Rathna Sharad

Interesting article on last mile delivery. This is one of those areas where the high level theory is super exciting, but low-level delivery network design and ruthless execution are *everything*. This led to a recent generation of failed attempts to build last mile delivery as startups. I don't hold out much hope that Shein and Temu will change that balance, only delay more failures. Is this an impossible area to build a startup in? No. But it's a problem where domain expertise has to meet capital, and a team has to be brilliant from a network design standpoint, combined with day-to-day operations chops. Those teams are super rare. https://lnkd.in/dgQjYZ_2

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Heading back from the GM Summit where the big idea was a Closed Loop Parcel System. Anurag Allena on our team wrote some more details about the idea (linked below), but here are some highlights that I worked with him on: When someone isn't using a closed loop concept, they fall into two camps, both are bad. Camp (A) Prioritizing customer experience without managing costs Retailers who offer competitive delivery promises like free/fast shipping often end up with excess shipping costs and lower margins. → Reminder 1: Shipping is the highest operating expense on the P&L, so that's a big deal. Camp (B) Prioritizing costs and falling behind to competition on experience Retailers who don’t offer a Prime-like shipping experience can't compete and lose sales to competitors. → Reminder 2: Consumers have more options on where to shop than ever before. → Reminder 3: After price, shipping (fast/free/accurate/configurable) is the second highest growth lever in ecommerce. It's solved with data, but retailers spend more time chasing data than leveraging it Systems are fragmented. Shipping data is spread all around. Audit systems like Green Mountain's are disconnected from execution systems. Closed loop systems means using your data to automate and optimize shipping related decisions across the supply chain Use the insights from firms like Green Mountain to configure systems like Shipium to help optimize decisions in WMS/OMS/TMS systems like Manhattan Associates or Blue Yonder to improve outcomes. Measure it with data, iterate, and update. If you are a retail shipper, you need a closed loop parcel system to continuously improve. You don't have that if you're using legacy technology that doesn't capture data the right way or allow for very fast changes and updates to match strategic changes (i.e. adding a new carrier here, adding a new warehouse there, shipping for stores over there, etc.)

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I had a lot of fun recording a podcast episode with Shiva Singh Sangwan. We discussed the evolution of Humba Ventures & Susa Ventures; tips for raising and building a fund; how to improve investment sourcing & picking; the role of luck in investing, and so on. https://lnkd.in/eiqsStej

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I first met Mike Maples, Jr in 2010, when Founders Network was just an idea. Over the years, Mike and his team at Floodgate (special shoutout to Arjun Chopra) have been great mentors, sharing their insights and guiding our founders. Most recently, their advice played a pivotal role in helping us launch Founders Network Fund. Today, Mike shared the key ideas with FN'ers from his new book Pattern Breakers (https://a.co/d/buKBd5O ), which explores the insights he’s gained from backing companies like Twitter, Twitch, and Okta -- and which put him on the Forbes Midas List 8x. This is the most important book on startups in the last ten years, according to Steve Blank. My notes on the key concepts of his talk: 1) Inflections – "not a trend but a change event that represents a turning point in our ability to provide empowerment." e.g. The GPS chip in iPhone 4s 2) Insights – "a non-consensus and right insight about the future that's powerful and non obvious and leverages inflections." e.g. Lyft = GPS + strangers driving you 3) Founder future fit – "Living in the future before other people live in the future and then try to build what's missing in the future." If you're a founder, check out the book. Grateful for the impact Mike and Arjun continue to have on both me and the Founders Network community!

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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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Not every venture goes as planned. With DawaWala, we had 50% of Karachi’s retailers on board, but I made the call to shut it down. Why? Unit economics. Sometimes, even if you have traction, the numbers don’t work. It’s tough, but you need to know when to pivot or let go. 💡 Next post, I’ll dive into the lessons I learned from this decision. Stay tuned! 🔄

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Really enjoyed my conversation with Matt Newberg on the HNGRY podcast. We dove into why we founded Bikky, why there's so much potential for restaurants to tap into their customer data, actionable ways to use that data, and the age old third-party vs. first-party debate. Restaurants raised prices aggressively over the past two years to stay ahead of inflation, and for the first time in a while consumers are questioning the value equation for their favorite brands. We're seeing softness in traffic across the category - with even leaders like CAVA (who still had blowout earnings) showing a slight decline. The winners in this cycle will be those that know what levers to pull to drive incremental traffic, frequency, and sales. I want to thank Matt for allowing me to talk about how we're doing that at Bikky. He's one of the most insightful folks covering the space, and holds the record for number of articles I forward when folks ask me what's top of mind in the industry. Here's the link the episode. I hope you enjoy listening to our conversation as much as I enjoyed being part of it: https://lnkd.in/e4yHTYeu

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Everyone raves about Amazon's e-commerce business. But I think there are at least two other businesses that have shown greater resilience. Walmart and Costco. Wait. Hear me out. For these two, the invention of e-commerce caused a fundamental shift in how consumers purchase. For Amazon however, we are yet to see a competitor that causes a fundamental shift in how consumers purchase. We've seen what the post-"offline-retail" world looks like. But we haven't seen what the post-"ecomm cart" world will look like. #ecommerce #startups #venturecapital

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Goldcast's startup journey has perfectly mapped the last 4 crazy years of SaaS. Palash Soni and his cofounders first started the company in 2021 to build great, customizable virtual event solutions for enterprise marketers. While their business kept growing past the pandemic, it was clear that overall spend was shifting back to IRL events fast. However, video consumption continued to rise and quickly became the best way to build your brand and an audience in software - if you knew how to operationalize video marketing. Goldcast's product evolution from a virtual events platform to an AI-native video marketing solution has been incredible to watch. The company had its best quarter yet, adding customers like OpenAI and Coupa Software and I couldn't be more proud. Here's Palash talking about their product evolution and the future of video marketing in an AI-native world.

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Between speed, quality and scope, something has to give. That was my answer when Harry Stebbings asked if speed sits in contradiction to quality when building products. In terms of what I’m most willing to trade off… ⚡ #Speed of shipping and rapid iteration cycles are critical. Your product (and your company!) will live and die by how quickly you learn. ✅ You also can’t trade off on #quality. Users’ first experience is like a match, you get one shot at lighting it right. Particularly with new products. ⚙ #Scope is how expansive your feature set is. It’s the thing I’m most willing to trade off because the sooner you can deliver a minimum loveable product, the sooner you can solidify what that feature set should look like. Curious to know what you’re most willing to trade off between the 3? Linktree #VC20 #product #startups #productmanagement

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Excited to announce the launch of Bracket by BoldCap 🚀 India's first Go-To-Market platform for entrepreneurs building global AI companies. For the past year, Bracket has been exclusively supporting our portfolio founders to tackle the complexities of scaling AI-native products in the global market, especially North America. Today, I am excited to launch Bracket; to provide all AI builders with the same GTM accessibility.. 🎯 The new landscape shift has made it absolutely clear that traditional SaaS playbooks no longer fit the bill for AI-native products. We are redefining this through Bracket – our closely curated community of 50+ GTM operators across North America and Europe who offer the resources, networks, and the new-age playbooks that founders need in their $0-$1M journey of building an AI company from India to the world. 🌍 We work with some of the smartest minds in GTM globally– from the Revenue director at Clari, Pricing leader at DocuSign, GTM leader at Databricks, Sales leader at Outreach to Growth Leader at Snowflake and many more– all exceptionally talented operators who have built multiple GTM motions from scratch and are now committed to support the upcoming generation of entrepreneurs along with us. We deeply believe this is what our ecosystem needs: accessibility to the right leaders in the global market, and we aim to bridge this for Indian founders. Thanks to our early GTM partners Jyoti Swarnkar Samuel Sunderaraj Kiran Surapaneni Merritt Baer Murali K Atul Sahai Ramana Narayanam Sara Archer Sara Jones Shiv Sundar Stan Rymkiewicz Andreas Drakos Andres Lozano Sanudo Ashwath M. Brant W. Cody Harris Connor Williams Daniil Krets Jake Haselden Jeff de Ruyter Karthik Ramamoorthy Kevin Flitcroft Laura Handy LeeRon Yahalomi Paul McGhee Shane O'Neill (and the list goes on.... unfortunately not able to tag more) who shaped Bracket into a powerful community along with us. Big shout out to Aditi Gera for all her effort on putting this together and to the rest of the BoldCap team Shiv Tayal Pratham Chadha Kevin D'Souza. Thank you Bhuvana Kamath and YourStory Media for this exclusive coverage - https://lnkd.in/gZBXTsmv If you're founder in the AI software space, we are excited to work with you! BoldCap

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#ObsessivelyEnthusiasticInvestor #UnreasonablyEnthusiasticInvestor #IrrationallyEnthusiasticInvestor at REFASHIOND Ventures: The Industrial Transformation Fund. We look for the people we believe are doing the best work in Industrial Transformation & Supply Chain Technology; Attempting the impossible. Then we go all-in on them. With obsessive, unreasonable, and irrational enthusiasm. We back them with evangelical zeal. Join us. #IndustrialTransformation #SupplyChain #Innovation #Technology #Startups #VentureCapital #DemandTheImpossible #UnreasonableEnthusiasm #ObsessiveEnthusiasm #IrrationalEnthusiasm

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During yesterday's LibreQoS APNIC webinar, I posed the question: won't more bandwidth solve these problems? As Herbert Wolverson said, yes, more bandwidth is good, but, still these problems remain if queueing is done incorrectly. Here's my take on why bandwidth alone is not as good as bandwidth + good queueing policies: Generally it was believed that 'data is important, so don't throw it away; hang on to it and send it later'. In practice, this has proven to be suboptimal as two issues may emerge: 1) latency increases for some flows due to heavy demand from other flows using the same bottleneck link, 2) even a single flow can have excessive latency due to aspects of typical TCP behavior (referred to bufferbloat) when the buffers grew large enough that the data being buffered was retransmitted anyway. It turns out that not all data is equally important. Active Queue Management is the art of deciding priorities, both in deciding what data to throw away, but also in allowing some later arriving data to be transmitted ahead of data in another connection that arrived before it. These problems have been studied, and good solutions have been found by using certain queueing policies in routers and switches, referred to as “fq_codel’ and “cake”. These track the different flows not by classifying the data, but by watching the behavior. Flows that send relatively little data (DNS lookups), or at a measured pace (video chat) have priority over flows that send a lot of data as quickly as possible (App and System updates, Video and ISO downloads).

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Thank you to Cecilia Liu at Sprig, Jeffrey Wang at Amplitude, Vijay Umapathy Heap | by Contentsquare and the moderator Ahmed Wafaey at Delivery Hero for a compelling and thorough discussion on 'AI-Driven Product Strategy: Crafting Future-Proof Blueprints for Market Leadership' at #ProductCon by Product School! Here are some key insights: - Product market fit is still required [We keep hearing this! :) #CSuite...What an opportunity to avoid Shiny Object Syndrome and possibly even save some investments by aligning AI/ML usage/experimentation to support business objectives and customer pain points, needs, and/or desires rather than pursing AI/ML for its own sake.]. - When UX is needed with AI/ML, it needs to be thoughtful like all UX. - AI is likely to and should take over low leverage tasks. - Having the Human in the Loop is a must for understanding future AI/ML opportunities and working out kinks for current AI/ML implementations. - DevOps along with AI/ML Ops being positioned for proper regression testing and quick deployment are critical so that the rapid changes with AI/ML can be tested and incorporated within days. As you can see, there were a lot of great nuggets packed in a little time in this session. This is a good one to listen to in its entirety!

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Hey Fundraising-Startups and Investors, VC on the rise again! Very exciting insights and takeaways about the VC/Startup-Fundraising-Market. Massive shoutout to Rohit Yadav for sharing and putting it together for free! 💰 MORE: 53% of VC Managers expect to allocate more capital and invest in more startups than last year, with only 6% expecting fewer. 📊 SEED SIZE: According to an analysis, the sweet spot at Seed stage seems to be USD 2-2.5 million for maximising chances of follow-on fundraising. 📉 MINIMUM TRESHOLD: Don't Go Below $1m: Companies securing less than $1m in seed funding were less than half as likely to reach Series-A. ⏱️ SPEED IS KEY! Act fast. Raising seed funding within a year of launching your startup doubles your chances of reaching Series-A compared to those waiting 3+ years. 🛠 TOOLS: More tools (getpantom, OpenVC, shipshape.vc, Signal from NFX) are coming up to support founders in their fundraising (also watch out for +Azava 🤘)...

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Episode 341 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Somak Chattopadhyay, Managing Partner at Armory Square Ventures. Yes, markets like the Bay Area, NYC, and Boston get a lot of attention when it comes to building startups and having the ability to raise capital, but there are lots of other places to build a successful company. This has always been the case, but the pandemic definitely pushed this reality further.  This is why a firm like Amory Square Ventures exists. There are lots of secondary markets where entrepreneurs need access to capital and it is also a very important matter for the local economy for these companies to grow and create jobs, versus relocating. Somak shares the details of what led him down the path to start Armory Square Ventures, a seed and early stage venture fund, and why their approach of investing in seconday markets has not only been a differentiator for their firm but what they also consider as an optimism engine and a community catalyst for regions outside Silicon Valley. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Advice on how founders can push back on advice from investors. * Somak’s background story and his early career in startups. * How he landed in venture capital at Edison Ventures and Tribeca Venture Partners. * The details on what they are targeting for investments and portfolio company examples like Machinery Partner and ACV Auctions, a Buffalo company that went public. * Somak’s anti-portfolio, companies that he reviewed and an investment didn’t work out and went on to be a successful company. * Advice on building a marketplace. * And so much more. #venturecapital #startups #marketplaces

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I have been waiting impatiently for the day Brittany Ennix would bring Portex out of stealth mode. I have been waiting since February 2021, when she and I first connected directly after having first connected on LinkedIn in 2016. That day is today. This article covers a mere fraction of the reasons I am happy to say that REFASHIOND Ventures: The Industrial Transformation Fund is an #ObsessivelyEnthusiasticInvestor in Brittany, and her team at PortEx. We look for the people we believe are doing the best work in Industrial Transformation & Supply Chain Technology; Attempting the impossible. Then we go all-in on them. With obsessive and unreasonable enthusiasm. Join us. #IndustrialTransformation #SupplyChain #Innovation #Technology #Startups #VentureCapital #DemandTheImpossible #UnreasonableEnthusiasm #ObsessiveEnthusiasm #IrrationalEnthusiasm  

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🛍️💥 How Shein and Temu Sneaked Up on Amazon! 🌟 Ever wondered how Shein and Temu, two relatively unknown Chinese e-commerce platforms, have managed to sneak up on the retail giant, Amazon? 🤔 Well, buckle up, because we're about to dive into the fascinating world of fast fashion and cross-border e-commerce! 🌏🛍️ 💡 Shein's Secret Sauce: Shein, a fast-fashion powerhouse, has taken the world by storm with its lightning-fast product cycles and data-driven approach. With over 6,000 new items added daily, Shein has managed to capture the hearts (and wallets) of Gen Z shoppers worldwide! 🌟 📈 Temu's Tactics: Temu, on the other hand, has focused on creating a seamless cross-border shopping experience. By partnering with manufacturers and leveraging data analytics, Temu offers a wide range of affordable products, delivered straight to your doorstep! 🚚📦 🔍 The Power of Data: Both Shein and Temu have harnessed the power of data to drive their success. By analyzing customer preferences and trends, they've managed to stay one step ahead of the competition. 📊📈 💬 Quote Time: "Shein and Temu are not just e-commerce platforms; they're data-driven fashion and lifestyle powerhouses." - Alex Kantrowitz, Founder of Big Technology 📈 The Numbers Don't Lie: Shein's revenue skyrocketed to $15.7 billion in 2021, while Temu's parent company, Pinduoduo, boasts a market cap of over $100 billion! 💸💰 🌟 The Future: As Shein and Temu continue to grow, it's clear that they're not just competitors, but game-changers in the world of e-commerce. So, keep an eye on these rising stars, because they're here to stay! 💫🚀 Sources: - "How Shein and Temu Sneaked Up on Amazon" by Alex Kantrowitz, Big Technology - Statista, Pinduoduo Market Cap #Shein #Temu #Ecommerce #FastFashion #DataDriven #Amazon #Retail #CrossBorder #GenZ #Fashion #Lifestyle #DataAnalytics #Pinduoduo #MarketCap #RisingStars #GameChangers

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