Bob Rosin’s Post

💡 Unlearn Episode 24 is out! "The closer you can be to the product, technology, and the actual user experience, the better the results you're going to have." - Bob Rosin, General Partner at defy.vc. Do you agree? 🤔 In this episode, Bob chats with hosts Asher Mathew and Kelly Sarabyn about the various partnership types for startups, the evolving role of the Chief Business Officer, and the role of partnership leaders in driving growth for their companies. 📈 Partnership professionals and executives in the startup space will get tremendous value from this conversation with Bob, who has worked in leadership roles at companies like Sony, LinkedIn, and Stripe! Check out the full episode today. More details in the comments.

I’ve always considered myself an analyst. From ExactTarget to LinkedIn to DataRobot, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to be a part of some world class teams. And, from my vantage point, the thing these organizations have in common is the culture they’ve built around sharing data to inspire performance. Yet, behind the scenes, there’s always been a patchwork of tools holding things together - a legacy BI platform, countless emails, and maybe some slides, making replication almost impossible for teams without armies of engineers. At least until now. I’m excited to share what Jason, Koren, Josh, Tony, Arwa and I have been up to. We’re on a mission to help teams rethink their relationship with data: how’s it’s visualized, explained, and the discussion surrounding it. We call it Writ and we’re just getting started. Stay tuned and reach out if you’d like to learn more! We’re humbled to be supported by some fantastic investors and founders: Darian @ Gradient Ventures, Bob @ defy.vc (h/t LinkedIn), the team @ High Alpha (forever ET Orange), and many more. More here: https://lnkd.in/e4zWwMtv

Deepak Tirumalasetty and I are excited to bring our expertise in running Fulfillment and marketplaces with Instacart and Amazon to local commerce delivery with this pre-seed round (linked below). Delivery Collective's mission is to decentralize local commerce delivery and provide merchants with a delivery platform to service and connect with their customers. We are starting with Food delivery as the first vertical for a few reasons - 1. Huge market - Restaurant sales are forecasted to exceed $1.1 trillion in the US in 2024. By 2030, $300 billion will be spent on online delivery and pickup. 2. Challenging economics - 3 out of 4 restaurants are not profitable due to the high delivery commission to marketplace apps, and due to this, consumers end up paying >36% more as price markups, high service, and delivery fees (see our Home page for comparison) 3. Lack of transparency - Restaurants don’t know who their customers are on Marketplace apps. They don’t own the customer data and cannot engage with them. 4. Consumer behavior - 7 out of 10 restaurant orders are from their existing customers, and most consumers order from 3 to 5 restaurants only. More than 4 out of 5 searches in Marketplace apps start with the restaurant’s name. Hence, there is strong loyalty even in this fragmented space! We just launched in a few Bay area cities—San Jose, Fremont, Newark, Dublin, and Pleasanton—with top brands like Idly Express. We aim to bring the Shopify effect to Food delivery, save ~6-10% of the restaurant sales as profits, and grow their direct delivery channel. Please reach out here if you are a restaurant. Thanks to Bob Rosin, Neil Sequeira, Benjamin Ling, Kyle Lui, Ryan Gembala, Brandon Schram, Adam G, Paul Irving, and Jay Jayaraman (SaaaS - Saapad as a Service) for their continued support. #FoodDelivery #Startups https://t.ly/jhiOr

I’m super excited to share that VectorShift has raised $3m seed round 🎉. Thank you to Y Combinator (Harj Taggar, Richard Aberman), 1984 Ventures (Ramy Adeeb, Mark Percival, Samit Kalra), Defy VC (Bob Rosin, Neil Sequeira, Brian Rothenberg, Adam P.),  Formus Capital (Cem Garih, Fethi Sabancı Kamışlı, Burak Karahasan, Emir Bölen, CFA), Soma Capital (Nikhita Jaaswal), 468 Ventures (Bernhard Janke, Bardo Droege),  Pioneer VC, and many more incredible investors on our cap table. 6 months ago, I was working at McKinsey & Company. I would stay up every night to 2-3am burning the midnight oil churning out excel models and powerpoint slides. Despite this, McKinsey taught me how to present to clients, engage with stakeholders, and approach every problem with analytical rigor. We applied to Y Combinator on a whim. Despite the fact that I am relatively non-technical, our group partners, Harj Taggar and Richard Aberman welcomed me with open arms and introduced me to the startup world. Thank you for your generosity, support, and advice. I couldn’t have imagined the journey since. Going through the Y Combinator S23 batch, I met some of the most humble and innovative people tackling the world's largest challenges. Founders who truly want to make a difference and change the world. Thank you to you all for being a part of my life and appreciate the opportunity to be a part of a startup community. At VectorShift, we are building the generative AI platform that allows businesses to build custom AI solutions for their repetitive tasks. We’ve helped thousands of teams already build AI search engines, assistants, and workflow automations. During my time at McKinsey, I met countless people from organizations of all sizes doing manual tasks and we want to make going to work better for you. With VectorShift, you can  + Centralize and live-sync your data across your applications + Search across your knowledge base + Define triggers and perform actions across your tools  + Build AI workflows either through no-code or through python SDK with complete interoperability Finally, I would like to thank the amazing VectorShift Team and my co-founder Alex Leonardi. We have the hardest working team - and we ship feature after feature after feature. I’m super excited for the future of VectorShift. Hard work consistently trumps other factors. If you are looking to leverage generative AI in your company, feel free to reach out!

Interested in working on AI or know anyone impacted by the recent tech layoffs? 𝐖𝐞'𝐫𝐞 𝐡𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠! Join us in building the future of AI-powered, human to human conversation. Here are a few roles: 𝐄𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 𝐄𝐱𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 https://lnkd.in/guBHENx9 𝐒𝐫. 𝐁𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐋𝐋𝐌 𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐫 https://lnkd.in/giVNgcTW Also feel free to reach out directly to our jobs email alias

Don't miss this conversation between Workato CEO Vijay Tella and defy.vc Partner Bob Rosin about AI & Automation in the Enterprise. RSVP here to be notified when we go live.