Mike Burshteyn - CEO, CryptoMove As CryptoMove’s Founder & CEO, Mike Burshteyn drives all company business strategy and execution. Before starting CryptoMove with his father, Boris, Mike was a cybercrime and data protection attorney. At Perkins Coie he worked with leading technology companies like Google, Uber, Amazon, and Microsoft, as well as startups in hypergrowth, on data privacy, security, intellectual property, and computer crimes. Mike was the #1 ranked college debater in America at UC Berkeley. What does CryptoMove bring to the marketplace? CryptoMove protects data with continuous fragmentation and moving target defense. Current data protection methods leave sensitive data, keys, and secrets as an easy stationary target at rest. CryptoMove’s key vault product is all about protecting authentication tokens, API keys, application secrets, SSH keys for cloud services, and secrets for containers and Kubernetes. Developers who do cloud native development or use cloud services, today, find it difficult to manage keys and secrets at scale. CryptoMove has this revolutionary technology that can help to solve those challenges. If you’re working with cloud services, if you’re working with containers, an effective secrets management tool like CryptoMove can increase your speed of development, make life easier for developers, and also provide additional security. What was your motivation while building up CryptoMove? What was your drive pushing you forward? It all started with my co-founder and our CTO, Boris. He invented this technology. For decades during his career he was building distributed systems and he was always thinking about how to do that more efficiently and more effectively. Thinking about the question of “what happens if encryption fails” led Boris to developing CryptoMove. When he needed a business partner, that’s when I ended up quitting my job and joining in. By the way, we are a family business — my co-founder is actually my dad. TL;DR: my dad invented this technology and needed help with the business so I jumped in. What do you think is the most challenging thing you’re facing at CryptoMove? That’s a great question. There are so many challenges with a startup all the time. I think that right now the biggest challenge that we are facing is this idea of how do you scale the organization. We’ve been experiencing a lot of growth: new customers, new users, new team members. Every time that you experience significant growth in the company it seems like everything has to get rebuilt in terms of the processes, whatever everyone is working on and whatever everyone is focused on. Being able to do that rapidly and in a way that maintains a really high standard for execution is a big challenge. Can you tell me a little more about your background before starting CryptoMove? I grew up in the Bay Area and my parents are both software engineers. They used to work at all kinds of startups and tech companies. When the dot-com bubble burst, I remember asking my parents “where did the traffic go?” because all the roads cleared up. So, I kind of grew up around tech. I ended up in college at Cal — most of my time was spent on the debate team, where we were ranked number one in America. We would research all sorts of different topics and actually one of the things that I researched quite heavily was cybersecurity and data protection. After college, I ended up working at a startup. It was a great opportunity to learn a little bit about all the different ups and downs and parts of the startup, and I ended up starting my own ecommerce business focused on debate research for students, which was fun. Soon after college, I ended up going to law school and became an attorney. As a lawyer, I ended up in this practice group at Perkins Coie doing data security, cyber crime, intellectual property, litigation, and privacy. We were working for technology companies, startups, big ones, small ones. I had a lot of exposure to cleaning up messes, such as API keys improperly checked into GitHub. Now, coincidentally, CryptoMove’s product is meant to avoid that. Meanwhile, my dad was working on CryptoMove in stealth, prototyping it. We were helping with the patents and standard legal work. What he really needed, though, was a business partner. So I went to my bosses at the law firm and they encouraged me to take the leap. That was about 3 years ago. Out of all of your experience, what do you think best prepared you for your current role? I don’t necessarily think any one thing prepared me. Frankly, every day and every challenge we encounter is something new and unique. It’s all about being flexible. My approach is generally to try to learn as much as possible from people around me. There seem to be a lot of startups where founders knew they wanted to start a company and they took a very deliberate path towards doing that. In the case of CryptoMove, it kind of just happened and wasn’t necessarily our plan. We’re just trying to do the best we can, taking advantage of opportunities. Going back to the first day of working on your startup, what advice would you give yourself? Apply to the Alchemist Accelerator, which we actually did. Not on the first day, but a couple weeks afterward. I would definitely do that again. I would just try to iterate as rapidly as possible. I think that’s something that I would say could benefit any startup. Create a hypothesis, test it quickly, and iterate and move on. CryptoMove today, our product, our go to market strategy, everything about the company, could not have been predicted 3 years ago. It took a process of rapid iteration. That’s been really important. What was the most valuable thing you learned from Alchemist? Alchemist was huge for CryptoMove and for a lot of companies in our class. We were first time founders and even though we had a lot of startup experience, we had never raised VC funding. Alchemist set us up for our first investor, Tim Draper and Draper Associates. We met at an Alchemist Investor Feedback Summit. Alchemist set us up with our first customer, which was the Department of Homeland Security via a scouting program they had, that led them to look at Alchemist start ups. Just working with Danielle, Ravi, Ash, and everyone helped give us the building blocks of the common pitfalls that you face in a startup. Even now, Danielle is an observer on our board. We have continued to work closely with Alchemist. Across the board it was really valuable to us. If you could do Alchemist again what would you do differently? I think that there are things that we did while we were in Alchemist that in retrospect we shouldn’t have done. For instance, we spent a lot of time going to a bunch of pitch events with corporations. In some cases they were helpful but there is a lot of corporate innovation tourism that is easy to get sucked into. When we were working on our product and asking users for feedback, that was the most valuable thing. In many cases, corporate innovation teams are just cycling through Silicon Valley almost like they are at a zoo. It’s a common pitfall for a startup, especially at that early stage. When you meet with big companies you think you can get a big contract with them, but in reality they’re just enjoying the scenery and taking some notes on startups. Alchemist calls this “corporate tourism.” Just to take note of what really qualifies a lead and whether there is corporate innovation tourism going on can save a lot of wasted cycles. What entrepreneurial lesson took you the longest to learn or are still learning? I think that there are different lessons for different people. For me one of the biggest adjustments I’ve had to make is that in a startup there are ups and downs every single day. Especially as the company gets bigger, you could have massive wins in one area and fires in another area happening simultaneously. You can’t ride that emotional rollercoaster. Also, since I was a lawyer and I was a litigator, I was doing a very specific type of work that required being extremely aggressive, either defending client interests or going after cyber criminals. There’s a shift in style. There definitely was an adjustment period. I can’t write long emails anymore and definitely don’t check all my punctuation. Obviously, you can’t negotiate a business deal the same way you negotiate a settlement in a lawsuit. What constitutes success for you, personally? For me, for my co-founder, and I think, for everyone at work, success at CryptoMove means different things for different people. But, we all are excited about what we’re doing, about building a new product from scratch. Take CryptoMove’s technology, this idea of moving target defense and moving target data protection, which no one has ever heard of before. People think it’s crazy when they first hear about it. We’ve got this really innovative technology, patented globally, that is really changing how organizations such as our government and military protects its data. That is exciting. In some ways success is being able to do it for another day, because it means we’re growing. Startups are always on a fixed timeline. There’s a runway. You’re always trying to get to that next level. As long as we can wake up and keep doing it, we know that we’re succeeding. Do you have any insights that you want to share to the next generation of Alchemist Accelerator founders? It is really great to take advantage of the Alchemist network. There are people with expertise in different areas and you can fast forward a bunch of learning by engaging with the right people. At the same time, you have to really be careful about applying advice to the specific context of your business. I think that there’s so many resources, especially in the Alchemist network that can be leveraged. Do you have any insights for the next generation of entrepreneurs who are specifically manipulating and working with data? When it comes to data, in the security space and for security startups, it’s such a crowded (and overfunded) market that it can difficult to stand out. We’ve done certain things, like making our product SaaS first. We really focus on our users, which are developers, devops people, security engineers, rather than just trying to sell to IT managers. It’s a very different approach than what you’ll see with most security startups. In today and tomorrow’s worlds, data may very well become the most important resource — as impactful and as distributed as oil. Given this, CryptoMove’s data protection innovation via fragmentation and continuous movement and mutation is vital. About the Alchemist Accelerator Alchemist is a venture-backed initiative focused on accelerating the development of seed-stage ventures that monetize from enterprises (not consumers). The accelerator’s primary screening criteria is on teams, with primacy placed on having distinctive technical co-founders. We give companies around $36K, and run them through a structured 6-month program heavily focused on sales, customer development, and fundraising. Our backers include many of the top corporate and VC funds in the Valley — including Khosla Ventures, DFJ, Cisco, and Salesforce, among others. CB Insights has rated Alchemist the top program based on median funding rates of its grads (YC was #2), and Alchemist is perennially in the top of various Accelerator rankings. The accelerator seeds around 75 enterprise-monetizing ventures / year. Learn more about applying today.
Derek Chau - Partner, Acorn Pacific Ventures Over his career, Derek has been involved in over $3.5B of private and public company acquisitions. Prior to Acorn Pacific, he was the co-founder of a machine learning company in the news aggregation space and also served as the COO of a leading-edge government software company. He is a CFA charterholder and also actively mentors companies in the Dartmouth and Harvard alumni networks. Can you tell me about your background? I was an executive at a couple of software companies ranging from a 300–400 person enterprise software company, down to a startup level software company. Prior to that I was mostly in corporate finance. Out of all your experience, what do you think best prepared you for your role in Venture Capital? I served a lot of senior level operations, seeing — for a lack of better words — a lot of blocking and tackling. Dealing with a lot of headaches on the operational level really prepares you to understand what it takes to scale a company. I also had some experience operating a very small startup, working with my own team, bringing everything together, and raising capital. Can you tell me more about Acorn? What is the approximate size of your fund? How much do you normally invest? Acorn is a network of funds. Acorn Pacific Ventures is the fund with myself and three other partners. Acorn was founded about 18–19 years ago as one of the first Chinese Americans funds here in the Valley, funded by a number of very successful Chinese American entrepreneurs in industry. They banded together with the vision to give back to the community, investing in founders and supporting that ecosystem. Over time that morphed into a series of funds. Acorn Pacific is the forefront here in the valley. There are a couple funds in Taiwan and one in Shanghai, and a partner fund in Singapore. Between that ecosystem, we invest in founders and in their vision. We also look for companies that over time have an international component and can leverage our cross border experience. Things like optimizing supply chains and technology transfer. How does your fund differ from other funds? There are two main factors. Whereas a lot of funds have good operational people, at Acorn we bring together all of our operational teams. From the very first founders, it is a requirement that we bring in people who have seen it from a variety of standpoints. Everything from robotics to supply chain optimization to software. We look for people who’ve been through it and have got battle scars. People who understand how it works and are very sympathetic to founders, understanding what it’s like to raise capital and scale a company. Understand what it’s like to go through the good times and the bad times. Can you tell me about how you make decisions in investments? We try not to be overly formal. We don’t run traditional investment communities. Rather, we want people to meet people. So, the operating partners and GPs at Acorn want to work with folks. We want you to meet the folks who are going to be helpful and who are going to be working day to day with you. As those conversations go over time and people become more comfortable, we run through our diligence. That is our process. We of course make unanimous decisions about the partnership. Once we are invested we get behind the company, working through the good times and bad. How do you deal with cold calls and e-mails? Do you have any advice for entrepreneurs trying to reach out to the VCs? It’s very very hard. We don’t put a lot of weight on them. We’re not trying to exclude cold emails and cold calls, but it’s very difficult to get our attention. It’s not a deal that’s introduced by someone in our broad network, which can be very broad. We’re not going to give it a lot of weight unfortunately. By chance you may get our attention and may get a response but it’s pretty rare. What’s the number one red flag you see that makes you pass on investment? There’s a lot of flags that we look for. A team dynamic is really important to us. First and foremost we invest in people. If we see that the team of founders or co-founders are not gelling or there’s some dynamic that’s missing there or if the team is not cohesive, that’s big flag for us. If we feel the technology is something we don’t feel that there’s much defensibility in, that’s another piece that could also raise a lot of questions. I don’t think there’s ever just one flag so to speak. Can you tell me more about your investment in MetaData with Gil? We met Gil probably a couple of years ago, and at that point the company was still very young. First and foremost I liked Gil. He had very good passion when he spoke. The market he is in is a very crowded space. It’s one that I traditionally did not spend a lot of time in, but there was something that was interesting about Gil. After the first meeting, we continued to keep in touch. He did what he said he would do in terms of delivering, in terms of top line, in terms of product, and customer traction. Transparency was really important to us and and Gil was super transparent. When we talked, we could tell he had a lot of candor and things clicked. We could also tell he cared very much about making the best out of his company and also being successful for his investors. The fit was there in terms of the people. How do you identify passion in entrepreneurs? It’s hard to boil it down to a few characteristics. The advice I give to all founders is to be true to yourself. If you’re not true to yourself, we can see through that. If it’s not something you are passionate about it’s, for a lack of a better word, fake. Obviously. In Gil’s case, he was in an industry he spent a lot of time in. That’s a good sign for us. He came from a frustration with this space and he saw an opportunity to make things better. Gil’s case is just one. We can tell even though he’s been at a few different companies, he was very passionate about making sure he would succeed. He was hungry. What do you find difficult about seed stage investing? Startups are hard. Anyone who has done it knows that. It’s easy to, after the fact, describe how everything went right, but we all know it’s so non-linear. There’s so many things that can go wrong. Everything from product market fit to technology to the team. It’s just pure luck. For us there’s never just one thing. There’s so many reasons that a company can fail, even if a company has all the right people and execution. There’s no perfect investment. For us it’s very much an art and it’s really going with your gut. Would you be more likely to fund a very experienced team with a mediocre idea or a novice team with an amazing idea? Every situation we come across is different. It’s really hard to boil it down to such simple terms. If I had to give an answer, I would say that The Valley is full of ideas. There’s not a lack of ideas, but it’s more about the ability to execute. Operational experience counts for a lot. Is there any one piece of advice you want to give to founders that doesn’t get shared enough? Be true to yourself and be humble. I think humility is a really important skill that we really value at Acorn. Rejection is hard and it requires endurance and perseverance. It’s not an easy thing to do. We’ve done it and understand it. It’s hard to look around you see all these other startups that are getting so much money and valuations, but they’re the exceptions. If you’re having trouble raising money, just keep at it, believe in yourself, believe in your team. About the Alchemist Accelerator Alchemist is a venture-backed initiative focused on accelerating the development of seed-stage ventures that monetize from enterprises (not consumers). The accelerator’s primary screening criteria is on teams, with primacy placed on having distinctive technical co-founders. We give companies around $36K, and run them through a structured 6-month program heavily focused on sales, customer development, and fundraising. Our backers include many of the top corporate and VC funds in the Valley — including Khosla Ventures, DFJ, Cisco, and Salesforce, among others. CB Insights has rated Alchemist the top program based on median funding rates of its grads (YC was #2), and Alchemist is perennially in the top of various Accelerator rankings. The accelerator seeds around 75 enterprise-monetizing ventures / year. Learn more about applying today.
Jean Kovacs -Partner, Hillsven Capital Jean has more than 30 years’ experience directing technology companies, and delivering exceptional results with growing enterprises. She is currently president of the Northern California Chapter of the HBS Alumni Angels, a forum for Harvard alumni to connect with, learn about, and invest in quality early-stage companies. Her resumé includes serving as CEO and Co-Founder of Comergent Technologies, and Co-Founder and EVP of Qualix Group. She was named to the Silicon Valley/San Francisco Business Journal’s list of Most Influential Women in Business and has been profiled in Fortune, The Financial Times, Computerworld, Internet World, and InfoWorld. She holds an MBA from Harvard and a BS from Northeastern University. Can you tell me a little more about your background before venture capital? I worked for technology companies in marketing, product marketing, customer support, sales, applications engineering, and then went to get an MBA, thinking that I was going to go to Wall Street. I ended up deciding to come out to the west coast. I worked at Sun Microsystems, which went public, and then Frame Technology, which also went public. Following that, started a company (Qualix), which we took public, then started another company, which we sold to AT&T. I was always on the operations side until I got involved in angel investing. About two years ago I joined Hillsven as a Partner. What do you look at when you’re looking at a startup? We typically focus on enterprise companies. We don’t do a lot of marketing of our fund. We typically look for “curated deals”, deals that comes out of an accelerator that we trust or is referred to us by someone that we trust. We’ll do two to three deals per year. We typically go in at Seed and lead the round. We put in anywhere from $500K-2M. What about MetaData stood out from the rest of the investments you were thinking about making? I should say that I was not with Hillsven when they invested in MetaData, so this is a little bit of hindsight on my part. One of the things we liked was that Gil started as an engineer then got his MBA and went on to be a CMO, so he actually lived the customers’ lives before he started the company. He had that domain expertise and could talk the CMO language. As he was being a CMO he was thinking, “Why hasn’t anyone developed a product like this?” We felt he had that unique combination of business experience, domain experience, and technical experience. That experience and vision, combined with energy and tenaciousness, were the right ingredients that lead him to start MetaData. What are your thoughts on Alchemist? I like the Alchemist team. They seem to have a higher bar for companies going in, which also results in a higher bar for companies who are exiting. When I talk to entrepreneurs who have gone through the program, they all universally say that it was really worthwhile. There are a lot of incubators and accelerators. That makes for a lot of noise, but I would say Alchemist is certainly in the top percentile, based upon their results. Is there anything you’re excited about in the future? I just think there’s a huge opportunity for what we do. We’re seeing SaaS is leading to the democratization of the enterprise. No longer are business people in enterprises beholden to huge IT departments or huge ERP vendors so that everything has to go through. It’s much more accepted now if you have an application that fits a need in an organization, to go ahead and get that and deploy it within your organization. It’s an opportunity we’re seeing for startups that we haven’t seen for a very long time. What do you think is the number one red flag that would make you pass on an investment? We invest very early on. Our number one priority are the founder(s). If we don’t feel good about the founder and the founding team we won’t invest no matter how hot the space is. What makes a good founder? First, it’s someone who can articulate a problem and has domain expertise with that problem. Second, it’s someone who can attract and build a great team. Third, the founders and especially the CEO has to be tenacious. Probably less than 10 percent of the companies that get started have an easy route creating a product, bringing it to market and growing sales. There are always ups and downs, so we need to know that that entrepreneur is so passionate that they’re going to forge ahead even when the going gets tough. Would you be more likely to fund a very experienced team with a mediocre idea or a team of novices with an amazing idea? It’s about the quality of domain expertise and focus. If they’re novice they have to be coachable, have energy, and be tenacious. We’d rather have someone come in and say, “I know this problem. Here’s how you solve it and here’s who I’ve talked to and here’s who I’ve sold to.” Having early traction in a company is really critical. Which of your investments are you most proud of and why? We’re proud of all of our investments! Can you tell me about how you deal with cold emails and calls? That’s a tough one. We’re so busy getting curated deals that it’s hard to answer cold emails/calls. We try to get to them, but they typically don’t get the attention that we give to curated deals. Earlier you spoke about finding deals through references you trust. What makes a reliable reference? In addition to a few accelerators we trust, we get deals from several sources: 1. Other investors who understand our model and know how we invest in and support our companies 2. Our CEO’s/Founders — They understand our model and we trust their insights. 3. Customers. We keep in touch with enterprises and are always talking to them about the problems they have. If they find a company who is young and helping them solve a problem, we want to talk to that company! What separates Hillsven from other funds in the area? We take a very active role. Typically, we lead the round, and always take a board seat. There are three partners here and we all have different skill sets. We’ve all been founders ourselves and our careers have been focused building companies, not just investing. We really spend time getting to know the company, and helping with what they need, whether they want to brainstorm on technical concepts or market fit. When they’re getting ready to raise their Series A, we also spend time helping them and making introductions. Bottom line: We view ourselves as partners with our investments, not solely as investors. What do you feel like your role in the company is? We’re there to support the CEO and the team. If the CEO comes in saying I’m really wrestling with this or that, we’ll pull in the right partner who can help. If we don’t have a partner with experience in that specific area, we all have networks that we can reach out and find someone who knows a lot more about a specific area. What you think is the biggest indicator of failure for a startup? If I were to sum it up, I would say believing your own bullshit. Someone who pulls together a great pitch and says, “if we build this they will come” and not really having that tie into the market and customer prospects. When you look at Gil, he was a CMO and he knows the pain that they have. We have a company called Retail Zipline, another Alchemist company. The CEO of that came out of the retail space. She knows the pain. It really is having that passion where you say, “this is an issue that my team and I can fix, and it’s a big opportunity.” Is there any one piece of advice you would give founders that you think doesn’t get shared enough? Do your homework. Look at the VC’s web page, talk to their portfolio companies to figure out what they focus on, get your information all lined up. Then, have the tenacity to, in a nice way, keep on top of the process. Can you tell me about your experience as a woman in Venture Capital and any advice you’d give to young entrepreneurs and investors? I would say right now, it’s a fantastic time to be a female in the venture and startup worlds. There’s been so much awareness in the market, that I think people are really realizing the talent pool and are going above and beyond to access it. Do you have any advice for mothers who are trying to grapple with motherhood and their career? It’s never going to be easy. One or the other is going to suffer and I think you just have to make peace with that. Sometimes you’re going to be more career-focused and sometimes you’re going to be more family-focused. I think as a mother you’ve got to just come to grips that you can’t be all things to all people, all the time. About the Alchemist Accelerator Alchemist is a venture-backed initiative focused on accelerating the development of seed-stage ventures that monetize from enterprises (not consumers). The accelerator’s primary screening criteria is on teams, with primacy placed on having distinctive technical co-founders. We give companies around $36K, and run them through a structured 6-month program heavily focused on sales, customer development, and fundraising. Our backers include many of the top corporate and VC funds in the Valley — including Khosla Ventures, DFJ, Cisco, and Salesforce, among others. CB Insights has rated Alchemist the top program based on median funding rates of its grads (YC was #2), and Alchemist is perennially in the top of various Accelerator rankings. The accelerator seeds around 75 enterprise-monetizing ventures / year. Learn more about applying today.
Tim Chou, Lecturer at Stanford University Most people never think of technology from an economic point of view. Instead, we focus our efforts thinking about the nuts and bolts of the technology. Tim Chou, a current lecturer at Stanford University, spent his career focusing on Enterprise Technology. He believes that it is important to know a variety of business models to better understand how we can sell to customers. In a talk given at Alchemist, he outlined seven important models of how software companies drive revenue, and offered further insights into the sales process. Model One: The most typical, yet still extremely effective model: license the software to the user and then charge for support and maintenance. Tim gives the example of Oracle, which previously was a $15 billion corporation with $12 billion coming from support and maintenance. Model Two: Make your software open source, but monetize the support and maintenance. Tim emphasizes that Red Hat is the only real example of success for this model. Model Three: Outsource. “I’ll take over your mess and I’ll do it for less.” He explains that the amount of money to manage software is 4x the price so in most cases 75%-100% of the budget is fully allocated for the next year. Therefore, by outsourcing, you reduce the cost structure to purely human labor in China, India, Eastern Europe, etc. However, Tim goes on to outline two major flaws with this model. One, you are unable to maintain a low cost of labor for outsourced labor as workers will eventually want wages that match the workers in Silicon Valley. Two, the primary reason of system failure is human error. Model Four: Tim explains, “The customer pays for the software and maintenance, while I’ll manage security, performance, etc. for a set price per user per year.” In this case specialization is key. If you can standardize the hardware and software then you can replace human labor with machine labor, crushing cost structures and increasing reliability. Model Five: You alter the payment terms of Model Four. This can mean paying monthly or by other terms. Model Six: Every business application company since 1999 has delivered in this model. It involves removing the at-home and at-customer aspect of the model, in order to standardize and reduce cost structures even more. In justification, Tim explains that while operating in model four or five, cost structures can be taken down to about $50 to $70 a user. On the other hand, students of model six can get down to $5 per user. Model Seven: In reality, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter are all software companies. What’s different is the way they charge for their service, whether it is ad-based models or embedding it in the transaction. An example is buying a book on Amazon, which is essentially paying for the software. In order to justify that there is an extra step in standardization, Tim argues that Google would otherwise charge around 70 cents per user per year in order to break even for searches. He explains all of their software is extremely standardized so their cost structure is entirely reduced to power (electricity). Understanding your Customer is Key to Choosing a Business Model These seven models offer a wide variety of choices to founders — however, in order to know which business model is right for your customers, you’ll need to talk to them! Tim believes in this day and age, we can now target our customers by first knowing who they are instead of just throwing your product out there. We can apply Geoffrey Moore’s idea of Crossing the Chasm to people who will buy into your vision and help you cross the chasm. Tim explains, a lot of the time you can tell if a potential customer is only interested in following the mainstream if they ask, “What is your ROI?” They are not your early investors. They are only interested to see if others have bought. Customers before the chasm are not large corporations, rather, they are individuals. How do you Sell? Once you know your customers, the challenge becomes how to sell to them. When broken down, there are two methods of selling. Both methods of selling involve “preciseness:” low and precise selling (e.g. Amazon selling $10 books, movies, etc.), and high but imprecise selling like business software, where you need fewer sales due to high value. The challenge is sitting in the middle where selling price is still high and is still imprecise. Tim makes the analogy of big screen TVs. Just like enterprise sales, there is an education cycle before you buy where you ask friends, read reviews, and do your research. Ultimately, you find that “selling is education and education is selling”. The challenge is that your sponsor (the guy who thinks what you’re doing is cool) is unable to answer questions to others about your software. Tim explains that the key is the art of storytelling. It really matters who is saying what. Without the right character telling the story, there is no credibility. Stories are a key part of learning as it activates a different part of the brain and your information is more believable. There are three types of stories: Man versus man, man versus nature, and man versus self. When telling a story about your product, communicate it in 3–5 points, identify the problem, and identify the value of your solution. By comparing the situation before your product to the situation after your product, you create value. What does this mean? It is no surprise that in order to sell to customers, you must understand your customers. It is important to understand that while your customers’ ability to use your product relies entirely on how you structure your business model. Their role as a customer lives entirely inside the model you choose to adopt. Therefore, when analyzing your product’s reputation, you can not overlook how your model is structured. By being aware of which business models work and which ones don’t, you can begin to better understand your customers as a whole. About the Alchemist Accelerator Alchemist is a venture-backed initiative focused on accelerating the development of seed-stage ventures that monetize from enterprises (not consumers). The accelerator’s primary screening criteria is on teams, with primacy placed on having distinctive technical co-founders. We give companies around $36K, and run them through a structured 6-month program heavily focused on sales, customer development, and fundraising. Our backers include many of the top corporate and VC funds in the Valley — including Khosla Ventures, DFJ, Cisco, and Salesforce, among others. CB Insights has rated Alchemist the top program based on median funding rates of its grads (YC was #2), and Alchemist is perennially in the top of various Accelerator rankings. The accelerator seeds around 75 enterprise-monetizing ventures / year. Learn more about applying today.
Arun Penmetsa - Partner, Storm Ventures Arun Penmetsa is a Partner at Storm Ventures and focuses on early-stage Enterprise software companies, primarily in SaaS, Security and Digital Health. He has extensive experience building enterprise software solutions at Oracle and Google. Arun is passionate about healthcare and using technology to improve outcomes and drive efficiency for patients, providers and payers. He is also an investor in several healthcare groups in India where he serves as an advisor on technology and population health. In his spare time, Arun enjoys spending time with family and hiking. How did you get into the world of VC? Was it your first job? No, to give you a little bit of background, I started out on the technology and engineering side. After college and graduate school, I worked at Google and Oracle, building enterprise products for about five years. Then I went to business school, and joined Storm Ventures right after that. It wasn’t my plan going into business school, but I got introduced into the world of venture capital (VC) when I met a lot of VC’s, mostly at startup conferences and other networking events. I was really curious, because one of the things I was trying to do in business school was to learn a lot more about other industries. I’d only worked for a few companies, so I was curious how the industry worked. I spent the summer between my two years of business school at Storm. I really enjoyed the work I did, and really enjoyed working with the Storm team, so I was happy to have the opportunity to come back full time. Did you see yourself doing this, or being where you are today, when you graduated college? When I graduated from college, and when I finished graduate school, I was thinking about a more tech-focused career. Like I said, I worked in engineering and product at Google and Oracle. I was trying to transition more into a startup environment, so no, I wasn’t really thinking about venture capital. Why did you invest in 4me, the Alchemist company? What differentiated them from other investments you were thinking about at the time? A couple of things. At Storm, we focus on enterprise software and spend a lot of time on industries that are not necessarily mainstream. So I was always interested in the service management space. Given the general level of innovation that had been happening, the service management space was lagging a bit compared to other industries, so I thought there was a lot of opportunity there. When I met Cor, the founder and CEO of 4me, one thing that really impressed me was the caliber of their team. Cor’s background in the space — having started two other businesses, and having successfully exited them really stood out. I thought the team had a unique perspective and depth of knowledge about the industry. That was one of the biggest factors for us. We also have a broader thesis about how data flows through a lot of these industries. Historically, if you think about it, the way that a lot of technology is set up in these industries has created data problems. There are different systems and different owners for a lot of the data that is needed for these companies to manage their own workflow. As service management has evolved, and this is playing out in a lot of different industries, the need to operate across boundaries and silos has increased more and more, whether that’s geography, or technology systems, or different departments. I don’t want to get too into the weeds, but service management is broadly going through a transition where the new focus is on SIAM or Service and Integration Management. The team at 4me really built their product for that. We thought the shift in the industry really aligned with the expertise the team had, so we thought that was a good match. Plus, they were winning against the more established incumbents as a startup that was bootstrapped, so the growth was impressive. A combination of these factors led us to invest in their company. What are your thoughts on Alchemist in general? I think the program is great. I’ll give you a little background about Storm. We’ve been around for about 19 years, invested through five funds, and we’ve pretty much been enterprise focused for those 19 years. The last couple of funds have all been focused on software. In many ways, what Alchemist does is really a perfect fit for us. It’s definitely a sector and stage fit, because we mostly do series A investment, so that’s been fantastic. I’ve met Ravi and Danielle a few times, and I think their focus on running a slightly longer program is important, because things take longer in the enterprise space, particularly as you go into some of these deep tech industries. This helps companies get to a stage where they can really start talking about go-to-market and what levers a venture capital firm like us can bring. I think that’s critical because a lot of times, when you work with accelerators, they have great founders and great companies, but it still ends up being too early for us.\ Alchemist has set up a good model, a long enough program with good mentorship and support, where you get to a stage where a VC firm like us can add a lot of value. I think I’ve been going to Alchemist Demo Day since the second Demo Day. It’s been great working with their companies and seeing them as they grow. What’s the size of your current fund and how does that compare to funds at a similar stage in Silicon Valley? Our current fund is $180M, which has been about average for the previous funds as well. Funds are obviously getting bigger, just given some of the recent raises we’ve seen. We’ve decided to stay at a similar size, primarily because we really focus on investing in companies just as they’re getting to the product market fit stage and we work with them on finding go-to-market fit and scaling beyond that. We help them think about building the right sales model, building the right playbook, and thinking about what hires they should make. We can definitely make the fund bigger and bring on more investors, but we’ve found that this has worked for us. Companies that we really want to work with are in that early stage, where they want that first institutional investor. We’ll partner with them and help them scale through the right process. What’s the typical check size and how is that typically structured? Typically, our check sizes for the A rounds are in the $2M to $5M range. We can go lower, and occasionally we’ll do seed rounds, or we’ll do larger rounds sometimes. Storm has invested in about 150 companies, led investments in a number of cases, and we’ve co-led, so we’ve pretty much worked with everyone. We’re not very rigid in terms of needing 20% ownership, but we like to own as much as possible, because we tend to be really hands-on with our companies. We’re definitely not a fund that makes a huge number of investments. We are somewhat concentrated and would rather go deeper with our companies than just go broader. Is there a stage you typically prefer to invest? Series A. The sweet spot is definitely the A for us. Do you have a specific vision or focus that differentiates you from other funds? The emphasis on go-to-market. We spend a lot of time working within the firm and working with other organizations that we can bring in to support our portfolio. Once you’re selling your product to a handful of customers, and there’s repeatability in the use case, we can help you figure out how to scale. One of the biggest issues is that early on, getting to that $500K or $1M run rate, a lot of that comes from founder sales. It varies depending on the size of the account and other factors, but when you make that transition to a sales team and the founder steps back a little bit, a lot of times that process doesn’t go smoothly. The depth of knowledge that the founders have about the sector, the problem they’re solving — it’s hard to replicate that throughout the teams. What we try to do is really think about the go-to-market as a science as much as we can. We want to think about the right playbook, the right sales model, the right customer you’re selling to, and really building those processes out. We spend a lot of time with our companies building out that process hands-on, so that they can effectively make that transition to scaling, and they don’t hit a speed bump when they get to that stage. When companies come to us, a lot of times we’ll see that they have a grand vision and a good roadmap, and have predictions that are up and to the right that we hope they’ll hit. But on occasion, they’ll stumble a little bit. A lot of it is making this transition, and getting your playbook down, with the right sales model. That’s one way that we try to differentiate from other firms. Additionally, we’ve been very focused on enterprise for 19 years, so we have a huge network in the space across a variety of industries, that can add value to our companies. How do you think you differentiate yourself individually from other VC’s? To build on what we talked about, we have built deep relationships in various enterprise sectors given the focus over many years. I’ll give you an example: I spend a lot of time focusing on healthcare at Storm. Over the last few years, we’ve built a strong healthcare practice. As part of that, we have connections to a lot of health systems across the country — including physicians, practitioners, and entrepreneurs. In that one example, we can definitely bring a lot of those connections to bear for the startup. We’ve sat in a lot of these practitioner’s offices, so we can really understand the deeper workflows, that comes with selling to major players and providers. A lot of the work that happens on the backend isn’t really visible to these companies. That’s just one example of the insight and level of connection that we can bring for our portfolio. In terms of the broader firm itself, the go-to-market is a big area, but we also bring in a lot of experts who can specifically give advice on sales and marketing. One other area where I’ve spent a lot of time is security. In fact, we have a number of CSO’s working out of our offices pretty often. What makes an investment particularly compelling and what’s a big red flag that would make you pass? In terms of red flags, maybe this is an obvious one. We’re looking at mostly enterprise, so if the founders have never worked in industry, I think that’s a big red flag. It’s not that I wouldn’t talk to them or not invest, but it’s something where I’d definitely want to dig in more. Especially if it’s an area like Cor with 4me and service management, it’s hard for an outsider to really get a sense of what the problems are, and what the incentives are, in terms of why these problems get created. So, it’s not always a technology solution and it’s not always that the best tech wins in a lot of these cases. We really think hard about the unique insight that these founders are bringing, and how their background and experience really leads to that. On the flip side, things that I would definitely look for, because we invest so early and have to bet on the team, would be the background of the founders. We also look for their early ability to win customers. A lot of times, we see founders that work hard and have passion, which enables them to get customers. However, a lot of the customers are using the product for different use cases. That’s fine early on, because they’re still trying to find the right product, but we’d like to understand what’s really working, what’s the sweet spot early on, so that they can find repeatability. I think that repeatability is important because that leads to more usage and lower churn. That’s when you’ve really found a pain point worth investing in. We also think about market transitions, and ask if there is something fundamentally changing in the market. Not just a better version of what’s been done before, but something fundamentally changing in the market that will lead people to adapt a new technology, a new product, or a new workflow. When we meet entrepreneurs, we try to already have a thesis on the market, so that we can make faster decisions about whether the idea makes sense or not. What do you think separates a great founder from a good founder? One of the things is the ability to hire really great people. As a founder, you have insight into a certain area, but you can’t do it all. That’s why a founding team in general needs to be well-balanced. I think the biggest thing is being able to sell people on your vision and hiring people that are better than you. If you can hire well, I think in many cases, the rest of the issues can be addressed, because you’re getting the right set of people that can work together and solve problems. It’s a hard thing to test for, so we try to spend a lot of time with our founders. Would you be more likely to fund a really experienced team with a mediocre idea, or a team with no experience that had an amazing idea? It really depends on the idea and the use case. I would say I’d pick the team over the idea, because it’s unlikely you’re the only one with the idea, meaning that a lot of your success is based on execution. Ultimately, you really have to hustle and execute. On the flip side, if I can add a caveat, the one area where that can be a little more murky, is when there’s a huge market pull. In that situation, a mediocre team in a market that’s really taking off can probably execute better than a great team in a market that has no momentum. If the market is really taking off, a good team can have better outcomes than a great team in a bad market, no matter how strong they are. Oftentimes, we have theses in certain areas, so we have some view on the market and how that might impact these companies. If there was a piece of advice that you’d give to founders who are raising money that isn’t shared enough, what would that be? Founders often focus on the current product that they’re selling today and their long-term vision, which is grand and massive if you achieve it. However, a lot of times, in the middle, there’s a big gap. Having a clear strategy for how you’ll progress beyond the immediate pain point that you’re solving today is something that people don’t spend enough time on. I think having a viewpoint on how the market evolves is critical. It’s knowing what transitions are happening in the market and how that gives them tailwind, and understanding why that is the case. Which investment were you most proud of and why? Obviously, I like 4me quite a bit. I don’t know if there is one I’m most proud of. Going back to the industry transition idea, where it’s critical to find the right time to make a change in the industry, some of the best companies get the timing right, where many others are too early or too late. In healthcare, there’s a company we invested in called Lexigram, that’s helping payers and providers transition to the value-based care model. They’ve done really well. In security, there’s a company called TruSTAR that’s truly leveraging how companies share information with each other and really enabling that. Those are a few. What areas are you most excited about now and moving forward into the future? Security and healthcare are two areas I am excited about due to the changes taking place. A broader answer is that no matter what industry you’re in, if there’s a market transition that’s happening, I would be interested in learning more. The other thing that I think a lot about is the whole idea of the data economy. Historically, a lot of data was stored in silos across organizations, team, and geographies. Any company that is truly building insights across such data is a company that I would love to meet and speak with. So, there’s not one particular area, but these are a few of the areas that excite me. About the Alchemist Accelerator Alchemist is a venture-backed initiative focused on accelerating the development of seed-stage ventures that monetize from enterprises (not consumers). The accelerator’s primary screening criteria is on teams, with primacy placed on having distinctive technical co-founders. We give companies around $36K, and run them through a structured 6-month program heavily focused on sales, customer development, and fundraising. Our backers include many of the top corporate and VC funds in the Valley — including Khosla Ventures, DFJ, Cisco, and Salesforce, among others. CB Insights has rated Alchemist the top program based on median funding rates of its grads (YC was #2), and Alchemist is perennially in the top of various Accelerator rankings. The accelerator seeds around 75 enterprise-monetizing ventures/year. Learn more about applying today.
First-time entrepreneurs that are building an enterprise SaaS company and trying to raise money without having paying customers will typically find it difficult to raise capital. As an Alchemist Accelerator CEO mentor, I help founders understand this point as early as possible. If you want to survive, meaning close your Angel or Series A round to live another day, you must prove that customers will pay for a solution to the problem you are solving. That is table stakes in Silicon Valley.
Last week Samir Kanji (First Republic Bank) published a blog with a list of the accelerators ranked by graduates who received more than $750,000 in funding. Cromwell Shubarth of the San Jose Business Journal pointed out a change in the rankings for the Alchemist Accelerator.