Sarah Guo

The Forbes 2024 Cloud 100 List is live ☁ Congrats to all the honorees – the world's top 100 private cloud companies –including the 3 healthcare and life sciences companies featured this year: • Benchling - biotech R&D platform • Komodo Health - healthcare data analytics • Abridge - AI for clinical documentation For more on how AI is colliding with cloud computing, check out Bessemer Venture Partners's 2024 Cloud 100 report. Personally I'm focused on advancements in multi-modal AI, as applied to biomedical applications (Trend 3!): https://lnkd.in/euzurvQV

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🌟Innovative VC Firm Overcomes Exits Drought with Secondary Sales🌟 ⛵Navigating a challenging landscape where exits are scarce, Santa Barbara Venture Partners (SBVP) has pioneered a novel approach to sustain its growth and attract investors for its second fund: secondary sales. Instead of waiting for traditional exits like IPOs or acquisitions, SBVP opted to sell shares of its portfolio companies, demonstrating its ability to generate returns for investors and stand out in a competitive market. 🎤According to Dan Engel, founder and managing partner of SBVP, these secondary transactions have been a game-changer, sparking investor interest and bolstering the firm's credibility. By leveraging its recent successes, including a lucrative stake in sports-betting company DraftKings Inc.' acquisition of digital lottery app Jackpocket, SBVP seized the opportunity to return profits to its limited partners (LPs) and pave the way for its second fund. 💡Engel highlighted the challenges faced by young VC firms in raising subsequent funds, particularly amid a downturn in exit activity and heightened investor scrutiny. With traditional exit routes becoming increasingly elusive, the pressure is on for firms to demonstrate tangible returns and establish a track record of success. ✨"For us, secondary sales have been a game-changer. They've helped us return profits to our LPs and attract investors for our second fund," said Dan Engel. 💰For SBVP, the decision to pursue secondary sales was driven by the need to provide liquidity to LPs and validate its investment thesis in the eyes of prospective investors. By strategically offloading portions of its holdings in high-performing portfolio companies like Bark Technologies and Rad AI, SBVP not only generated substantial returns but also bolstered investor confidence in its ability to deliver results. ⚠Despite the complexities and potential stigma associated with early share sales, Engel emphasized the importance of prioritizing investor returns and seizing opportunities to unlock value for stakeholders. With a focus on profitability and transparency, SBVP remains committed to its mission of delivering sustainable growth and maximizing returns for its LPs. 🔍 "Returning profits to our investors is our top priority. By strategically selling shares, we're proving our commitment to delivering results and driving value for our stakeholders," added Engel. As SBVP continues to explore secondary transactions and expand its investor base, the firm stands as a testament to innovation and resilience in the face of market challenges. 🚀 ✅ Looking to raise capital for your #fund and increase the international pool of your LP #investors?   🤝 Need warm #LP introductions?   📝 Selling #secondaries to increase liquidity?   🧐 Looking for co-investments?   ▶ G+QUANT's link for inquiries and fund decks: https://lnkd.in/gjC_EuTE #VCInnovation #SecondarySalesSuccess #InvestorReturns #ValueCreation 

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Insightful breakdown from my great Partner Omri Amirav-Drory on the simple factors that really separate the top 1% of investors from the rest, and how more operators should become investors! https://lnkd.in/gEiZdT2h

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Today, we’re announcing our second fund of $450m to support our mission of partnering with early stage software companies that leverage technology discontinuities into go-to-market advantages. This marks the next chapter in our firm’s evolution. Since we launched Theory Ventures in 2023, we’ve gathered a wonderful team : Lauren DeMeuse, Spencer Farrar, Andy Triedman, Rafa Jara Simkin, Amber (., Arjun Mishra, & Kristin Beach. We have partnered with 8 marvelous founding teams, all using data to power the next wave of innovation across the Modern Data Stack, Artificial Intelligence, & Web3. We’ve grown our fund size to match the needs of founders in this market : average Series A rounds have increased 42% since our launch, a reflection of the growth potential of these software categories. I’m grateful to our team, our founders, & our limited partners for the continued support, & to Allie Garfinkle for sharing more about Theory (https://lnkd.in/gmD7zjSP).

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🎭 𝗖𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝘆 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗿𝗼𝗹𝗲𝘀! Henry Draper from Albany Partners shared a number of great insights from their 2024 CTO Compensation Report at this week's CTO Craft Con in London (link to video in comments) I frequently write about company culture specifically its impact on technology teams and unsurprisingly I was drawn to the data below. 41% 𝗼𝗳 𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗿𝗼𝗹𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗼𝗳 𝗳𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗶𝗻 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲. (𝗦𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘀𝗶𝘇𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝘀 520) 👑 𝗖𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 The culture of a company is often a bi-product of its leadership. So, it is not a surprise there is a correlation between leadership and culture, solving these issues will: 🔁 reduce your churn ⬇️ reduce re-hiring costs ⏳ reduce delays to delivering value to your customers I would point out that "poor line management" was also identified as a separate factor which is also a leadership trait. Other top reasons for looking to find a new role included: 📈 Company Performance 🚀 Purpose / Mission 💰 Compensation What are your thoughts on the data below? Share your thoughts in the comments below👇🏽 #technology #culture #compensation #leadership #hiring #retention

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In this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with notable X personality Trung Phan about the evolving social media landscape, and how to tame the mayhem and pandemonium of X. https://lnkd.in/dVHMzbui

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Managing production software, and especially "root causing" issues, whether at the infra or app layer, continues to be a growing challenge despite the success of companies like Datadog. I have looked at applying deep learning to this problem since 2017 when we worked with Gurashish Brar & Mohit Gupta to incubate Opas.ai. The team was exceptional, and they even hired a great SDR (me 😜 ). We learnt the hard way that it was too early and #AI was just not ready. A lot has changed since in terms of data infrastructure (check out Conviva's Operational Data Platform), causal inference models and LLMs. Jaya Gupta and I are excited to take another whack at this market, which we call #AgentSRE to distinguish from the outdated #AIOps framing. If you are building an #AgentSRE company, ping us. https://lnkd.in/gvBgfN7k

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Just finished reading "The Next Giant Leap" by Space Capital - a pioneering VC investing in the emerging Space Economy. The report speaks to how SpaceX’s Starship is more than just the most powerful rocket ever built—it is poised to reshape the global space economy in profound ways. With its immense payload capacity, reusable design, and lower cost per launch, Starship will unlock entirely new industries and transform existing business models. But how should industries and businesses evolve to align with this paradigm shift? 📈 Rethinking Business Strategies & Supply Chains - For businesses, Starship represents an era of mass-production over precision engineering. This means moving away from the focus on mass efficiency toward cost-effective, redundant, and scalable production. - In terms of supply chains, this opens opportunities for new players in manufacturing, materials, and space components. The demand for off-the-shelf parts and non-aerospace suppliers will rise dramatically. 💡 New Use Cases & Opportunities   The opportunities Starship unlocks go beyond launching satellites. - In-space manufacturing of high-value products like pharmaceuticals and advanced materials that cannot be created on Earth. - Mega-constellations of satellites for global broadband, expanding on what Starlink has already begun. - In-orbit assembly and servicing, allowing for larger space structures like telescopes or even habitats to be built in orbit, radically reducing costs. - Lunar infrastructure and resource extraction will become more viable, paving the way for sustainable human presence on the Moon and, eventually, Mars. 📊 What Should Businesses Do Now?   1. Embrace Redundancy & Scale – Instead of focusing on one-off, high-cost solutions, businesses should embrace redundancy and mass production.    2. Simplify Design – With Starship’s payload capacity, there is less pressure to optimize for mass efficiency. Simplified, scalable designs will allow for faster production and iteration cycles, akin to how SpaceX rapidly tests and evolves Starship itself. 3. Develop Strategic Partnerships – Collaborating with forward-thinking space startups, suppliers, and even non-aerospace sectors will be essential to capitalize on the opportunities Starship provides. 🌌 A New Era of Innovation   Starship will democratize access to space, lowering the barriers for businesses to create and scale. The next decade will witness breakthroughs in scientific exploration, energy production, and in-space transportation that we can only begin to imagine today. #SpaceEconomy #Starship #Innovation #SupplyChain #Manufacturing #SpaceTech #Entrepreneurship #FutureOfSpace https://lnkd.in/gNdbwXdq

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At the heart of all business transformations are: 1. Reduction in opex 2. Investment in new/better revenue streams That’s it, that’s the list.

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We're launching the inaugural edition of Beyond Benchmarks, a deep dive into the metrics and trends observed across the early-stage enterprise cloud market. This is the first look at some of the business data around GenAI in SaaS. Some initial observations: 1) 60% of SaaS companies have already integrated GenAI into their offerings (60% of these as part of their current product and 40% as a new product), and an additional 20% are planning to do so this year. Almost half aren't monetizing these features. Those that are are primarily experimenting with both usage-based and flat fee pricing models. 2) Most companies are utilizing OpenAI as their primary LLM, but many are experimenting with multiple models - and we are noticing an early trend towards intelligently routing GenAI inference requests to different models based on cost, performance, and security. 3) Though we are in the initial innings of GenAI, we are seeing some positive signals - companies that implemented GenAI had 7% higher NDR than those that did not. Still early days, but we'll be doing this benchmarking report regularly to track and share how things progress in this new era. Link to report in comments.

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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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Want a front-row seat to the frontier of tech? We’ve got the role (or two) for you! We’re expanding our frontier-tech team at Blackbird by hiring a Frontier Tech Investments Associate and Foundry Fellows! Got questions? We've got answers... 1️⃣ What are the roles? 🧪 Associate = a full-time VC investment gig in our Blackbird Investments team, working directly with me. We’re looking for someone with a science and/or engineering background and more curiosity than they can handle. You’ll grow your own investment brand and practice, support our portfolio founders, and will help build Foundry, our early-stage frontier-tech accelerator. ✨ Foundry Fellow = a casual/contract gig in our Blackbird Investments team, ~15h per week for 3 months. The Fellowship is ideal for PhD students and ECRs who want to learn more about startups and VC. You’ll go deep on emerging areas relevant to your expertise (or curiosity!), get a front-row seat to groundbreaking companies in those areas, build out your non-academic network, and develop a solid writing practice. 2️⃣ Why are you hiring? We love frontier tech, and we’re ready to grow our team. 3️⃣ Wow, it’s so great that you’re starting to look at deep tech! Look, we get it: we don’t make a lot of noise about our frontier tech investing. Buuuut we’ve been deep-tech investors since we backed Tim Kentley-Klay to found Zoox back in 2014—we’ve been on incredible journeys with PsiQuantum (building the world's first utility-scale quantum computer right here in Australia!), Inventia Life Science (transforming drug discovery with high-fidelity cell models), Remedy Robotics (surgical robots for remote endovascular procedures), Opto Biosystems (minimally-invasive neural implants to treat cancer), and more. We believe that frontier technologies, and great frontier-tech investing, will be part of the solutions to the greatest problems humanity faces today. 4️⃣ When do applications close? May 31st at 11:59pm AEST. 5️⃣ I have more questions! I’m sure you do! Clare Birch and I are hosting an AMA to answer any and all questions about these roles. Want to know what a week in the life of our team looks like? What’s keeping us up at night? What our ideal candidate looks like? Come along and find out - registration link in the comments 👇 Apply for these roles: Associate - https://lnkd.in/gCfj4EUJ Foundry Fellowships - https://lnkd.in/gj6ATZVZ If you know anyone that we should meet, send me their details! Cameron Elise Ben Andrew Robin Joseph Adelaide James Olivia Lucinda Raghav Jesse Christie Mohamed Tom Amee Pablo Haya Loong Hon Joshua Benjamin Megan Harry Denzil Matthew Diana Daniel Tom Deanna Justin Amar Lilly Stone Thomas

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Introducing the Google Cloud Private Marketplace, now generally available. Private Marketplace allows cloud administrators to create a curated collection of vetted software and solutions that integrate with Google Cloud and align with your organization’s cost, security, and compliance policies. Empower your end users to explore pre-approved tools without compromising on governance and cost control. Read the blog to learn more. #GoogleCloudMarketplace #GCP #GoogleCloud #Marketplace #Software

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My Three-Day AWS re:Invent Experience: A Strategic VC Perspective (Disclaimer: First Timer) The conference was a massive event, rivaling nearly 60-70% of CES's scale, which is typically the largest gathering in Las Vegas. The sheer size was evident in the crowded, standing-room-only receptions and dinners - though I unfortunately missed three VC-hosted Wed dinners due to a conflicting event in San Francisco. (And TBH, more than 3 days in Vegas is overwhelming!) From a strategic standpoint, AWS's engagement with venture capitalists is brilliantly multifaceted. By hosting VC-targeted sessions, I think they are achieving three key objectives: 1. Market Intelligence: VCs serve as AWS's real-time sensors for emerging trends and startup ecosystem pain points. 2. Business Expansion: They can seamlessly connect portfolio companies with AWS's powerful platforms like Bedrock and SageMaker. 3. Talent Scouting: VCs can potentially identify and introduce promising acquisition targets to AWS. Key Takeaways: AWS demonstrated remarkable agility and market responsiveness through several noteworthy announcements: - A unified platform in SageMaker - More efficient architectural training via HyperPod and dynamic accelerator allocation - Opening the Bedrock marketplace - Implementing intelligent prompt routing The comprehensiveness of AWS's offerings presents both an opportunity and a challenge for startups. While AWS provides incredible tools, emerging companies must sharpen their go-to-market strategies and focus on unique value propositions. A particularly exciting announcement was the Bedrock Data automation capability. If executed as promised, this could revolutionize how unstructured, multi-modal content is transformed into structured training data. My attendance at two VC roundtables - focusing on AI and Silicon (Trainium) - further reinforced AWS's impressive technical depth and strategic vision. Kudos to the AWS team for an exceptional conference! BTW, the attached picture is from the Visionaries in the Stadium at Allegiant Stadium. Well, it was too much going on for me - I left after 30 minutes. 😅 + The strategic placement of Luma AI in the main keynote speaks volumes about a16z's network influence. #AWSreInvent #AIInfrastructure #VentureCapital #TechInnovation #KudosAWSTeam #SpecialThankstoJasonGuesman #VisionariesintheStadium #LittleToomuch

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As we dive into 2024, the Series A fundraising landscape is becoming increasingly daunting. Investment standards are soaring, and fewer startups are making the cut. Series A investors are finding many seed stage companies too premature. The median valuation jump from seed to Series A skyrocketed from $19.5 million in Q1 2022 to $28.7 million in Q1 2024. Investors now demand stronger revenue performance, targeting $2 million to $3 million in ARR, up from $1 million to $2 million. Alarmingly, only 12% of Q1 2022 seed startups secured Series A funding within two years, down from 31.8% in Q1 2020. #venture #earlystage #seedtoseriesa #seed #seriesa #inspireglobalventures https://lnkd.in/gW4bkcNy

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Are we ready to move from Software-as-a-Service to Service-as-Software or Outcome-as-aService? Joanne Chen's recent Forbes article suggests that #AI empowers tech builders to deliver not just software, but the desired outcomes their clients wanted to use their software for in the first place. By doing so, they can 30x their TAM to target the $4.6 trillion global services market. Box's founder Aaron Levie made a similar point on X. “Think of it this way: Salesforce [...] generates only $35 Bn in revenue annually and will grow incrementally. Global companies spend $1.1 trillion on S&M salaries each year. The size of the opportunity for AI disruption is many multiples larger than Salesforce could ever be.” I love this idea. And it's no doubt what's driving investments to turn AI from an enabler to a real enterprise productivity driver. However, I've experienced combining SaaS with services. What I learned is that there is a huge mindset shift for entrepreneurs to make this happen: changing the model from a means to an end. I’m not even talking about the fact that AI is still far from delivering what it will. I’m an optimist and I see a lot of amazing entrepreneurs solving the challenges to bridge the gap from promise to reality. But to deliver the end results your customers want, you need to be ready to shift from being responsible for just providing the means to being accountable in providing the end. When I took over Linkfluence, the company was still operating under a hybrid model with roughly 50% of software revenue and 50% services revenue. While this was in theory attractive because we could deliver a managed service and prove the value of our technology much faster, it also came with a number of issues - and not just scalability which AI can and should address: - We had issues with having to iterate based on briefs that were either not clear or not well understood by our team. - Clients couldn’t really understand the scope of our technology as they didn’t experience it first hand. - And however good and knowledgeable our team was, they couldn’t have as much context as internal employees - even though we often had people spend a lot of time on clients’ premise. In the end, we refocused the scope of our services to make it an enabler to our software and not the end game. Of course, this is just one data point. But in order to deserve the higher value of delivering the end result, SaaS leaders need to really think about whether they’re ready to do that - and what they need to change in their culture, GTM and organization beyond making AI capable of delivering it. SaaS founders - I’d love to hear your thoughts: are you preparing to move from software to services as you invest in AI? Sources in the first comment Image (outcome...) by Dall-E

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