Arman Assadi

Founders, you're losing deals by not having a clear discovery call plan. I've seen this a lot where founders looking to scale up their early sales efforts are going into it thinking the product will get them through the sale In most cases, this isn't the truth You need to have some sort of framework to make the selling motion more repeatable Instead of demo'ing the product, try learning more about them and their challenges first. Your goal should be to know enough to build a customized demo for them. This will help in building solid relationships, build value throughout the process and likely speed up deals on the back end of it. If you don't know where to start, hit me up and I'm happy to lay out some early sales structure for founders! Go crush it out there 🤙

16

Founders: don’t get too profitable. Get cash flow positive so you control your destiny. Then maximize growth while staying CFP. This is the path to maximizing the value of your business, assuming there is still room to grow in your market.

12

2 Comments

Crossing the chasm is a book most startup founders knows about. TLDR: It's about how products are adopted by early adopters and the mainstream market. But I hardly ever see anyone in the productized service space read this book, but it's highly relevant. Here's why 👇 Early adopters. Software products are adopted by early adopters and then eventually reaches the late majority and laggards. If your prospects aren't for design subscriptions, then you're not targeting early adopters. So this means that you have to find a market where the customers are willing to take a chance on this wild idea of subscription design services. Hint: Early stage startups that are funded are all for taking risks over large enterprise companies like AWS / Tesla.

6

3 Comments

Founders, don't become foie gras. Overfeeding your startup with capital won’t get you to IPO any healthier (or faster). Just figure out what’s enough and push forward. Constraint fuels creativity. Urgency forces prioritization. Uncertainty sparks clarity.

54

6 Comments

I'm excited to reshare this timeless episode of #Supermanagers featuring David O. Sacks, a member of the PayPal Mafia, founder of Yammer, Inc., and General Partner at Craft Ventures. David offers invaluable advice for CEOs, managers, founders, and anyone looking to elevate their organization. In this episode, David dives into:  - Introverted leadership - Managing hyper-growth - Knowing when to throw out processes  - And so much more. Don't miss out on his unique perspective and leadership journey. Tune in to learn from one of the best in the business! 🎧 Link in comments 👇

30

3 Comments

Movac KiwiNet Deep Tech is difficult because you do not comprehend 95% of the universe using the Standard Model of Particle physics. Either learn that measurement is flawed due to human bias or experience and unbiased state through transcendence experiences corresponding to Christ consciousness. The physics of life is based on LENR and not the Standard Model of Particle physics. Unfortunately, scientific research has been captured by the materialism perspective. This is mutually exclusive to the light observed in consciousness. Physics of life. Deep Tech https://lnkd.in/gKqC3PAR Gateway into the aromatic ring Faraday cage system. Time to see the light 😁.

4

For founders raising money — here are a few ways to start building your initial list of investors to vet: ➟ Work through Crunchbase to find companies in your space, and look up the investor who funded them at the appropriate round. You can also look at funding announcements for companies in your space and see which investors are involved. ➟ Reach out to angel investors, advisors, mentors, and your extended network to ask which GPs could be a good fit and have keen interest in your space. ➟ Look up lists of the most active investors in your region and try to understand if those investors have a thesis or have previously invested in companies in your industry. Good luck and stay strong! I've seen Unicorns get 100s of No's at the Pre-Seed stage before they got to their first Yes.

56

4 Comments

I’m so excited to announce the new name of the vetted community for startup founders I'm building: Village Lane Village Lane connects ambitious early-stage startup founders, both in-person and online, who have at least $100k in ARR or $250k in funding. The name Village Lane is deeply personal to me... It's the street I lived on after business school, in an apartment with my friend Andrew - the kindest, most welcoming, supportive person I’ve ever met, who sadly passed away suddenly a few weeks ago at only 31 years old. It’s also the place where I went full-time on Just Go Grind for the first time when it was a daily podcast and then joined VITALIZE Venture Capital. It was a special time and place and where I took a giant leap in my career. I envision Village Lane (the community) being similar - a special place filled with kind, supportive members looking to take a giant step forward with their businesses. Several experiences have led to the creation of Village Lane: - A transformative MBA experience at USC - Working at VITALIZE Venture Capital for 2.5 years - Growing my social media audience to 40,000+ followers - Building this newsletter to 21,000+ subscribers - Hosting 400+ podcast interviews with founders & investors - Creating an angel investing community with hundreds of members Now I'm focused on helping founders connect, build their personal brand, and create more successful businesses. Village Lane's in-person events will include things like: - Co-working - Social activities - AMAs - Retreats The online component of Village Lane will include: - A member directory - Slack group - Vendor suggestions - Tech stacks - An investor database - Media exposure and amplification - Personal branding assistance We'll also phase in monthly digital peer groups as membership grows. This will all be built around our members and their needs. I’ll share more details as this evolves. Interested in joining? Learn more and apply below.

30

2 Comments

I spent last week meeting with Founders and VCs in SF & Silicon Valley. Here are the top 5 things I learned: 1. Ideas are worthless. It's all about execution. People put way too much weight on the "idea" and who came up with it. Without execution, it's not reality. 2. Control is a facade. Be careful who you get in bed with. The moment you take money from investors, you no longer have complete control. Any round of funding is going to dilute your equity stake and give a board seat (or two) away. As a Founder, you could be fired (see Steve Jobs). 3. Relationships are everything. From partners, investors, advisors, and employees--how good your relationships are with these groups will often determine the success of your business. Giving up equity to a partner, investor, or advisor can pay huge dividends when it gives you access to key networks of relationships. 4. Be ready to pivot and evolve. Don’t be married to your idea. The idea you start off with likely won't be what you end up with. And that's okay. In fact, it's normal. 5. Experimentation, market interaction, and customer feedback are critical to getting it right. From the very beginning (when stakes are low), experiment, experiment, experiment. Test out your product/service as much as possible with the market. Get customer feedback. Find out what the market actually wants and is willing to pay for. Agree? Disagree? What would you add? #startups #entrepreneurship

35

9 Comments

Reality Engagement —— I started PHX Ventures because I want to help founders in Arizona build high-growth software companies that achieve venture scale. I can handle the good, bad, and ugly of company building. I’ve lived it. I can handle losing money. I don’t like it, but I can handle it. I can handle bad news and disappointment. Company building is a roller coaster. I can handle a changing market and new competitors. Market opportunity and market dynamism go hand in hand. I can handle co-founder breakups and key team member departures. It’s not great but it’s fairly normal. I can handle bad quarters and product problems. Stuff happens in startups. What I can’t handle is a lack of engagement with reality. Willful ignorance or disregard for data won’t make your business better. If the math of your business is telling you something is broken then it means something is broken. Let’s just fix it. And let’s fix it right now. Let's at least try. I love optimism. But I love realism even more. Broken things tend not to fix themselves. In my experience, the best founders have the highest engagement with reality. Just tell me what about your current reality is giving you angst. Tell me the problems in the business. Just tell me. Don’t sell me. Tell me. I can handle it. And maybe I can help. #founders #startups #b2b #saas

82

10 Comments

Many seed stage companies funded in 2020/2021 most likely won't make it to Series A these days. Over the last few months I watched two seed stage founders I invested in find buyers for their companies and successfully return cash to investors. In both cases the situations were dire and in both cases their existing lead investors were totally MIA. The reality for most VCs is that their best performing companies typically need their help the *the least* and the struggling ones are where it's essential to step up. For VC's, word travels fast when you aren't there to help. And for founders, working with investors who will be there when the chips are down is more important than ever.

115

8 Comments

🔑 Maintaining Momentum in Fundraising: 3 Strategies for Success Fundraising is easy when you're consistently hearing "yes" and have plenty of momentum. But what happens when you're starting from scratch or your pipeline is running dry? In my latest video, I share 3 strategies to help you build and maintain momentum: 1. Find the easy yeses 2. Update the maybes 3. Ramp up outreach

8

Here is a personal story in 2014 on how we created the LinkedIn Automation Category by coincidence, we didn't go loud like a marketer would do, but consistently delivered year after year, 2016 we turned down a Series A round of $3M. We created a category and boostrapped from dec 2014 to 1M+ ARR in just 8 months not bad! Now we learned a lot during this time, opened office in Omsk Russia, Scottsdale Arizona and Berlin.... We became Lean as we in 2016 started investing in AI and was able to automate a lot of the task we had humans doing, before covid we went entirely Remote fired the entire team in Russia as we discovered they stole from us over $500K + more. My first mistake was during covid having small twins I started to worry, my downside was I worked for the biggest vaccination company in Europe not producer and worked as a student directly for the CEO (public traded) as his resource for things. That meant i got to sit with doctors and learned about a covid scenarios and that extra knowledge made me scared, which in hindsight was a bad decision but sometimes having deep knowledge on certain things can become your own conflicting downside. During covid we shrank but came quickly back after. Now during our initial growth phase we saw hundread of copy cats starting to copy everything we did and having customer calls being asked what is this new company different from you, i could often just state, i honestly don't know and based on their website i can see they copied most from us, then look at signups 9 out of 10 times had done a trial and cloned like the wild west. This initially made me quite irritated but over time I realised we can win by delivering what we setup to do making all tedious task automated and bring value in the sales funnel by simply eliminating anything the customers would do manually with world class data. During the years we build a strong Technology tracking / installs tracker called Techtracker.io which we started to rebuild, from how it crawls data and will have a huge impact in the market in 3-4 months from now. We build the first commercial technology to track people visiting a website in 2018 that could identify a person before they filled a form, this again would not have been possible without talking to leads and the idea comes from the CMO from one of the biggest banks in Asia asking if we could identify the person and not just the company. You can imagine at first i was, no way not possible. But when I spent 4 months in San Francisco talking to smart people one day a guy told me if you do X you can do Y and I had that Aha moment wait in my head i can combine that with our IP and add this IP and we can finally solve it. Rest is history another market created. My advice is go out speak to the market, without them you can't grow, discover and solve new innovations. Now this video is simply to illustrate how our competitors are reacting when we launch a new feature :) stay tuned for what we do next!

6

3 Comments

Imagine you’re meeting a VC today and pitching your company. Now, also imagine the VC goes home tonight and tells his or her spouse about the meeting with you. How do you think the VC would (or should) describe your product to the spouse? Remember, this is for someone who doesn’t have any context, and probably doesn’t have time to listen the whole story. If you can think of a story version that's plain and simple -- how you want the VC to describe your product to the spouse -- perhaps that version should be your pitch in the first place?

114

10 Comments

👥 Attention Startup Founders! 🚀 I recently met with a promising startup in SF. Ten minutes into our meeting, my friend (an experienced mentor) asked: "If you, the founders, are here, who is selling?" The CEO joked that sales were "on pause." My friend’s advice? "Adjourn this meeting and go back to selling, now." As a startup advisor and former product leader, I've seen the biggest mistake early-stage SaaS companies make: neglecting customer-facing roles. To avoid this, you need strategic hires that drive revenue from day one. There are 5 customer-facing hires you must make to ignite revenues. 1. Digital Marketer/Content Creator: Develops content that positions you as a thought leader. Want to know the other four and dive deeper into why these roles matter? And how to set your startup on the path to success? Read the full article for detailed insights! 📈💡 https://lnkd.in/g9X5mryf #Startup #SaaS #Sales #Marketing #GrowthHacking #Entrepreneurship #ProductMarketFit

44

5 Comments

Over the years I’ve seen the post going around in various forms of how Bessemer Venture Partners keeps a *robust* anti-portfolio on their website. It’s fun, self-aware, humbling, and differentiating. If you haven’t already, go have a look. (As an aside, I’ve been to their offices in Cambridge multiple times back in the day while visiting Kent Bennett, the venerable Felda Hardymon, my dear friend Steve Papa (if Steve was capable of “friendship”), and the young(er) founders of a company called Toast - Bessemer wallpapered their bathrooms with the rejection IRMs of said anti-portfolio). Anyone who has been in the game long enough probably has their own version. Companies they could have invested in, but passed on, only to be made a fool when said company later becomes a decacorn. My personal opinion - and I tend to think one that Bessemer shares - is 1) we all make mistakes, 2) we’re human and at times quite dumb, and 3) hell, at least we had access in the first place. Venture investing is about seeing as many amazing opportunities as you can, even if sometimes that means missing a few…dozen. Either that or I’m totally full of shit and we’re just plain idiots. What do I know. I’ve only been doing this for three years. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In any case, in the spirit of giving myself a Father’s Day gift of crow, which I plan to eat, here are some of mine: Toast: not sure if Steve P would have let me into his $4M or whatever it was round never mind the Seed or the A, but I feel like I could have convinced them. Steve F and Aman said they were going to fully rebuild a POS after running into integration nightmares with Micros, Aloha, et al, and I thought they were crazy. Old industry incumbents. Entrenched. Insert foot in mouth, and then pull it out and use it to kick my own ass. Klaviyo: TJ Mahoney was a pre-seed investor and he told me about it. Said AB was a stud. I passed without even talking to them. $8M valuation or around there I think. Shopify ecosystem play? Ew. Sigh. I’m a dumbass. Pillpack: mentored TJ a bit early when he was having some team stuff going on at Techstars. The hippie. $4M post or something. Said no. Whoops. Drizly: Nick Rellas kept stonewalling me, the little twerp, but pretty sure I had a small spot. Pat Kinsel would have got me in. Slept on it. Round closed. I’m an idiot. Draftkings: met Jason at a dinner and Ryan Moore told me to hop in at pre-seed - I already had a small play with a competitor. Jason and I became great friends (which we are to this day). Really knocked that one out of the park. Way to go, Phil! Good eye! Anyway, PLENTY more where that came from and I’m sure I’m currently in the process of creating one of the world’s most epic anti-portfolios at Impellent Ventures. But, again, c’est la vie. Better than sitting on the sidelines and wondering what could have been. At least I know what could have been - a gazillion more dollars than I have right now. Ah well. Batter up! *p.s. I’ve had some winners, too ;)

62

7 Comments

A post from Rob at Balderton Capital pointed me at this piece from TechCrunch, and it perfectly aligns with what I've seen in the market: When things (aka: building businesses) are getting harder, founders seem to be more aware of how to structure ownership within their team. I've recently seen a few transactions where mostly experienced founders insist on longer vesting schedules for them and their team (👋🏻 Mario from Enpal revealing this week the whole company runs on 7y vesting schedules). Avoiding dead capital on the cap table is one of the key priorities we try to make founders aware of when raising rounds - be cautious with part-time, non-operative 'co-initiators', professors, accelerators or angels that don't add much value beyond the very initial stages, or co-founders that decide to move on. Enforcing strong (read: long) vesting mechanisms including cliffs (no need to stick to the 1y cliff market standard either) can be a simple mechanism to align interests for the long-term.

68

11 Comments

Accelerators, venture studios and the Road to Nowhere .. A cautionary tale on the "business" of starting your company. The takeaway is "never pay for introductions" A few years ago I was asked to work with a founder and after a month or two I walked away, never executed the paperwork because this founder, after introducing him to a few people and getting a little buzz, told me he was going to accelerate the process by joining Astralabs in TX. He was confused that I wasn't happy they were "selected" by this program and told me all these VCs and angels they were going to talk to. I asked how much he was paying them, to which he said it was $700 and I didn't get it. Except I did. I knew that this was going to "cost" them far more in cash and equity. Here it cost many founders their company. As pressure hits valuations and raising funds many founders are looking for a quick path. It does not exist and thanks to good information out there for founders from Carta and others today, information is accessible unlike ever before. There are a handful I like, having worked with YCombinator since class of 2008. But other than a handful of others these accelerators are not providing enough value and as the landscape shifted they needed revenue. Some angels now charge fees. The reality is there is no shortcut. Real innovation gets funded and your "idea" isn't funded without customers, traction and differentiation. VCs want to be first and like novel tech. Pick your advisors carefully - we pick who we want to work with carefully! I like disruption and the Black Swans . Good read, very well researched, from TechCrunch's Christine Hall & Mary Ann Azevedo #vc #startups #investors #angels #blackswans

20

1 Comment