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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.

I remember the day I received it : my first Blackberry. A few weeks later I lost it in the back of a taxi cab in Paris. But I haven’t forgotten the chiclet keyboard, its subtle click with each keypress.

A year later, the iPhone presented the world with an all glass keyboard. Who would type on a flat surface, detractors asked? In the end, all of us.

This week, I saw another user interface for a phone : dictation only.

Is tech M&A back?

Google announced its intention to buy Wiz for $32b today. If approved by regulators, it would be the 6th largest technology M&A ever.

This transaction would make Wiz the 5th most valuable pure-play security company.

For Google, this would be its largest acquisition ever second to Motorola for about $12b. Notably two of the top three acquisitions are security. Mandiant sold for $5.4b.

Engineering teams within AI application startups are much smaller than a classic software company - maybe half the size or less.

Let’s run an experiment : let’s assume every public software company benefits immediately to the same extent & cuts R&D spending by half.¹

How would the value of these businesses change?²

72% of unprofitable SaaS companies would become profitable.

Public SaaS companies’ growth rates have halved since 2023, as David Spitz pointed, from 36% to 17%.

Why? There are few, fast growing, younger SaaS companies to sustain the growth rates.

The top quartile companies are growing at slower rates today than the bottom quartile companies in 2016. The median has never been lower in the last ten years.

Monday’s analysis cost about 27 cents to produce.

This little screenshot is of Claude Code, the product I use now to write the analysis of datasets like estimating the value of a venture firm.

I didn’t expect to find this feature initially as useful as I do now.

But it makes me feel great because of how inexpensive it is to be productive. 27 cents for a statistical analysis of a small dataset is a bargain considering the battery of statistical tests the AI applied.