Suggestions
Mercedes Bent
Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners
Mercedes Bent is a well-known investor and operator in the startup world. She has a vast background in economics and education with a BA degree from Harvard University and dual master's degrees from Stanford University Graduate School of Business and Education. Mercedes is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and has invested in a variety of companies such as Fintech, Crypto, Consumer Social, and more. Mercedes worked as an early employee and General Manager at General Assembly, where she accelerated the company's growth and drove significant revenue improvements. In 2016, Mercedes was named a 40 Under 40 for Tech Diversity in Silicon Valley. She is enthusiastic about the intersection of learning, entrepreneurship, and technology and uses her experience to invest in the future of income, edtech, fintech, crypto, and more. Mercedes has formed successful ventures, scaled sales and product teams, built cultures, and identified go-to-market.
Highlights
don't give up: lower funded, later entrants can win
Dropbox: entered a crowded 2007 cloud market late. used simple UX to beat heavily-funded enterprise suites like Box and early versions of Microsoft SkyDrive
Netflix: offered to sell to Blockbuster for $50M in 2000. blockbuster had 9,000 stores and billions. Netflix pivoted to streaming
Salesforce: entered in 1999 when Siebel Systems was the undisputed CRM king. invented "SaaS"
Google: launched in 1998 long after Yahoo and AltaVista. won by focusing on a technical algorithm (PageRank) while better-funded rivals focused on "web portals" and ads
Atlassian: bootstrapped on credit cards in 2002. Outplayed heavy-spending incumbents like Microsoft (SharePoint) and IBM with a low-friction, developer-first model
GitHub: no VC for the first 4 years (2008). stayed lean, focused on UX. better funded legacy giant SourceForge (founded 1999) dealt with "gatekeeping" and poor UI
Mailchimp: started as a 2001 side project with zero outside funding. competed against Constant Contact (founded 95), which had raised $100M+, by mastering the "freemium" model for SMBs
Qualtrics: bootstrapped for 10 years (founded 2002) while early rival SurveyMonkey (founded 1999) took on massive capital earlier
who else came from behind?
