Norman Book

🏢 Big Moves in SF Commercial Real Estate! Intuit & Capital One 🏢 Two major financial firms are making strategic relocations within San Francisco: - Capital One is reducing its office space by two-thirds, moving from 201 3rd St. to 40,000 sq. ft. at 100 California St. This deal includes significant improvements to the new location, enhancing tenant experiences with new outdoor spaces and on-site amenities. - Intuit is downsizing from 200,000 sq. ft. at 22 4th St. to 36,500 sq. ft. at 505 Howard St. The move aims to leverage San Francisco's diverse talent pool while optimizing their workspace for future growth. These moves highlight the dynamic nature of SF's commercial real estate market and the need for adaptable, strategic office solutions. At Resource, we specialize in guiding companies through such transitions, ensuring seamless relocations and optimized space utilization. 🔗 Discover more about our tailored real estate services: yourresource.com #SFRealEstate #CommercialRealEstate #CapitalOne #Intuit #OfficeRelocation #RealEstateStrategy #ResourceCRE

33

1 Comment

Growth Strategy Advisors is a boutique consulting firm headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Our mission is to empower startup founders and early-stage companies as they navigate the complex landscape of Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies and sales acceleration. Here’s how we do it: Founder-Led Sales: We recognize that founders often play a pivotal role in the initial sales process. However, as companies scale and GTM motions become more intricate, a strategic shift is necessary. Our team steps in to guide founders through this transition, ensuring seamless growth without the typical pains associated with siloed teams and fragmented data1. GTM Strategy Definition: We work closely with founders to define their GTM strategy. This involves identifying target markets, customer segments, pricing models, and distribution channels. By aligning these elements, we create a cohesive plan that maximizes revenue potential. Sales Enablement: Our experts equip founders with the tools, training, and processes needed to build a high-performing sales engine. From lead generation to closing deals, we optimize every step of the sales cycle. Performance Tracking: Metrics matter! We help founders establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and track progress against them. Whether it’s pipeline growth, conversion rates, or customer lifetime value, we ensure data-driven decision-making. Cross-Functional Alignment: Effective GTM requires collaboration across departments. We bridge the gap between marketing, sales, finance, and legal teams, ensuring everyone is on the same page and working toward shared revenue goals.

8

We are landing in London on June 25th at 3 PM for the next leg of the DPE (Developer Productivity Engineering) City Tour, which will feature speakers from American Airlines, Netflix, Red Hat, Meta, Spotify, and Gradle Inc. These companies aren't just industry leaders, they are passionate #developerproductivity and #developerexperience experts who are ready to share their wisdom, scars, and thoughts on everything from developer portals built with Backstage from Spotify to having fun while making developers more productive! Thank you to Holly Cummins, Rui Maranhao Abreu, Aleksandra Polit, Jack Palmer, Roberto Pérez Alcolea 🇲🇽, Trisha Gee and Lucas De Souza for your commitment to the success of the event through these incredible talks! Once the talks are over, we are hosting a watch party (no need to fight for a place at a local pub) for the match between England and Slovenia with food, drinks, and a lot of local pride. So, throw on a jersey, come learn about developer productivity and be there to celebrate another English football victory! Register here and find more info --> https://lnkd.in/g8fQUudq #java #maven #devops #platformengineering #softwaredevelopment #android

60

5 Comments

DeepCast shipped a number of really cool new features recently in advance of a broad outreach push to podcast listeners. One new feature is our new Daily DeepDigest tool that sends you a concise daily email including any new episodes from the trailing 24 hours from any podcasts you Subscribe to (on DeepCast). Think daily podcast cliff notes or podcast news ticker tape, with a hint of Morning Brew various brews or PitchBook News—it's increasing information throughput when you're pressed for time. And this feature is rapidly evolving to distill other key extractions from shows you're already interested in, but also exposing you to other shows you might be unfamiliar with that also have nuggets to share—and thus increasing your aperture yet still conscious of your time. Want to go deeper on any given episode? Click the episode detail and you're off to an episode on DeepCast, where you can subsequently read a longer form distillation of that episode or go straight to the source and listen to the episode. (And podcaster friends, these pages are definitely increasing indexing and thus Google entry points to your shows!) I'm loving this feature as a user, personally. Can't wait to see what others think! #BuildingInPublic #Podcasts #AllTheWorldsInformation #HowYouWantIt

24

1 Comment

For those closest to me—be it founders, operators, or investors—you’ve probably found yourself unable to escape my excitement re: all things Vertical (Fintech) SaaS, especially during the past 6 months; occupational hazard I guess 😅. Bad jokes aside, I’m excited to finally share the fruits of that labor in form of this report and eager to trade notes and insights with other operators, founders and VCs who are equally passionate about the potential of Vertical SaaS. Check out the full blog post here: https://lnkd.in/gswiQijd #VerticalSaaS #EmbeddedFinance #Fintech #Investing

54

2 Comments

Dealmakers think a lot about how AI = (growth or industry disruption) = M&A. But what about their own ways of working? I look forward to a robust discussion next week on how generative AI impacts the business of M&A. #wheredealsaremade

5

This is serious. The company itself has acknowledged the risk now posed for it's customers: risk from the potential theft of authentication data as well as the possibility of being targeted for social engineering. I'l reiterate here: if you use or have used Dropbox Sign, formerly HelloSign, you need to consider the credentials for that service as compromised and take active countermeasures to prevent yourself from becoming a victim of cybercrime.

3

2 Comments

Check out this survey from our friends TSIA

5

"Microsoft Corp.’s earnings were “solid in so many ways,” in the view of Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes. And they’re poised to get a lot better for a number of reasons, he argued in a note Friday. For one, the company’s Azure cloud-computing business hasn’t had quite enough capacity to meet booming artificial-intelligence demand. Additionally, the company has only just begun to recognize financial benefits from its Copilot AI software features. Microsoft MSFT, +1.82% grew the Azure business at a 31% clip last quarter, and AI contributed 7% to that growth — up from 6% of AI contributions in the December quarter. And given capacity constraints, the contributions Microsoft just posted “could have been even better,” Reitzes wrote. “This growth backs the ‘AI Gold Rush’ we are seeing with staggering [capital-expenditure] figures and spending outlooks from the first big three clouds that have reported this week,” he wrote. “Microsoft seems to have an edge right now, growing the fastest on a huge revenue base — working through various constraints pretty darn well.”"

6

We provide fractional CFO help for companies looking to fundraise or do M&A. I'm always surprised when I review investor decks at the number of companies that provide TAM calculations which are top down, versus bottom up in nature. "Here is a generic link for an industry we operate in, and here is the rough market size we'll get to..." I'm not saying this is wrong, but if should be triangulated out with a bottom up calculation to get to TAM, SAM & SOM. These calculations help both a company and the individuals reviewing the deck understand which customers an entity is targeting, the subgroup within this, the geographies they are based in and the number of companies in each geography. It provides a timeline for initial customers that will be targeted, and market share reached (SOM), scaling up to more geographies and customers (SAM) and then what the total addressable market is (TAM). We're offering a free review and feedback of these calculations for any companies interested in exploring their TAM calculations further. Happy Monday all and have a cracking week.

56

4 Comments

For folks in my Bay Area network... Join me next week at HIGHER’s The State of TA breakfast briefing on Tuesday, June 18th at Chief Clubhouse San Francisco! I'm looking forward to catching up with a bunch of other TA leaders to discuss the challenges we’re all facing across the industry. It still feels like we are navigating uncertain times, but we'll do our best to make sense of it. I hope to see you there!! HIGHER’s The State of TA is grounded in detailed analysis from interviews with TA leaders across the US and Europe, alongside additional context provided by the panel. Here’s some of the topics we’ll cover: - Hiring and turnover: is this holding steady? - Talent quality: can this be defined and what key metrics do others use? - Talent teams: are we reaching the threshold for capacity and how do you bridge the gap between technology, efficiency, and capacity? - DEIB: is this falling down the priority list? Register today to secure your place: https://lnkd.in/gFd7TSE6 [eu1.hubs.ly] 

136

2 Comments

Very impressed with the Wevo Energy story and I share those feelings. It is never easy facing all challenges and complexities. #Podcast #StartupJourney #SolarEnergy #Entrepreneurship #WEVO #SolarEdge #Acquisition

7

We often get asked what the relationship between Wasm and unikernels is: they're complimentary! You can use unikernels to run Wasm in the cloud with strong, hardware-level isolation in a lightweight manner: the output below shows a Wasm blob running on kraft.cloud, consuming < 64MBs and cold starting in 20 milliseconds 🔥 The longer answer you can find in this blog post: https://lnkd.in/dPh6jfTw

49

It is a great privledge to be backing Stella Garber for a second time, as well as her sensational co-founders Brian Schmidt and Justin Gallagher. It’s also great to working with Index Ventures again, too. One thing I have learned in my venture career is that humans are lazy, and software that does simple things can feel like magic. Hoop uses AI to automatically harvest to do items from all of your communication channels. Today it’s single player, and in the future it will be your whole team. Read more about why we invested: https://lnkd.in/geTy-kyZ

20

13 Comments

Since leaving Amazon last year, I partnered with my college roommate and my closest friend of nearly 30 years, Dave Abouav, to build a new product from scratch. Our objective was to start small, solve an actual problem, and do so as cheaply as possible (since I'm not working). But more importantly we wanted to have fun doing it. It took 10 months of us coding the app ourselves, and EventForm (https://www.eventform.com) is now live. If you are looking for a great and free solution to manage registration for your upcoming event of up to 1000 people, give it a try and let me know your thoughts. A few thoughts on why we chose to build EventForm and why we built it the way we did: Solving an actual problem - I'm sure most of us have recently registered for an event by filling out a Google Form. Google Forms is a great product to quickly survey people about their interests and preferences, but it lacks additional functionality required for a truly efficient event registration management. In my past I've seen success in products which take an existing user need, demonstrated by the use of inefficient solutions, and offering more efficient solutions. Ideally users don't have to change their habits too much to adopt a new solution. Sort of PM 101 statement. EventForm builds on Google Forms and other Google services (Gmail, Calendar, Sheets, YouTube) rather than replaces them. Starting small - working at eBay and StubHub, I've seen many successful 3P companies which added value to our sellers with mission-oriented solutions for which eBay didn't have time, focus and resources. Solving a specific problem well could be rewarding in many ways. EventForm solves an existing need specifically for Google Workspace and Google services users. If you have a Gmail and a Google Calendar account, you can use EventForm for event registration management. Cheaply as possible - as I mentioned, I left my job in March '23, so with that there's no paycheck. I wasn't interested in fundraising. And my version of fun is doing something with my own hands while learning. So, we decided to take advantage of Google's Add-on platform called Apps Script. Basically all you need is a cheap laptop with internet access. You don't have to pay for compute or storage capacity. If you know or can learn JavaScript and HTML, you are good to go. I brushed off my JavaScript books from 20 years ago, and got to working. I haven't had this much fun in a long time. Of course some days felt like a grind, but solving coding problems proved to be incredibly satisfying. To help with UX and logo design, as well as tidying up some of my HTML/CSS, I hired people on Fiverr. All in we've spent less than $1,000. Hope you give it a try. Would love to hear your thoughts.

175

34 Comments

SFTW Startup Spotlight returns after a bit of a break. This month I highlight #artificialintelligence and #robotics company FarmWise Access to farm labor is a big challenge here in California (and in many other parts of the world). Labor can be up to 50% of your production costs in specialty crops Farmwise is tackling this challenge head on, with their AI powered mechanical weeding robotic implements (Vulcan!) and taking advantage of convergence of a few different technologies with a bold mission and vision "Enable growers and ag equipment OEMs to reimagine every farming task with machinery that can perceive, understand, and act at the plant level in real time" The startup spotlight from SFTW does a deep dive into -Farmwise's philosophy and a vision for a different way to farm -Deep dive into their technology (my favorite part!) -Their flexible and modular architecture -Use of foundation models (another topic I like to think about) -Business model, and most importanlty, -The team behind Farmwise led by industry veterans Tjarko Leifer and Greg Chiocco, and a diverse motivated team Link in the first comment #agriculture #california #agtech

76

4 Comments

In a dynamic industry like SaaS, staying ahead means understanding key metrics like the Rule of 40! Thomvest's analysis provides invaluable data on growth and profitability trends, offering crucial benchmarks for SaaS companies striving for success. These benchmarks can serve as a reference point for SaaS companies to evaluate their own performance and make strategic decisions. Thomvest 2024 SaaS Benchmarks. Slower Growth, Steadier Margins… | by Alex Rohrbach | Apr, 2024 | Writings from Thomvest Ventures https://lnkd.in/gGFw4p6Z .

4