Carl Fritjofsson

Learn a bit more about our DNA and how we operate at Acurio Ventures from Kate Cornell

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Why Custom Development Still Dominates Ecommerce—and How to Revolutionize Operations without it Custom development is essential in ecommerce, enabling brands to deliver innovative experiences. But what about operations? Should brands rely on large developer teams and complex tools? Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) solutions are seen as the answer to operational challenges. With over 15 years of experience, we know iPaaS well. But are they the best for commerce operations? When connecting selling channels, marketplaces, stores, warehouses, and systems of record, is custom integration with iPaaS the only way forward? Is There a Better Way? Yes— with Pipe17 Pipe17 was created with the premise that there is a better way. Our solution surpasses traditional approaches, including iPaaS, by a factor of 10x. The 10x Approach with Pipe17 Speed to Market: Developers are costly. We aimed to deliver a 10x solution by embedding all capabilities directly into our platform. Point-to-point connections may seem simple, but building order routing logic in an iPaaS can take hundreds of hours. Operational Insight: Development tools rarely provide necessary operational tools. We offer out-of-the-box dashboards and tools that allow teams to address issues as they arise. Immediate Action: SaaS applications typically enable direct problem-solving. We built a system with capabilities to tackle common issues, empowering smoother operations and a better consumer experience. How We Achieved This Key technical decisions: Hub and Spoke Architecture: Point-to-point flows are outdated. Pipe17 allows each new endpoint to connect and support out-of-the-box flows with every other endpoint. Pre-built Flows: Selling on Shopify and pushing orders into an ERP like Acumatica or Netsuite requires similar flows for each customer. Pipe17's built-in flows are best practices, configurable, and enable data connection in hours, not months. Commerce-Specific Logic: Order routing often takes months to build with development tools. Pipe17 simplifies this, making it easier to meet modern brand promises. Operational Dashboards: We built dashboards that provide insights and allow immediate action. The Pipe17 Advantage Pipe17 offers the optimal path for brands and retailers to fulfill their promises by optimizing operations at a lower cost. Leading brands, merchants, retailers, and service providers thrive with Pipe17.

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📣 Free founders-only event below! I often see founders get a lot of early traction in signing customers and then hit a wall when trying to scale that repeatedly. Why?? Maybe it's because: 1️⃣ that 1st group of customers came through warm intros from your accelerator batch 2️⃣ you've already combed through industry connections from your previous career 3️⃣ you're just good at brute-force selling but you're only one person 4️⃣ you are still narrowing in on product market fit Next week I'm hosting a free, founders-only candid discussion with two people who have had to break through this wall out of necessity and now coach countless founders on this. More on our speakers: 📈 Ian Illig took his 1st job out of college at a friend's startup (employee #1). He quickly found himself trying to sell a product that was still finding its market fit. Fast forward years later and Ian had completely built out the sales team and revenue, allowing the company to get acquired. And then he turned around and did the same thing again with the same founding team. 👀 Sonia Baschez was one of the 1st employees at Atmos, a consumer & builder-facing product for homebuilding. She developed early marketing channels & helped the company grow from Pre-seed to Series A. Sonia optimized product launches to reach the right customers, a challenging feat given their core customers are actively NOT in the tech bubble (aka Techcrunch and a thread on X are not going to do the trick). Whether they know it or not, both Ian and Sonia have been secret superpowers for me as I've grown The Council Fund and supported portfolio companies. I'm excited to share their playbooks & expertise with founders for FREE next Wednesday. Join us 12-1pm Pacific! Link to RSVP in comments below ;)

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Chat with Miles Clements about building Linear For me companies are like design problems: you have context, constraints & goals unique to you. Then you look for a solution that has a good fit to your unique problems. The company problem also evolve over times the solution Directly applying what others have done doesn’t work that well, yet there is lot emphasis on playbooks, pattern matching and playing copying what other companies are doing in industry. https://lnkd.in/ghxjJwYU

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As 2024 comes to a close, I’m proud of the remarkable milestones achieved by the founders I’ve had the privilege of working with. Your vision & hard have been truly inspiring. Excited to see what 2025 holds, as more ambitious founders turn bold visions into reality. - Let’s keep building. 💰 Major Fundraising Milestones: ✅ HiringBranch - $5M Series A ✅ ChillSkyn Inc. - $1.94M Seed ✅ Workstaff - $1.6M Seed ✅ Flare- $42.5M Series B ✅ YouSet - $3.5M Financing ✅ Triple Hair Inc. - $4M ✅ Opalia - $2M 📈 Strategic Acquisitions: ✅ QuoteMachine by Lightspeed acquired by LightSpeed ✅ Agendrix acquired by The Citation Group Stephane Rivard, Annie Bergevin, B. Eng, MBA, CFA, Patrick Racine, Nick Dauchez, Vincent H. Surette, CFA, Mathieu Lavoie, Yohan T, Xavier Freeman, Fellipe Monteiro, Jean-Philippe Gravel, MBA, Jean Lachapelle, Jennifer Côté, JD Rocheteau, Jonathan Muschalle, Pamela Champagne, Mathieu Allaire, Christopher Baron, Christopher Vreugdenhil, Matthew Bélair, Yun Yao, Catherine Mondor, Adrien Sicard, Gabriella Hachem, Nim Cheema, Francis Campbell, Philippe Genois, District 3 Innovation

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In Q2 2024, the time between funding rounds for Series D+ companies increased to 2.1 years from 1.2 years in 2021, according to PitchBook. In my view, founders building enduring high-growth companies with products that their customers love can still attract capital, but the questions are: at what price and in what form does it make the most sense? More time typically allows growing startups to raise the capital they need at a higher valuation, resulting in less dilution for management, employees, and inside investors. This dynamic is especially important for those who raised capital at peak prices in 2021 and may now see lower valuation multiples, which in some cases means raising today could be at a flat or lower valuation. As a result, I'm talking about alternative financing options with many founder and investor friends. These include venture debt, SAFEs, convertible notes, and other solutions, which can be used individually or most often together to extend runway without repricing equity or sacrificing growth before a formal priced round. I'm excited to see the startup and venture community appearing to be more agile than I've ever seen it. Ideally, we'll harness our collective energy and creativity to support risk-taking builders with solutions as they navigate the market. See you out there! Note: These thoughts are solely mine and do not reflect the opinions of any company I am associated with.

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Our revamped newsletter, The Angle by Angular Ventures, officially launched today! We hope this new format will make it easier to read, share, and subscribe. Back to it, in this week's column, Gil Dibner covered the spirit of risk-taking that inspired Angular to venture into unusual spaces. While, of course, we invest in AI and SaaS, as of late, we have been investing in more and more contrarian spaces - from quantum, to spacetech, to energy, etc. in search of the supposedly impossible - the truly contrarian. Read the full column via the link.

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Early this year, we made tough changes at Brex to increase intensity, quality, and speed. 10 months later, after switching into founder mode, here’s how Brex is doing: 📈 Revenue growth accelerated nearly 3x in 2024, NRR up >15 points; burn rate down 70%. Customer acquisition up 50%; CAC paybacks improved 40%. 🏦 Enterprise business grew 91%, with NRR >130%. Now serving the largest organizations on the planet, with a combined market cap >$2.9T. ⚡️ 3 major product releases, 100+ features in each, and 4 new products in partnership with Stripe and Navan, serving startups through enterprises. NPS improved by 11 points. 🧠 Eliminated two layers of people management, elevating builders that operate at all levels and reconnecting leaders back to their craft. 💵 In 2025, we expect revenue growth to continue accelerating at scale, and to be the last year in which Brex burns money. … but the biggest change of 2024 is expecting nothing to ever come easy again. During our first 6 years of Brex, things just “happened.” We went from 0 to $100MM ARR in 16 months, despite many mistakes. This stopped being true in 2023, and it required a painful reset to bring our culture back into what it once was: a culture of builders, willing to go extra hard to build a generational company. This year taught me that taking the hard path, and running the company in a way that’s truly authentic to you, is worth the risk. The biggest risk of all is not gaining energy from the process itself – the only reliable source of energy to compound for decades to come. I hope this inspires other founders to make the changes they need to realize their company's full potential. ❤️ So grateful for everyone at Brex who made this year’s progress possible. Onwards! 🚀 Link in comments to read more.

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A milestone for team Orb: we're announcing our Series B today, led by Mayfield Fund and with existing partners Menlo Ventures and Greylock! We're also out in public - you'll see these billboards all around SF. It's a simple message: you shouldn't have to build billing. Join teams like Perplexity, Vercel, ngrok, and Pinecone - Orb gives you your time back. Trust me: pour your heart into your product, not proration. If you're the sort of impulsive contrarian driving around SF and you realize that you just want to build billing full-time, then come join the team! Billing at Orb scale sneaks up on you: there's infrastructure scaling challenges (millions of events a second...), domain modeling challenges (each business is messy & different!), and you get to work with our customers extremely closely - from finance and ops with CSVs to engineers with SQS queues. oh, and this is just the beginning - here's to many years more of execution :)

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We’re a little behind on updating our investor presentation because of all the growth happening with our portfolio companies! October at Mento VC has been exactly this kind of month, and I couldn’t be more excited about it — definitely a good problem to have. Here are a few highlights from our latest presentation (check out the images attached): • 13x revenue growth since we invested, we’ve crossed $2M ARR, and the team is still adding $200k ARR every week 😱 • Healthy, steady, organic growth of 2.5x since the investment. • The biggest surprise has been our latest investment — the team added $1M ARR to their $2M in less than 2 months and is still going strong. This is the moment where we don’t need to prove ourselves as much to investors anymore — the portfolio is speaking for itself. And not just to investors. Yesterday, on a call, a founder asked us: “Oh, you’re the investors in VideoGen? That’s awesome, congratulations!” I’m sharing this as a reminder to myself that all these efforts are paying off, and we just need to keep going. If you’re tired, want to stop, or feel like giving up — just find even the smallest sign that you’re on the right way and keep moving 🙏

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We launched a new website for Teem at https://teem.finance 🎉 🚀 The entire process took 35 days…here’s how we did it: 1. We asked friends for referrals and got intros to five agencies 2. We did a short call with each to describe our vision and asked for quotes 3. Quotes ranged from $4K to $15K for what we wanted (a 3-5 page MVP microsite) 4. We selected Yunling Xie from nio rio based on the quality her portfolio first and price second 5. Iterations were fast because Nio Rio worked quickly and we also made an effort to respond ASAP with feedback 6. Iterations were also fast because we used modern, collaborative tools like Figma and Webflow We’re thrilled with the result, but would love your feedback. Leave a comment below with your thoughts and visit us at https://teem.finance

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Have you updated your custom instructions? “They’re the secret power up that make everything you do with ChatGPT better!” Henrik Werdelin and I love learning from the best, and this conversation is certainly no exception. We sat down with Dan Shipper—prolific writer, technologist, and co-founder and CEO of Every Inc. — who insisted on the existence of a “secret power up” to supercharge interactions with ChatGPT! Dan walked us through his playbook of writing an AI-playbook: custom instructions provide a “user manual” for every chat interaction. That means faster output, unexpected connections, and even better, no more starting from scratch each time. Dan revealed how carefully honing your custom instructions can transform your AI interactions, making them smoother, more personalized, more creative, and insanely efficient. Here's a sneak peek of how to level up: • Custom Instructions: Tailor AI responses by providing background on who you are, what you care about, and how it should respond. • Save Time: Let AI do the thinking for you by preloading it with the right information. • Maximize Creativity: Watch as AI makes connections you never knew you needed, streamlining your workflow effortlessly. • Get ChatGPT to help: If you’re not sure what your custom instructions should include, ask ChatGPT to interview you and give you a draft to refine to unlock super powers you never knew you were missing. This episode is filled with ways to hone and maximize your leverage with ChatGPT—listen to the full thing by clicking the link in the comments.

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Let's normalize talking about the emotional resilience required as a startup founder. At Treeo VC we do believe that the best operational synergies are derived from diverse co founding teams. We love seeing business, tech and subject matter experts coming together because that's where the innovation magic happens. And just as important as the unique insight that this trifecta delivers is the extra emotional juice to support each other and the organization. Here's an easy read below: Treeo VC Arzu Tekir Cigdem Toraman https://lnkd.in/drzRpyyK

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I had an absolute blast with Michel Gagnon and the Stun and Awe crew - THANKS again for having me... Sneak peek of the substance below: > Micro SaaS companies can be just as safe and stable as larger businesses, offering lower valuations and less competition from institutional players. > Founder-product fit is crucial, as founders solving their own problems often create useful products with great retention. > Founder burnout can be a buying signal, indicating a solid business with a founder ready to move on. > The first 90 days post-acquisition should focus on visibility, documentation, transition, and validating diligence assumptions before pursuing growth. > Building transparently and maintaining open communication with users post-acquisition helps preserve the human element and avoid the pitfall of going silent. > Simplicity equals mastery - if it takes a complex explanation to justify an acquisition, you probably don't fully understand the business. > Establishing reasonable incremental growth goals based on baseline performance (systems over goals) is more effective than setting arbitrary targets. > Fostering a culture of care and respect enables honest feedback and allows teams to move faster through a shared commitment to truth-seeking.

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Eka Ventures enjoyed co-hosting a roundtable with Erevena on building brands for consumer and B2B companies We where fortunate to hear insights from scale up leaders Roxanne Nejad Iona Carter and Viktoria Tchoudakov. Thank you to Estia Ryan and Flo Bown for organising Key insights included: 1. Trust is the foundation of good brands: Viktoria Tchoudakov mentioned the value of Trustpilot to IWOCA's scale whilst Iona Carter focused on Plum Guide's "Michelin Star" inspired certification for properties 2. Organic is key: “When looking to drive organic growth through content, we focused on three themes: education for the user, demonstrating our values, and humour” – Roxanne 3. Tracking brand awareness is tough and can be expensive - but has a value to investors

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We're now raising our pre-seed round and are looking for investors who actually know what they're doing with consumer or social apps. Know anyone who'd be interesting to speak with? Tag them below or give us a hand and make an intro. Whether you're an Angel or VC, If you're not a dinosaur and actually see the new untapped potential in AI & Social, hit us up. AI's about to change how people connect, and Gen z desperately needs something real. we're gonna make it happen with KLIK-Social No bs, just real connections.

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