaleupphase #startups #cro #builder #leadershipinsights #startup

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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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the *mirage* of the india software ipo for global b2b companies over the last few quarters there has been increasing chatter in the indian ecosystem that indian software companies building for and selling to the US/global markets will be better off registered/flipping back to being an indian registered HQ and going IPO in india than (struggle to) meet the high bar that is required for an ipo in the US. the key points are these: (1) if indian companies can get to say $100M ARR with decent 15-20% EBITDA they will be considered heroes by the indian retail investors (2) however, with these numbers it is not possible to go ipo in the US (3) indian market is hungry for tech and will continue to award much higher valuation to these companies. i don't know what the right answer is in the long run. it is also possible that there are different right answers for different people. and by no means am i an expert so take this view as just one view, but based on seeing all of this very closely while working with the top 1% talent in India. here's why i personally believe this is unlikely to work and/or may be long term harmful for indian software product ecosystem that is looking to build globally relevant companies. 1 - top tier founders who I checked with said “hell no” to this option. for them it is like accepting defeat before even getting started. the ecosystem is finally closer-than-ever to figuring out how to build US-native companies to be globally relevant/respected brands in their categories and this entire thought process of "aiming for an low bar indian ipo" is opposite of what is going on in their minds and what is driving them today. 2 - once you set the $100M ARR, $20M EBITDA as the *goal*, it is likely to immediately lower the bar mentally for everyone in the company and it can be a negative spiral when you set a local maxima as a *great outcome* - the entire ecosystem then aims for this and overall we will soon start to build small companies instead of large outlier companies that are globally respected. 3- the outcome of this strategy *on average* will create #7 #8 #9 companies in their respective categories at best and that too *when things work out* and that is a hard position to be in as we all know. even if they go public in india i am not sure how long they can hold their valuations if their position, brand and standing in their categories is mediocre at best. CONTINUED IN THE FIRST COMMENT -->

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Vinay, former CTO of Loom (sold for $975M to Atlassian) has shared how life has become purposeless after sales. The article can intrigue you to question everything about your life. A man with infinite wealth, freedom, and fame is still confused for what’s next. But what has remained to achieve in this world then? 𝐈𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐦𝐞 𝐚 𝐉𝐢𝐦 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐲’𝐬 𝐪𝐮𝐨𝐭𝐞: “I hope everybody could get rich and famous and have everything they ever dreamed of, so they will know it's not the answer.” If we look at 𝐌𝐚𝐬𝐥𝐨𝐰'𝐬 𝐡𝐢𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐬 (a theory that explains human motivation by mapping human needs onto a pyramid). 1/. Physiological: Needs for food, water, shelter, air, sleep, and clothing 2/. Safety: Needs for personal safety, health, job security, property, and financial security 3/. Love and belonging: Needs for relationships, intimacy, family, friendship, and a sense of connection 4/. Esteem: Needs for self-esteem, respect, status, recognition, freedom, and strength 5/. Self-actualization: The need to become everything you are capable of being It feels like Vinay is on stage 5 - 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲. I once watched 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤 𝐂𝐮𝐛𝐚𝐧’𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰 where he also faced Vinay’s problem: ………. At 28-29 he became a multi-millionaire after selling his tech consultancy agency. He took all his friends to LA and spent extravagantly there. First few days were magical. He could buy any clothes/car he dreamed of throughout his life, could spend quality time in 7-star hotels, and could purchase anything for his girlfriend. But after a few weeks the excitement started to vaporize. Boredom replaced his enthusiasm. One day he decided that he’s meant to do business only. ………. In Vinay & Mark’s stories we can see the path may be different for each of us. As Lord Krishna said in Bhagavad Gita. There are 4 paths: 𝟏/. 𝐁𝐡𝐚𝐤𝐭𝐢 𝐘𝐨𝐠𝐚 The path of devotion 𝟐/. 𝐊𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐚 𝐘𝐨𝐠𝐚 The path of selfless service 𝟑/. 𝐑𝐚𝐣𝐚 𝐘𝐨𝐠𝐚 The path of meditation 𝟒/. 𝐉𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐚 𝐘𝐨𝐠𝐚 The path of knowledge For the majority of us, money isn’t the ONLY goal. It’s just a milestone. We confuse milestones with a goal. And that’s why after hitting a milestone…life starts feeling vacant. Purposeless. We may never settle for money & abundance. We need even more. 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭’𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 ‘𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞’? - An escape from boredom? - An unsatiated hunger to immerse yourself into something bigger (A bigger mission)? - Devoting yourself to a religion? I think there may be 8 billion answers for 8 billion people. But one thing is for sure. You need to know your ‘more’. Or you can walk on one of the above 4 paths. P.S. Nobody has the right answer. It’s a personal process :D

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I disagree, one such example that comes to my mind after reading this is Byju's where they built distribution and never focused on product. While on the other hand PW had an amazing product and distribution got solved over a period of time. As a founder I am not deeply in love with the product but with the problem we are solving and to solve we need to focus on just one metric - Customer Delight. #product #startups

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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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This is one of the key trends in SaaS over the last 24 months Improved operating margins. As growth slows - a higher weighting is placed on profitability. Public SaaS co's have done a good job transitioning from high growth at all costs to moderate growth at a reasonable cost. Operating margins have improved across the 30+ public SaaS co's I follow. Median was -18% in Q1 of 2022. That's up to -4% in Q1 of 2024. a 78% improvement in 24 months. If you want more data like this hit me up. Just released my q1 report on SaaS metrics. Tracks core SaaS metrics for 30+ public SaaS co's I'll send you a copy.

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Guess what just happened in GTM strategy? Hasan Sukkar and Prabhav Jain of 11x just scored a $50M Series B, with Andreessen Horowitz leading the charge. And if you’re wondering, yes, this is about to shake up the entire revenue game. This isn’t some garden-variety AI automation play; 11x is bringing out the heavy artillery with AI-driven digital powerhouses, Alice and Jordan. Alice is more than an SDR; she’s like the sales beast that never sleeps. She’s not just running campaigns and finding leads—Alice 2.0 is rolling out as a self-learning entity that upgrades every time she’s on the job. And then there’s Jordan, the multilingual master of calls, handling conversations in over 30 languages around the clock. So yeah, 11x didn’t just build scalability—they broke its limitations. And investors are taking the bait. HubSpot Ventures joined #a16z for a reason: 11x isn’t optimizing workflows; they’re redefining how revenue is built from the ground up. These AI agents aren’t here to trim a few hours off your workday; they’re here to replace 11 humans’ worth of work—and actually get better at it. We’re talking serious productivity gains for revenue teams that aren’t just chasing efficiency but rewriting it. In the metrics department, 11x is cash-flow positive with $10.5 million ARR. The big brands—Brex, Handshake, Airwallex? Yeah, they’re already locked in. Meanwhile, legacy players like #Salesforce are watching 11x rewrite the playbook from the sidelines. So here’s the deal: GTM is changing, and 11x is holding the blueprint. You can catch up, or you can get left in the dust. Innovators, game on. #SalesTech #Sales #BusinessDevelopment #SalesEnablement #SDR #BusinessDevelopmentTech #LeadGeneration #LeadGen #AI #AIAgents #SalesReps #LongLiveTheSDR #Technology #Innovation #TechEcosystem #StartupEcosystem #VentureCapital #StartupFunding #SeriesB #GTM #GoToMarket #startups

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Here are 7 takeaways from the 2024 SaaS Benchmark Report by High Alpha, Openview, Paddle, and Tremont: 1. Revenue Growth & NRR at public SaaS cos have stabilized 2. 76% of founders are most concerned about GTM Execution 3. Revenue growth is down for companies >1M in ARR 4. Early signs of re-acceleration of revenue growth in early stage cos 5. NRR is a key revenue growth driver for larger companies 6. Companies with higher ACVs has stronger growth & retention rates 7. SaaS Spend bounced back in 2024 What's the most surprising find you had? Comment 👇 #SaaS #GTM

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OpenAI's Sam Altman interviews serial founder and legendary VC investor Vinod Khosla. Sam asks "What percent of investors are good company builders?" Vinod responds with 3 powerful statements: 1️⃣ 90% of VCs add no value 2️⃣ 70% of VCs add negative value 3️⃣ If you haven't built a company before, you haven't earned the right to advise an entrepreneur #VentureCapital #Fundraising #Founders

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Software NDRs are plummeting. According to a sharp analysis from Avenir, Net Dollar Retention (NDR) for U.S. public SaaS companies has dropped significantly over the past 8 quarters. Historically hovering around ~120%, NDR has now declined to 110%. And it’s not showing signs of stabilizing. What does this mean? • For every $100 of existing revenue, the average public SaaS company used to grow it to $120 in a year (after expansion, contraction & churn) • Now, it’s only growing to $110. That’s a 10% hit on their annual growth rate. This drop aligns with NTM revenue growth falling from 25% CAGR to 12% CAGR in the same period. Are we at the bottom yet? Not sure. Is this a post-COVID tech spend hangover? Possibly. What could turn this around -- Thoughts? #SaaS #NDR #TechTrends #Growth #Software P.S. the superb 45-page deck is in comments

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SaaS GTM operators (in-house marketing and sales teams & external folks like agencies), on average, don't do any serious learning about the industries they are working in 🤓 It is neither a norm nor a requirement for the GTM folks to have deep niche backgrounds. Marketers and sales managers usually get hired for their previous work and experience doing exactly this (marketing and sales) — for SaaS companies in sometimes completely unrelated spaces. And because of the pressure to deliver, few take the time to truly learn about the new industry where they've just landed. Most founders & VCs have the mindset: if it worked for someone else / in the other niche, it will certainly work for us too, and that person must know what they are doing 🤷‍♂️ Product and industry onboarding usually takes 1-5 days and is as simple as "read this Notion page" (if it even exists). The outcome of shallow industry understanding is bad & shallow: 1️⃣ GTM strategies. 2️⃣ Customer understanding. 3️⃣ Content & sales enablement assets. Now, what would "deep industry onboarding" look like? That depends on the niche. For e.g. martech, it's always easier because the GTM folks might have already experienced all the same pain points as the target customers (fellow GTM folks). For AI, finance, HR, or even SMB software — it's harder and must be handled thougtfully. 🎙️ Customers: the best source of industry information is always the actual paying customers of your product. Customer interviews must be a standard part of GTM onboarding in every company (B2B/B2C, all niches). If your GTM managers never talked to a customer, they have no idea what they are doing — regardless of how many "Notion docs" they read. Pro tip: get them to record the interviews, summarize insights (using Breyta.ai), and use these to fast-track the onboarding in the future. 📚 Books: get them to read some quality industry books. Yep, good old books. Most folks think that books are ... redundant? Too complex? Ain't nobody got time for that? Take the time; it's worth it. Books are a great source of "deep knowledge" that comes directly from the experts. 🗣️ Competitors: we recently ran a "Mystery Demo" (mystery shopping, SaaS edition) for a partner. I learned A TON talking to the reps of competing companies (pain they are solving, messaging, benchmarking products against each other). Obviously, it's hard for SaaS companies to demo their competitors' products directly — but that's where external partners (like us / Empact Partners) can help out. Deep GTM onboarding & industry research takes more time, but it's worth it — and should be a never-ending process.

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While the IPO window still feels like it’s nailed shut, and some verticals (AI) are faring better than others (SaaS), the overall startup outlook (at least on the layoff front) has improved. When startup fundraising plummeted in the summer of 2022, the key measure of success shifted from rapid growth to a clear path to profitability. Tech layoffs overall are now at a two-year low, despite recent downsizing at Miro and Dropbox, suggesting a potential stabilization across the industry. It will be interesting to see how these numbers look in H1 2025 as innovation in AI continues. #startupoutlook #startuptrends

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All CEOs know revenue target for runway & valuation at next funding round (& CROs their number for equity release / bonus) BUT crazily few think about (& take ownership of) resource allocation to achieve these GTM objectives. Despite 1)Efficient growth & sales productivity being top C-Suite priority 2) Where you play being top controllable determinant of how you win. To maximise revenue growth & margin in your business you must 1) Know what you are doing today that works / doesn't work across sales, marketing and CS: clarity of input and attribution / cause & effect / unit economics of GTM components 2) Learn what you are not doing that is proving successful outside your business that is worth testing / integrating 3) Apply "first principle" and "80/20" thinking to knowledge blocks 1 & 2 4) Re-engineer process with sero-based budgeting to make strategic bets by re-allocating resource to where most likely to get bang for buck within your resource constraints. After 100s of audits I've learned that you can reliably - Cut > 25% of current sales & marketing budget - AND increase revenue growth by > 50% YoY - obviously with better margin / runway / valuation So much of revenue success is - Despite current process / from not following playbook - Accidental as opposed to intentional - Limited by not knowing a) what works and can be scaled / improved b) what doesn't work and can be cut with near zero downside You can't do everything and you don't need to, but you surely must intelligently allocate resource to where you are most likely to win and not dilute resource effectiveness by doing what doesn't work? Too many leaders focus on making what is not effective more efficient, rather than actually leading the change to establish what is effective #ceo #managingdirector #founder #salesleadership CRO Connected RevGenius Pavilion GTMfund Modern Sales Pros

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practical insights for b2b customer acquisition and growth

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Just stumbled upon a tech-twitter discussion where someone working in Private Equity shared a screenshot and had mentioned in his mail that he will share the signed document via Legitt. One step closer to the vision. The vision is 36 months from now, any business, whether a single-person-show, a small team, a mid-size business or an enterprise business, will use Legitt AI in one form or the other. Legitt AI is no more just a Contract Management Platform. It's much more than that. Write to me for a demo and learn how you can super-charge your business with Legitt AI.

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Vinod Khosla is considered as one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists ever 🌍 He's an indian-american billionaire founder of Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures, with investments like Square, Stripe, DoorDash, Instacart and more. Mario Gabriele's Lessons from Vinod: - You may be closer to a yes than you think. - Get the goose, not the golden egg. - Expect resistance to innovative ideas - Do not forget: your job is to sell. Top resources from Khosla 👇 1. Pitch the way VCs think: https://lnkd.in/dVQ95uc5 2. How to solve the Pitch Problem: https://lnkd.in/dFKdTABy 3. Plausible tomorrows 2035-2049: https://lnkd.in/dGQdtA4b 4. Letters to a Young Founder: Vinod Khosla: https://lnkd.in/dX22Hxx7 Subscribe to my newsletter for more content about Startups & Venture Capital: https://lnkd.in/dczX2bya

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I've invested in over 300 startups over the last 5 years, and there is one common trait that nearly all failed early stage startups share - they don't run a proper customer discovery process. You can read about the importance of customer discovery all over the internet, but that practical application of it among first time founders is still extremely low. We look at over 10,000 deals each year Forum Ventures and I see firsthand just how few founders actually excel in this process. One subset of founders simply doesn't do it at all. It's a classic archetype - build product in a vacuum without running any validation cycles. Typically the founder profile here skews more technical/product where founder-led sales feels out of character and not an area they enjoy spending time. Often founders think they can "product their way" to initial customers, but more often than not that new feature set they are excited about fails to generate user demand, simply because they never asked anybody if they care about what they were building. There is a classic startup'ism - first time founders focus on product, second time founders focus on distribution - and it rings very true within this subset. The second group of founders actually understands the importance of running discovery and leans into it early in their build process. While they have the best intentions, ultimately they come up short because in practice they don't actually know how to run an unbiased process. Discovery that focuses around a feature/solution set will skew toward lukewarm positive responses from potential customers, "sounds interesting, let me know when the beta is ready". The reality is no one is going to tell you that your baby, in this case your product, is ugly when it's far easier to just smile and nod. Founders often take this false signal as validation and race to ship a product that ultimately falls flat on its face. There is an art to soliciting feedback from a potential customer. The process emphasizes questions on their existing workflows, bottlenecks they experience in their day to day, understanding what motivates them and how they measure success in their role. This is a critical area we emphasize when evaluating investment opportunities, and a process we are very hands on in assisting our portfolio companies. Having a strong network is a massive advantage when launching a startup but close network relationships have the potential to give false signals across a customer discovery process. There are ways to combat this by being very deliberate when once solicits feedback from their network, but there are definitely bonus points for net-new out of network customer validation.

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