Rory O'Driscoll

"Some Credit Unions are a generation away from being obsolete." Woah, ... that was a surprising statement. Thanks to our good friend Mark Chandler, we got to spend a wonderful night on the water in San Diego as part of the Origence's LendingTech conference. Tom Orman was sharing his thoughts on Credit Union and FinTech partnerships. Tom explained that over 25+ years in the Credit Union space, things have accelerated to change rapidly, especially post-Covid. For an outsider to the Credit Union industry like me, it's easy to assume that all Credit Unions are the same. That's far from true as I've learned over the last 4+ years: There is a wide spectrum of Credit Unions: super innovative ones and then others who prefer doing things "the way they've always done it." A lot of what Tom said was in line with our observations summarized in the attached thought leadership piece. Key Points from Tom and my conversation that align with what we've learned about the industry: 🚀 Innovation Spectrum: Credit Unions range from highly innovative to those sticking to traditional methods. 📉 Digital Transformation Needs: Credit Unions must embrace digital transformation to stay relevant and competitive. 🔄 Change Management: Successful change requires top-down support and a willingness to break away from the "we've always done it this way" mentality. 📱 Member Experience: Enhancing digital onboarding and creating a seamless omnichannel experience is crucial. 🏦 Financial Health: Effective digital strategies can significantly reduce loan origination and member acquisition costs. 📈 Growth Goals: Ambitious Credit Unions with strong growth goals are more likely to embrace and benefit from technology. 🌟 Cross-Selling Opportunities: Credit Unions should leverage technology to cross-sell products and deepen member relationships. 🌍 Industry Challenges: Credit Unions face unique challenges, such as maintaining member loyalty in a digital age dominated by direct-to-consumer FinTech innovations. If I missed something, please leave a comment or ping me. Ending the week with a lot of gratitude for everything the Credit Union has given us and enthusiastic, excited and motivated to give back tenfold! None of what Clutch is doing would be possible without generous folks like Tom Orman, who share their insights and guide us through how to prioritize our technology efforts. Thank you, Tom, and everyone else who contributes to this ongoing journey of transforming the Credit Union industry. If you want to read on, take a look at the following Whitepaper: https://lnkd.in/d7NSjr2t

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Having a Cars and Capital event tomorrow in Southern California with Oren Klaff. If you want to join message me. https://lnkd.in/gDQ4D39u Oren Klaff Bridger Pennington #InvestorEvent #FamilyOffice #InvestmentOpportunity #CarlsbadEvent #PrivateEquity #WealthManagement #InvestmentConference #CapitalRaising #NetworkingEvent #IndustryLeaders #FinancialGrowth #InvestorsMeetup #WealthBuilding #BusinessGrowth #InvestmentForum

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🚀 Exciting News! 🚀 We’re thrilled to announce new investment partnerships with Prospero Capital Ventures, BrightSol LLC, and S30Build, LLC  that will power NOTICENINJA’s next phase of growth and market expansion! This investment from Prospero and partners, with their deep expertise in the staffing industry, is a major boost for our mission to revolutionize tax automation and compliance management. Together, we’re set to transform notice management for companies, making compliance simpler, smarter, and more efficient. Read our latest press release for all the details! #NoticeNinja #Investment #Growth #TaxAutomation #FounderStories #ComplianceSolutions #ProsperoCapitalVentures

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🎃 Ready to carve out your path to Product-Market Fit?🎃 Join Companyon Ventures’ Behind the Curtain roundtable tomorrow (Oct 30) with Michael Ho, Firas Raouf, Eric Morgan, and Hersh Tapadia as they 'exorcise' the mysteries of PMF. Don’t ghost us—RSVP in the comments 👻 https://lnkd.in/emCJcn4w #emergingmanager #venturecapital #productmarketfit

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Exciting news! We just sent out the inaugural newsletter for Future Frontier Capital, our pre-seed venture fund backing frontier tech startups. As I hit "send," I realized how launching FFC parallels the path of the founders we support. Starting FFC has required the same passion, perseverance, and self-belief that drive entrepreneurs. Just like a startup, getting a VC fund off the ground demands relentless hustle—building the brand, perfecting the pitch, and networking tirelessly. There are constant challenges that test your resolve and endless hours of unglamorous work behind the scenes. And perhaps most daunting - the self-doubt, wondering if you're crazy for attempting something so bold. Pushing through that negative self-talk requires unshakable faith in your mission. Raising this VC fund reminds me of starting our IP strategy and patent analytics firm two decades ago. It’s a powerful reminder of the perseverance, creativity, and resilience needed to turn an ambitious idea into reality. This experience makes us more empathetic partners, ready to support the founders we back. Our work is just beginning, and this inaugural newsletter underscores our commitment to supporting frontier tech startups every step of the way. #startups #VentureCapital #EmergingManagers #Entrepreneurship #InnovationMindSet

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118 VCs (one hundred eighteen!) are gathering in San Diego next week - to meet with 30 SD startups. But it's so MUCH bigger than just those 30 co's. It brings VCs back - when they see quality companies. It helps those who are next-in-line and adjacent. It enables us to send deal flow all year 'round. It attracts talent and other companies. It inspires entrepreneurship. Connect is working for SD. Together, we're building the best damn innovation ecosystem on the planet. Year over year. Five.Ten.Thirty.

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If you enjoyed our first blog on the metrics that matter for Verticalized SaaS then don't miss on the Part II of the series where my colleagues Devraj Hom Roy and Matt Schaar discuss the strategic and operational choices to improve these operational indicators. https://lnkd.in/g5QkCrcH

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Thrilled to announce the launch of our inaugural edition of Beyond Benchmarks at Emergence Capital. This comprehensive report dives deep into the metrics and trends shaping the early-stage enterprise cloud market. A huge thank you to our VC partners and contributors for making this possible! Here's a sneak peek of our findings: --> 60% of companies have already integrated GenAI into their service offerings, with another 20% planning to do so this year. --> While most companies use OpenAI as their primary LLM, many are experimenting with multiple models. We’re seeing a trend toward intelligently routing GenAI inference requests based on cost, performance, and security. --> Companies that have implemented GenAI are showing promising results, with a 7% higher NDR compared to those that haven’t. Beyond Benchmarks goes further with more GenAI trends, insights on the current fundraising environment, and key performance metrics. Our goal is to provide founders and their teams with valuable benchmarks to help them make better-informed decisions. At Emergence Capital, we're committed to helping founders build iconic companies. Dive into the full report here: https://lnkd.in/g6bnvAZM

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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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Reflecting on another fantastic StartupAZ retreat in Flagstaff last month! I’m grateful to be a part of this incredible community that continually supports technology founders in Arizona. StartupAZ is more than just a network; it’s a powerful ecosystem of founders, mentors, and seasoned entrepreneurs who come together to uplift and propel each other forward. The monthly cohort meetings provide the kind of support and mentorship that makes all the difference in launching and scaling a technology company. This organization has been a game-changer for me personally, connecting me with like-minded leaders and providing the resources needed to navigate the challenges of entrepreneurship. Being surrounded by other founders who are as passionate about innovation and growth as I am has been truly inspiring. Below is a video from our retreat, showcasing the spirit and energy of this incredible group of people dedicated to pushing the limits of what’s possible. Seeing how much we’ve grown and the impact we’ve had on Arizona’s tech landscape is both humbling and motivating. If you're a founder in Arizona or someone passionate about the startup ecosystem, I highly encourage you to get involved with StartupAZ. Let’s keep building, growing, and supporting the next wave of innovators right here in Arizona! #StartupAZ #FoundersSupportingFounders #ArizonaTech #Entrepreneurship #StartupCommunity #Innovation

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"The ice is beginning to melt on what was a wintry period" - Laura Bock, partner at QED Investors ☃ In Q1 2024, venture capital funding for payments startups was 85% down year on year, marking a six-year low. This sharp decline reflects a broader trend of decreased investments across the fintech sector. 🙁 HOWEVER...... 👇 Surely this will soon change with favourable structural and technological tailwinds opening up exciting opportunities around the topics of account to account payments and payment authentication. PSD3 is going to be a turboboost for open banking kicking off a whole new wave of innovation and value-added services. 🚀 https://lnkd.in/d_c_At8V So place your bets if you dare. What will be the hot topic in the payments that will kick off the next VC bull run in the space? 🤷‍♂️ #VentureCapital #PaymentsIndustry #Fintech #Innovation #StartupGrowth #A2A #Account2Account #Payments #psd2 #psd3 #fraudprevention

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One of my proudest moments as an investor occurred today as Alaffia Health announced its series A because it shows how the Aperture® Venture Capital vision of multi-level, multi-generational #impactinvesting is succeeding in the marketplace. Here’s the model in its most basic form : ✅As diverse fund managers with meaningful capital to allocate, we are changing the VC landscape every day just by doing our day jobs. ✅As Black/Brown investors with ~40 years experience collectively, Aperture GPs have access to talent /excellence that others do not, so our portfolio *organically* is more inclusive by race, gender and geography even while optimizing for financial outcomes (all about the alpha). ✅Our most successful portco’s are using financial #innovation to solve market problems that impact underrepresented demographics and underserved communities. Alaffia Health is a shining example of the impact portion of our overall fund thesis, and we couldn’t be prouder of TJ Ademiluyi and Adun Akanni, MPH, PMP - the dynamic brother-sister founder duo whose vision we have steadfastly supported on their journey. Congratulations to TJ and Adun from William Crowder and myself, as well as the whole Aperture team- Marjorie King Philip McKenzie Yves Louis-Jacques Tanvi Lal Michelle Dhansinghani Lisha Bell Katie Kelly Amy Chung Cindy Chong, CFA Brian Fernandes-Halloran Monroe France Jayden Pantel Darren Herman Evan Wladis Neal Triplett Thomas Scriven Peter Ammon Irina Bit-Babik Tim Milanich Rob Rahbari

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💡 Founders, are you prepared to tackle loan covenants? If your startup is going to take on debt, understanding financial covenants is essential. They are the rules of the game, and knowing them can keep your startup safe from default. Explore our article for valuable insights. Check the link in the original Kruze Consulting post.

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I think our pricing is pretty unique in the industry. We give a Schedule A, which is in essence wholesale payments rates based on the combined volumes of Moov’s customer base. The client then has full pricing control to the end user on what the markup looks like. For example, a RTP credit might be 25 cents wholesale. If our client’s SMB went directly to their bank, they're probably going to get charged 45 cents to $1 dollar for that. So our client should take it to market at 65 cents for an RTP. We then rev share that markup 50/50. Where they need to, the partner has the pricing power to go as low as 25 cents to win a strategic account because they have our wholesale rates. We trust them to grow their business the right way, and with a revenue share structure, our interests are always aligned. What’s perhaps more unique is that we also remove any pricing friction in our sales process: If the client doesn’t want to have any commitment with us, that’s fine, it’s just a 50/50 revenue split. For companies with more volume, if they want a higher revenue split, they commit to a certain minimum net revenue. The higher the commitment, the better the split. Simple. Fair. Mutual Value Creation.

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Orb (#uncorrelated) raised $25M to continue building their pricing and billing platform that lets companies automate a range of different billing modes e.g., usage-based, subscriptions, or a mix, marry analytics and billing, collect and meter product usage data, invoice customers, generate revenue reports, draw on product usage insights to find revenue opportunities, model out alternative pricing plans (thus enabling experimentation), orchestrate changes in real time, schedule future price changes for certain customer cohorts or contract renewals, directly embed draft invoices into product billing portals, surface past-due invoices, and recover failed payments automatically. "Orb gives companies a single source of truth that can connect every unit of product usage to revenue. We’ve found a particularly strong fit in AI, cloud infrastructure, fintech, and dev tools, and have seen most of our growth come from those verticals.” Orb’s revenue grew 5x in the past year, and the customer base tripled to include brands such as Vercel, Replit, Pinecone, and Perplexity. https://lnkd.in/gYh4y2tg

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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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In vertical SaaS, the very best companies landed with a product solving a specific, burning pain point that horizontal solutions solved badly and then became broad product suites over time (ServiceTitan, Veeva Systems, Doximity, etc). My partner Gordon Ritter calls this “layering the cake”. In vertical AI, the landing wedges are much more brittle. While the painpoints they solve are very real (and often unaddressable by SaaS alone), they’re also much more likely to commodotize in the near term as the tech advances. 👀 Therefore, the need to layer the cake in vertical AI is much more urgent than in vertical SaaS. 👀 The best vertical AI CEOs not only recognize the dynamic, but talk about it openly. Helps those around them keep up the speed of innovation and their eyes on the bigger prize.

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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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Curious about how we spot the most unobvious winners at seed? It’s simple - we invest in those we’d never want to bet against. In 2017 slice was a scrappy fintech financing smartphones for college students. Today, it’s set to become India’s first true digital bank, catering to the needs of India’s Gen Z. With this merger, Slice is poised to simplify digital banking for a billion Indians, establishing a new gold standard of customer-focused banking.

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