Suggestions
Sumangal Vinjamuri
Growth & Customer Success at Clarisights (Techstars'18)
Sumangal Vinjamuri is a seasoned professional currently driving growth at Clarisights, a SaaS marketing intelligence platform focused on assisting enterprise performance marketing teams in breaking down data silos. With a background as an Engagement Manager at IvyCamp under IvyCap Ventures and overseeing operations and marketing at Mentored Research, an e-learning startup, Sumangal brings a wealth of experience to the table.
Highlights
The role of a modern CFO is evolving rapidly - we are seeing finance functions undergo a transformation from manual processes to more AI-led solutions, which enables them to be better strategic partners to other functions in the enterprise.
We at Blume strongly believe that a new breed of AI-first companies can be built to solve the changing needs of CFOs and finance teams, leveraging the best-in-class models and data approaches. Incumbent players in this space are often seen as clunky, outdated and not up to speed with the latest advancements - giving startups a unique advantage to counter-position themselves as modern alternatives.
We're proud to be backing companies leading the charge to transform the way finance is run with AI - such as bluecopa, Scribble Data and more. If you are building a co in this space, would love to chat!
Blume Ventures Sanjay Nath Karthik B. Reddy Ashish Fafadia Sajith Pai Arpit Agarwal Shrey Shah Jatin Madhra Rohit Kaul
Some of my personal highlights from the "Masters of Speed" webinar between Keith Rabois and Hemant Mohapatra yesterday..
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Velocity of execution is the single best predictor of startup success. From an investor pov, the rate of learning b/w consecutive board meetings is a pretty good indicator of this.
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When pursuing PMF in a particular direction, founders should look for anomalous data to validate/invalidate their hypothesis. When PayPal was struggling, they discovered 50+ eBay listings specifically asking for payments via PayPal - took them towards the right ICP/PMF.
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If it takes >10sec for the reader to process a slide, that's not an effective slide. The "magic" of what the co does should be obvious. Also works for PMF - the more complicated a biz is, the harder it is to discover anomalous data.
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In the early years, having a more homogeneous team helps the co move faster - there's less divergence of pov. A more diverse set of perspectives becomes important over subsequent years.
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When hiring the early team, founders should optimise for the "barrels". Most people are "ammunition" - but the barrels are folks w/ high ownership and can run projects end-to-end. This determines how many shots you can shoot in parallel.
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The most effective CEOs can go very deep into the details of the business - from 30000ft to the "bare metal". This sets the culture of the team as well - the quality of execution goes up when the CEO is very dialed-in.
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Every company has 3 core risks - the founders' job is to identify them - and solve starting with the hardest one first. It becomes incrementally easier to build a co from that point - avoid deferring the hard problems.
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Strong indicator of PMF/scalability - "How many months does it take to pay back the CAC?" This shows how much friction (measured in $$) exists to adding new customers to the biz in a scalable manner. <6mo is stellar, 6-12mo is attractive, and >12mo can be concerning.
The last point also aligns very closely with Blume's pov on how PMF can be defined - as Sajith Pai lays it out succinctly, "PMF = Scalable GTM, enabling predictable repeatable unit-positive customer acquisition with high retention."
Blume Ventures Lightspeed India Khosla Ventures Karthik B. Reddy Sanjay Nath Ashish Fafadia Arpit Agarwal Rohit Kaul Vikram Gawande
