Hot in Enterprise IT/VC - What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #328
Here’s a PSA for everyone: more is not better, better is better. What I'm seeing across startup land from raising 💰 to closing customers, activity is 📈 while conversion 📉
Founders, u have limited resources, make sure to qualify early in process. More POCs ≠ more closed sales. 1 deal can change ur trajectory, but u can't chase all of 'em. Everyone’s feeling the pressure to do more with less, to justify their existence, to fill the pipeline, but this is the wrong way to view the world. Across the board, I’m seeing incredible amounts of energy expended on activity leading to more work and less results. More POCs does not equal more closed deals. More VC meetings does not mean more money raised. Take a deep breath, pause, and examine your funnel. Where are things breaking down? I promise you if you qualify better, you will have more time to focus on what truly matters. On the sales pipeline slide, how many board meetings have you been in where the pipeline keeps increasing, and yet you still don’t have predictability on closing and the revenue is still not pouring in. Not all pipelines are created the same, and many times this can give new founders a false sense of security by seeing a a growing pipeline. The reality is that these were never properly qualified in a process, i.e. defining a MQL (marketing qualified lead) to SQL (sales qualified lead) and turned into a real opportunity. These leads can be incredibly expensive to chase down if the upfront work has not been done. Go back to basics and stop reporting vanity metrics. Because of this poor sales pipeline definition and hygiene, founders and execs want to keep spending more money on marketing since the leads are still coming in and carry more sales folks to follow up on all of the leads. This becomes a death spiral - false confidence, more cash burned, and lower conversions. Less is more! Speaking of doing more with less, meet EdGPT, my new assistant. If you’re a new subscriber or want to know what’s in my head, EdGPT is trained on 6 years of newsletters and in the future I hope to add twitter and other audio clips to better train the model. Go ahead, ask me anything and thanks to friend @NicolaeRusan with HeyPal for getting this up and running. 👋🏼 I'm taking the next couple of months off.
EdGPT will be making all of my investment decisions and taking my board seats 🤣
try it here: heypal.chat/public/enterpr…
🙏🏼 @NicolaeRusan If you want your own assistant for your substack or website, reach out to Nicolae at HeyPal and point it to your support docs, website, videos, forum, or any text, and get an expert on your topic in seconds. I caught up with Nicolae (also co-founded Clay.run - a boldstart port co), about what he’s thinking when it comes to generative AI and here’s what he shared.
I agree with much of what Nicolae has to say and feel like this is a new era for SaaS applications. Frankly the last 5 years have become quite stale with little innovation on the application layer, and it will be an interesting battleground to see if existing SaaS apps with AI added to a massive installed base will continue to dominate, or if there is room for AI-first applications built from the ground up with these LLM models weaved into every aspect of the application. For me, I’m still trying to figure out the dev tooling angle to see if there is a turnkey layer to sit between the LLMs to enable mass adoption in apps - similar to how liveblocks (a boldstart portfolio co) enables real time collaboration in apps (see below). #LiveblocksLaunchWeek – Day 1
Introducing Liveblocks 1.0: the complete toolkit to modularly embed collaborative experiences into your product in days, not months.
→ liveblocks.io/blog/liveblock… BTW, this is not the first time chat bots dominated the scene as I’ve seen this movie before so many times 😃 (see what’s 🔥 #319 on my investment 20 years ago in Smarter Child). As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues. Also please don’t forget to have fun with EdGPT which is trained on 6 years of weekly newsletters and more data will be fed over time. Scaling Startups
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What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #327
Saturday, February 4, 2023
Hope springs eternal especially when it comes to AI
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #326
Saturday, January 28, 2023
On planning...Be Macro Aware, Micro Obsessed
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #325
Saturday, January 21, 2023
Startups as art: lessons from legendary music product Rick Rubin on creating music that feels like magic
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #324
Friday, January 20, 2023
The world has fully reset on round sizes at early stages - what does it mean for founders?
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #323
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Founders, control your own destiny, no acquihires in 2023
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