Scale Venture Partners

We created a tool to help founders see where they need to be and how fast they need to be growing to stay on the path to IPO. Read more about the Mendoza Line for SaaS and input your own numbers to see where your startup falls. https://lnkd.in/gc6vwhEt

Getting closer to customers is the best way to identify patterns of needs, mitigate churn, and find opportunities for expansion. This has never been more important for startups. In Q1 of this year, growth from existing customers was nearly the same as growth from new customers. Scale EIR Zack Urlocker shares a handful of techniques to get back to basics and deepen customer relationships. https://lnkd.in/gTXAgbcV

Wiz is back in the news with a reported $23B acquisition from Google on the table. We believe that cloud security is at a massive inflection point, and there continues to be incredible opportunities for founders building in this space. Read more from Shayan Shafii on the next generation of cloud security. https://lnkd.in/g_5AeBsy

In sports, there are the true greats. The athletes who have been undeniable since day one. But for every GOAT (LeBron), there are hundreds more whose fate is unclear (Bronny). So, how do we know who is going to make it? We're always asking ourselves a similar question: how do you know if a startup is on the path to greatness? Six years ago, Partner Rory O'Driscoll coined the Mendoza Line for SaaS: the ARR growth rate at every stage of a company above which they are on track to IPO (and a good candidate for venture backing). Scale associate Edi Danalache refreshed that analysis and contextualized it for today's market. The bottom line? You need to grow faster for longer to reach IPO scale in today's market. Read the full post for more analysis, details behind the data, and plot your own numbers to see where you fall on the line. https://lnkd.in/gc6vwhEt

Product marketing is one of the unsung heroes of proper GTM execution. Peter Giordano curated the key takeaways from Scale's product marketing council led by Lauren Vaccarello and Mini Peiris, including quick wins that can make a nearly immediate difference. https://lnkd.in/g2s-63j3

Scale Partner Jeremy Kaufmann joined DrinksWithAVC to discuss his journey to venture, building an AI company from zero, and how to be an introvert in VC. Watch the full podcast here: https://lnkd.in/gpTa_idx

Our New Ideas in AI series introduces CEOs and builders to the leading academics and thinkers at the cutting edge of AI research. This month, we had the honor of featuring Archit S. and Rafael Rafailov, two of the authors of the 2023 NeurIPS Outstanding Paper “Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model” (aka the DPO paper). Their DPO paper introduces an alternative to the complex, costly, and time-intensive process RLHF, the previous gold standard which gave OpenAI an early lead in the LLM race. Read more from Maggie Basta and watch the full video from the talk at the link in the comments.

Our New Ideas in AI series introduces CEOs and builders to the leading academics and thinkers at the cutting edge of AI research. This month, we had the honor of featuring Archit S. and Rafael Rafailov, two of the authors of the 2023 NeurIPS Outstanding Paper “Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model” (aka the DPO paper). Their DPO paper introduces an alternative to the complex, costly, and time-intensive process RLHF, the previous gold standard which gave OpenAI an early lead in the LLM race. Read more from Maggie Basta and watch the full video from the talk at the link in the comments.

Selling your first $1 million deal is a watershed moment for startups. It validates the value of your product and signals to the market that you've arrived as an enterprise application. Landing these deals requires a specific type of end-to-end execution. Scale EIR Roger Arnemann digs into the core principles that get early stage startups to $1 million deals faster. https://lnkd.in/dFakQ9rZ

Despite more organizations adopting RevOps as an operating model, not everyone is fully leveraging its true power. Scale EIR Robert Koehler digs into three primary challenges facing RevOps teams today and how RevOps leaders are approaching them. https://lnkd.in/gP4-7fc9