Jay Simons

DeepCast shipped a number of really cool new features recently in advance of a broad outreach push to podcast listeners. One new feature is our new Daily DeepDigest tool that sends you a concise daily email including any new episodes from the trailing 24 hours from any podcasts you Subscribe to (on DeepCast). Think daily podcast cliff notes or podcast news ticker tape, with a hint of Morning Brew various brews or PitchBook News—it's increasing information throughput when you're pressed for time. And this feature is rapidly evolving to distill other key extractions from shows you're already interested in, but also exposing you to other shows you might be unfamiliar with that also have nuggets to share—and thus increasing your aperture yet still conscious of your time. Want to go deeper on any given episode? Click the episode detail and you're off to an episode on DeepCast, where you can subsequently read a longer form distillation of that episode or go straight to the source and listen to the episode. (And podcaster friends, these pages are definitely increasing indexing and thus Google entry points to your shows!) I'm loving this feature as a user, personally. Can't wait to see what others think! #BuildingInPublic #Podcasts #AllTheWorldsInformation #HowYouWantIt

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Today, GTMfund’s is excited to announce to launch of Operator, its first incubated company. Max Altschuler (founder of GTMfund) teamed up with co-founder Adam M. (design engineer and 0-1 builder) and co-founder Mark Kosoglow (Outreach employee #1 and former SVP of Global Sales) to create Operator.ai alongside an insanely talented team Pleasant Middelhof, Jeremy Jonas, Carl Gunderson. We've entered a period called “The Great Ignore”. Spam and irrelevant, poorly-automated outbound campaigns are running rampant.   Operator gives you an easy-to-use Growth Engineer that allows you to build and enrich lists with accurate data, and run experiments and queries using AI to generate highly targeted outreach.    Check out their website to get updates, early access, and see how they are taking the world back to 2 touches meant to attract buyers into conversations that convert, instead of 20 touches meant to make sure you hit your activity number: https://www.operator.ai/

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Big announcement below! 👇 Let's talk about the current state of GP-LP affairs: 🤯Emerging VC managers have absolutely exploded over the past 5 years. 📈 At the same time, more and more data has surfaced that shows that emerging VC firms tend to outperform larger, established firms. 🤔 All of this has made it intriguing but tough for LPs to know where to direct their attention. 🛍 GPs frequently meet LPs at conferences who are window shopping but not committed to the asset class or emerging managers. 🧾 And both crews get overwhelmed by transactional convos. So Sydney Paige Thomas and I created Abundance. Abundance is a private, nomination-based retreat for active LPs and top emerging GPs to form new experiences together and build lasting relationships. Why Abundance? Abundance is knowing that there is more than enough for more than one to succeed. And a single win within a community is a win for the community itself. The journey of an emerging VC manager from 1st close to final close or Fund 1 to Fund 2 is (1) communal and (2) requires an abundant mindset. LPs look for structure and confidence to feel comfortable investing in early VC firms. Yet many of the feeds we scroll and conferences we attend reinforce inherent power dynamics and transactional thinking, which allows scarcity mindset to creep in for emerging GPs. Some of the best events I’ve attended have been intentionally non-transactional, e.g. Camp Hustle, Recast Summit, and other GPs’ AGMs. The fundraising success stories we see usually involve a community (usually of other GPs & LPs) coming together to support and open doors for the emerging GP. We designed Abundance to be an immersive gathering that fosters these connections. Starting tonight, ~100 GPs and LPs are descending upon Seattle for the inaugural Abundance retreat. This has been under wraps for months and I can’t wait to see it come to life! Thanks in advance to our awesome sponsors who were the earliest believers in this vision: Sydecar, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Gunderson Dettmer, & Zelda Ventures. And shoutout to my dad Ed Illig for logo design & Halle Kaplan-Allen being the first sponsor to say yes 🤩 Presented by The Council Capital & Symphonic Capital.

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Insightful breakdown from my great Partner Omri Amirav-Drory on the simple factors that really separate the top 1% of investors from the rest, and how more operators should become investors! https://lnkd.in/gEiZdT2h

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Hey folks, I think you might be aware that what we're building at DeepCast includes a podcast discovery and exploration platform for listeners at www.deepcast.fm. We also recently unveiled www.deepcast.pro -- a promotions, marketing, and monetization platform for podcasters (and folks like networks and agencies who support them). "You make the shows, let us help you with what comes after." Shows claimed and processed via DeepCast Pro are also published for listener consumption on DeepCast. High value all around! If you're a podcaster, claim your show at www.deepcast.pro to get started. Free speaker-labeled transcripts for all your episodes as well as generated insights for each (key takeaways, quotes, topic & keyword sets, summaries, and more) plus many more features—and growing daily! We're shipping fast over here! (Thanks to Rachel Perez Hosna Qasmei Kim Burgaard Benjamin Moon Rachel Magana Hari Ramachandran!)

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Ready to elevate your B2B SaaS game? Dive into strategies that transform complexity into clarity. Unravel the intricate puzzle of growth with actionable insights. Are you aligning company strategy with execution for maximum impact? Discover how to harmonize sales and marketing to power up your revenue engines! How often are you tuning in to market insights and refining your approach? Here are 5 key insights to drive your company forward: 1. Decode the landscape: Know your trends and dynamics to position effectively. 2. Connect the dots: Let marketing drive growth, beyond just campaigns. 3. Embrace synergy: Ensure perfect alignment between sales and marketing. 4. Listen & Anticipate: Use market insights to stay agile and responsive. 5. Empower through enablement: Equip your team for success with consistent messaging. How does your approach stack up against these strategies? Watch the full video: https://lnkd.in/div6jKmY 👏 Don't forget to share this post if you found it insightful—let's spread the knowledge! 🚀

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🚀 Are you a new #VC Head of Platform? 📈 A fund making its first Platform, Talent or Operations hire? Getro powers introductions for more than 600 VCs, and Ted has brought together some tips that can help as you get started. Shout out to our partners at the VC Platform Global Community for bringing together the leaders in this space 🙏 Joshua Goodfield and Cory Bolotsky #vc #vcfund #vcoperations #headoftalent #headofplatform

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Want a front-row seat to the frontier of tech? We’ve got the role (or two) for you! We’re expanding our frontier-tech team at Blackbird by hiring a Frontier Tech Investments Associate and Foundry Fellows! Got questions? We've got answers... 1️⃣ What are the roles? 🧪 Associate = a full-time VC investment gig in our Blackbird Investments team, working directly with me. We’re looking for someone with a science and/or engineering background and more curiosity than they can handle. You’ll grow your own investment brand and practice, support our portfolio founders, and will help build Foundry, our early-stage frontier-tech accelerator. ✨ Foundry Fellow = a casual/contract gig in our Blackbird Investments team, ~15h per week for 3 months. The Fellowship is ideal for PhD students and ECRs who want to learn more about startups and VC. You’ll go deep on emerging areas relevant to your expertise (or curiosity!), get a front-row seat to groundbreaking companies in those areas, build out your non-academic network, and develop a solid writing practice. 2️⃣ Why are you hiring? We love frontier tech, and we’re ready to grow our team. 3️⃣ Wow, it’s so great that you’re starting to look at deep tech! Look, we get it: we don’t make a lot of noise about our frontier tech investing. Buuuut we’ve been deep-tech investors since we backed Tim Kentley-Klay to found Zoox back in 2014—we’ve been on incredible journeys with PsiQuantum (building the world's first utility-scale quantum computer right here in Australia!), Inventia Life Science (transforming drug discovery with high-fidelity cell models), Remedy Robotics (surgical robots for remote endovascular procedures), Opto Biosystems (minimally-invasive neural implants to treat cancer), and more. We believe that frontier technologies, and great frontier-tech investing, will be part of the solutions to the greatest problems humanity faces today. 4️⃣ When do applications close? May 31st at 11:59pm AEST. 5️⃣ I have more questions! I’m sure you do! Clare Birch and I are hosting an AMA to answer any and all questions about these roles. Want to know what a week in the life of our team looks like? What’s keeping us up at night? What our ideal candidate looks like? Come along and find out - registration link in the comments 👇 Apply for these roles: Associate - https://lnkd.in/gCfj4EUJ Foundry Fellowships - https://lnkd.in/gj6ATZVZ If you know anyone that we should meet, send me their details! Cameron Elise Ben Andrew Robin Joseph Adelaide James Olivia Lucinda Raghav Jesse Christie Mohamed Tom Amee Pablo Haya Loong Hon Joshua Benjamin Megan Harry Denzil Matthew Diana Daniel Tom Deanna Justin Amar Lilly Stone Thomas

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As we explore a seed round of VC funding for Avnir, a mentor has driven into me to "interview them as much as they'll do their due diligence on you!" When I consider professional etiquette important to me (and probably every serious founder), I am reminded of what I've coached hundreds of executives on over the past two decades: "Your culture is a culmination of behaviors you're willing to tolerate!" So, here is a Top 10 List of Professional Etiquette crucial to long-term strategic relationships between VCs and founders: 1️⃣ Respect for Time—Punctuality, Efficient Communication, and Timely Feedforward are demonstrated and genuinely felt. We would both rather me invest time in building the business. 2️⃣ Transparency—Clear Expectations, Honest Feedforward, and Disclosures on conflicts of interest or resource limitations save everyone unnecessarily wasted cycles! 3️⃣ Professionalism—Politeness, Confidentiality, and Objective Evaluation allow courteous interactions, respect for proprietary information, and avoiding bias in evaluating the founder's meritocracy. 4️⃣ Empathy—Understanding the Journey and Constructive Dialogue acknowledge the uphill battle founders face while avoiding unnecessary criticism and providing supportive guidance, demonstrating a genuine interest in their vision. 5️⃣ Integrity—Fair Terms, Follow Through, and Avoiding Overpromising honor commitments during discussions, and create realistic expectations from the relationship. 6️⃣ Co-Creation—Value-adding Mindset and Team Player Attitude accelerate the founder's ability to gain traction and position the VC relationship as transformational vs. simply transactional. 7️⃣ Humility—Avoiding Arrogance, Condescension, and Open-Mindedness acknowledges that both parties have unique expertise to add and enhance the receptivity to unconventional ideas, approaches, and perspectives. 8️⃣ Listening Louder—Present, Engaged, and Clarity of Intent eliminates distractions, brings out what's not being said, and jointly crafts better questions to help uncover the unknown and the undiscovered. 9️⃣ Encouraging—Supportive Communication, Positive Reinforcement, and Inspiration help celebrate small wins and key milestone achievements. It's ideal to light a fire within the relationship rather than under anyone, which seldom lasts! 🔟 Playing the Long Game—Relationship Nurturing and Post-Investment Care establishes the runway for a lasting partnership rather than simply pitching a deck and closing a deal. After the investment decision, sustaining the relationship will determine the partnership's long-term perspective. Jason M. Lemkin, Peter Bell, Cassie Young, and Ed Sim - you exemplify world-class in the relationships you build with your founders. Did I miss anything? #VCFounderRelationship #AlignedExpectations #RelationshipsMatterMoreThanEver

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

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For those founders who think they need to go straight to an investment GP, think again. Great tips from Andrew who basically tells us which companies we should invest in and which we should not.

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At Forum we look at thousands of deals each year across our Accelerator and Pre-Seed funds but only end up investing in a little over 1% of those startups.  As an early stage VC, I am in the business of saying no to nearly every startup I meet, and while there is nuanced rationale for many of the startups I pass on, a vast majority of businesses that don’t meet the qualification to get funded typically fall into one of two buckets. ▪ First time founders have a tendency to go out to market too early to raise pre-seed capital ▪   I’m sure most founders have heard some iteration of this from VCs that ultimately pass on their business.  In some cases it's a blanket excuse covering up for other pass reasons- perhaps a VC doesn’t believe in a team or isn’t bullish on the market opportunity - but in many cases founders simply haven't proven enough to the market to warrant an investment. I meet many teams with an articulate vision for the product that they want to build, but they either haven't performed enough customer discovery to prove demand for their initial wedge product, or need to raise pre-seed capital to build out an MVP.  In those cases, pre-seed investors are unwilling to underwrite those risks.  To be default fundable, teams need to be able to keep costs low, perform extensive customer discovery, and ship some version of an early product - pilots and early paid customers are key. A huge piece of this is having founding engineering talent on the team. ▪Not every startup is a venture opportunity ▪ By definition, a venture backed business is solving a problem within a market opportunity so massive and so desperately needed, that its growth rate is off the charts.   It spreads like a weed, absorbing almost unlimited amounts of capital to fulfill demand within its customer base.   Each year there are maybe 20 companies launched that ultimately have venture scale outcomes. The bar to reach this rarified air is unfathomably high and the reality is the vast majority of founders simply aren’t building for opportunities that have the potential to be one of these generational companies. Many startup founders view VC as the only viable option for capitalizing their business, but not every great business is a venture business, and most successful founders never take VC dollars.  In order to reach an IPO/acquisition large enough to generate venture returns, a startup needs a credible path to $100s of millions in revenue. This is the standard by which early stage opportunities are evaluated. The flip side to this, and I share this feedback often with founders I meet that are building interesting business in non venture markets, if you are able to scale to $10- $20M in revenue that can be a massively successful outcome for a founder.  There are investors who focus on these type outcomes, namely lower middle market PE shops, and the typical path to those deals is a bootstrapped business or a friends/family capital raise.

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VC platform teams rarely add meaningful value to portfolio companies. They’re mostly a tool for GPs to justify raising larger funds and collecting higher management fees.

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Last Friday, Vinay Hiremath, founder of Loom (USD 900M exit to Atlassian), shared on his blog about leaving Loom, leaving $60M payout, breaking up with his girlfriend, dealing with insecurities, a brief stint at DOGE, and how he is now in Hawaii self-studying physics. I, along with a few founders I know who had substantial exits at a fairly young age (late 20s to early 30s), experienced something similar. Post-acquisition, most of us underwent—and many are still going through—a self-discovery phase largely centered on finding a 'purpose' and determining the best possible use of our time at this point in life. Does it mean taking risks that nobody else can, building more companies, accumulating more wealth, reaching the pinnacle of mental and physical health, building a family, getting involved in social impact, or leaving everything behind to sit on an isolated island? Capital does give you freedom and excessive optionality in life choices, especially if you're still unmarried. However, it is difficult to find your anchor, and most of the time, the abundance of choices becomes overwhelming. I was fortunate to meet a few exited founders who had gone through the acquisition process, and they were kind enough to share what worked for them. In one of my conversations with David Haber, he said: "As entrepreneurs, we build companies, but while we do that, we can't discount life. And life is what happens outside our companies." That thought has stuck with me. Today, three years after exiting Recko | A Stripe company to Stripe, I feel there are multiple ways to make life more fulfilling. It is not just the single-minded, unidirectional professional pursuit, which more often than not is driven by a chase for external validation rather than an internal desire to become better at your craft or to do something that uplifts people around you. Until the time you find that burning desire, restlessness, or drive to pick up the shovel again, take that family trip, get in shape, try something that you always wanted but never could, embrace the nothingness, enjoy the boredom, and keep exploring!

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When you're not in the board room, you're always wondering, "What's going on in there?". I have now worked with seven companies where I'd regularly present to a board, a mixture of PE and VC-led, and it's almost always centered around a few key topics. If you're meeting your numbers: - what's your future forecast  - how are you going to continue to grow - how will you grow faster and more efficient  - update on money in the bank and spend If you're not meeting your numbers (along with the things I mentioned above): - what is your plan to turn things around and meet your numbers (this includes new logo, back-to-base sales, and churn reduction) - what resources can they offer to help - do you have the right players in the right seat This is an oversimplification because many nuances are at play, but this is generally it. While board meetings can be stressful, almost every board I've worked with wants to be helpful. Of course, their interest is, first and foremost, that the business is healthy and growing, so there's always that undertone, but overall, they want to help. After all, they are guardians of the investments they make on behalf of others and have to report back on their performance. Think of them like they are CSMs for their investors (the folks that give them money). They need to get a great return on the investment they made on their behalf.

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I believe two of the big winners over the next 10 years in the SMB category will be PE who are rolling up the businesses and GenAI powered software that makes running these businesses significantly more turnkey and/or profitable. Thanks for having me on Jay Kapoor. If you want spicy takes fast forward to 25 min mark. If you want to get deep in market analysis buckle in for the whole thing. https://lnkd.in/d8M7Jyrx

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In a recent episode of The Expertise Economy podcast, I sat down with Johnny Page, CEO, and Matt Verlaque, COO, of SaaS Academy. Johnny shared a crucial insight for SaaS founders that challenges conventional wisdom 👇 "Many founders aim to delegate sales once they reach $15-20K MRR. This is often a critical mistake. We advocate for founders to remain deeply involved in sales for as long as possible." Why? According to Johnny, "No one can articulate the problem and solution more compellingly than the founder." Key takeaways from our discussion: > Founder-led sales drive stronger growth > Focus on consistent wins rather than quick handoffs > Clarify your customer acquisition strategy > Define your ideal customer profile precisely > Optimize your sales channel and offer > Maintain this focused approach for at least 12 months This strategy is the catalyst for transforming steady growth into exponential scale. For a deep dive into scaling strategies for your SaaS business, watch the full interview now: https://lnkd.in/dju-Be2u SaaS founders, what has been your experience with sales leadership? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments. #sales #SaaS #SaaSAcademy #Scale #Startups #Podcast #Leadership

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🔥 Founders, don't make the mistake of pursuing VC funding if your startup isn't the right fit! 🔥 In this podcast clip, I sit down with David Forsberg, CFA from Ascent Energy Ventures to explore the truth about raising venture capital. 💸 As a startup founder, former VC, and advisor to companies that have raised over $1 billion, I know how crucial it is to target the right investors. 🎯 Check out the full podcast for more expert advice on navigating the world of venture capital. Link in the original Kruze Consulting post. 🎧 #startups #venturecapital

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