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We don’t often hear the words speed & ERP in the same sentence. But when researching Doss, we heard it again & again. We’ve always believed fast sales cycles create competitive advantage - nowhere is this more true than enterprise software.

Imagine purchasing software knowing there’s a 75% chance it won’t deliver value after a 12-month deployment. If selling software is the business of selling promotions, traditional ERP offers a ponderous path to career advancement.

I’ve been watching my behavior evolve as I use AI more.

Coding new projects, I started first by describing a big idea : generate a new website that ingests podcasts and transcribes them. But I quickly discovered this approach was like asking someone to build a skyscraper without blueprints—the AI choked on requests too broad & lacking structure.

So I broke the project down into smaller blocks. Write a function to download the list of podcasts in the last week from these sites. But I noticed how low-leverage that felt : I knew I was yoking a strong animal to pull along a child’s wagon.

Pricing is one of the most complex topics in software. Changing pricing is never simple. It is a company-wide evolution that has the potential to completely reshape your entire business & your customer relationships.

Few have executed this transition better than Barr Moses, Co-Founder & CEO of Monte Carlo.

Join us for a candid conversation with Barr as she shares how Monte Carlo transitioned from ARR to daily revenue as the core operating metric for the business.

With another tariff induced red-tinged day hammering markets, I wondered: Do private markets follow public ones? The data suggests yes—but with a delay & at a fraction of the magnitude.

A 1% increase in Nasdaq’s (QQQ) quarterly return translates to a 0.47% rise in median Series A valuations—but only after a two-quarter delay.

The inverse holds true as well: when public markets contract, private valuations follow suit approximately six months later at roughly half the intensity.

The new tariffs have markets down broadly. What do they mean for startups?¹

In terms of first order effects, tariffs can impact a startup in two ways : the input costs and consumers’ demand.

Most software companies don’t import or source critical components of the software from abroad so the COGS / gross margin structure of the company shouldn’t change unless they rely on significant hardware purchases, for example GPUs or robotics components.

As startups scale, effective sales implementation becomes the difference between stagnation and sustainable growth. After analyzing hundreds of sales organizations across startups, I’ve distilled the key pieces of advice that founders and leaders should keep in mind.

1. Sales Strategy Fundamentals

• Start with the right price: Establish pricing that reflects value rather than just covering costs.
• Define your ICP: Clearly identify your ideal customer profile before building your sales process.
• Understand sales velocity: Recognize that sales success depends on both deal size and deal frequency—optimize for predictability.

Your first sales hire should generate predictable and consistent revenue, not just hunt elephants

We’re excited to announce our Head of AI, Bryan Bischof, and our first entrepreneur in residence, Philip Zelitchenko.

A practicing professor of data science at Rutgers and a Math PhD, Bryan has spent the past two decades building AI and data science practices across thought-leading startups, including Hex, Weights & Biases, Stitch Fix, Blue Bottle Coffee and many others.

Recently, he published his learnings on a year’s worth of learnings building with AI here.

71% of exit dollars in 2024 came from a new avenue : secondaries.

Historically, IPOs and M&A have been the dominant exit paths for venture backed companies. Some years IPOs dominate, other M&A dominates, but in 2024 secondaries captured the super majority.

When a company sells new shares to investors in exchange for dollars, they create new shares in the company - primary shares. When existing shareholders sell their shares to new investors, we call this a secondary sale. An employee tender is a secondary sale offered to employees of the company. But secondary sales can also occur between one venture capitalist and another venture capitalist.

You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it.

The fairy tale version of “be yourself” is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it continuously.

The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.

What is a webinar in the age of AI?

It’s a blog post. And a podcast. And a video. And a meme.

Let me explain.

For many webinars, I’ll send a notetaker in my place, a robot to record the conversation & summarize it in the way I ask. A personal journalist in a sense.

Instead of watching & listening to a conversation, I’m transmogrifying the subset of the content that matters to me into the format I prefer : a summary in a template, in other words, a blog post.