“Claude told me to sign up; I don’t know what your service does.” Google is sending less traffic than it did a year ago. Your potential customers are finding and evaluating products inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. And most founders are still running the 2021 playbook. This week, we ran a working session on what’s … Read more
“Close to half of our final round candidates will wash out.” The hiring playbook most founders are still following was written for a different world. We just wrapped a conversation with Michelle Volberg, founder and CEO of tech-enabled recruiting and referral platform Twill, and Ryan Denehy, founder and CEO of ITaaS provider Electric. The topic … Read more
You should have built X yesterday and showed me a demo. What happens when your customer can just ask Claude Code to do your startup’s job? What if the moat you spent two years building gets bypassed by someone texting an AI agent on their phone? And what does a VC actually want to see … Read more
Don’t Be the Accountant Who Chose Not to Adopt Excel
“You have to play the game as it’s on the board.” What does a corp dev team actually look for when they’re evaluating your startup? And what’s it like on the other side of the table when you’re the founder getting acquired? We brought together two perspectives that rarely share a stage: Scott Haylon, Senior … Read more
“Our data science team is bigger than our investment team.” Many VC firms claim they want to be “data-driven” or “AI-native.” But when Melody Koh at NextView shifted from full-time investing to spending 75-80% of her time on data and AI initiatives, she made a prediction: most firms trying to follow suit will give up … Read more
“They’re not customers until they pay, otherwise they’re just cheerleaders.” What do these three things have in common? They’re things that happened to our panelists from today’s virtual event: Ryan Denehy (3X founder, 2X exited to public companies) of Electric and Farooq Abbasi (Founder & GP at Preface Ventures, investor in DX which just sold … Read more
“Trust is everything.” I just wrapped our latest virtual event. This one was totally different than any we’ve done in the last 2 years. Why? Because I wasn’t just moderating. I was part of the story. Sharran Deora (General Partner at DV) and Victor Jakubiuk (co-founder of OnSpecta, acquired by Ampere, now DV’s primary GP … Read more
The next edge in venture is knowing your portfolio better. The Venture5 team just wrapped up a conversation with Jonathan Geehan (CFO at Techstars), Healy Jones (Head of Finance at Neo), and Jason Miller (Founder/CEO at Foresight Data), and one tension kept surfacing throughout: finance teams have increasingly become the only people who can answer … Read more
“If I listened to everything our customer said, our product would be horrible.” Why do some companies sprint from seed to Series A in 18 months, while others grind for years and never quite get there? The metrics look similar on paper. Everyone’s got revenue. Everyone’s talking to customers. Everyone’s iterating. But something fundamentally different is happening under the hood. We brought together three people who … Read more
