Each year, the startup landscape shifts and founders adapt to a new climate of investor sentiment, regulatory pressures, and sociocultural phenomena.
So, to get a sense of what early stage startup founders can expect in 2025, we spoke with investor JeanClaude Dorsainvil from XYZ (https://www.xyz.vc/), an early-stage B2B, enterprise software and public sector focused investment fund. XYZ does their best work at the pre-seed and seed stage and invests deeply in a handful of founders each year.
Before JeanClaude could share his thoughts on 2025, we first had to debrief 2024.
“My view of 2024 is that it was a year of a great tectonic shift.” For the large incumbent, JeanClaude explains that entire business models were attacked by market conditions or regulation or startup bureaucracy, with no recourse. He continues, “Then there were folks who were waiting for their moment, saying ‘You may have had ownership of this idea but we figured out new tactics to take advantage of the rubble, the new infrastructure, this shifting landscape.’ and so it really was a year that nimble teams started to lean into their expertise.”
We spoke at length about the benefits of nurturing a founder’s deep sector expertise. But what if this expertise is not available?
JeanClaude responds, “Being a sector expert is not always the thing that carries you through a successful fundraise or through the successful evolution of a business.” Alternatively, there is so much potential in the complete novice, someone who “sees an opportunity where deep sector experts are overlooking another possibility of how something can be done.” For the complete novice, he concludes, “if your superpower is, ‘I can out-hustle people’, go do that.”
One thing we know well at StartupOS, is that for novices and veterans alike, access to capital resources is still one of the greatest focuses for startup founders. So we asked JeanClaude about the increased competition we’re seeing for venture dollars and the greater emphasis on startup traction in the fundraising process.
Traction is important, JeanClaude acknowledges, but “People are innovating at such a rapid speed that the duration to get from idea to prototype to first set of customers has drastically reduced.” In other words, consider leveraging new innovation in your approach to the product development process itself, in order to facilitate traction in the absence of that early capital which might previously have been required.
“Innovation cycles are the very nature of the industry that we work in.” This is how JeanClaude began our discussion. To close our call, he remarked “Everybody is figuring out how to address the velocity of company evolution.” “That's really where I'm optimistic. Who's going fast, who wants to go faster, and how can we help them do that?”
To listen to our full one hour conversation with JeanClaude and to position your startup for success in 2025, join our StartupOS newsletter (https://lnkd.in/ewTjQ5tF).
