Crew Capital's Community Newsletter #2

What a difference a month makes! Coming off of a quiet third quarter, the venture market roared back in October.

According to Crunchbase, venture capital funding in 3Q22 was down 53% Y/Y and 33% Q/Q. Dollars invested in Series B’s were down 54% Y/Y, while Series A’s were down 23%, and Seed’s were flat Y/Y (though Seed funding was down 24% Q/Q).

Post-Labor Day, through September, we observed the market picking up steam. Fast forward to October, we had one of the busiest months since founding Crew Capital two years ago, making four new investments this month!

We’re excited to share more about these investments as they get announced. In the meantime, we’re proud to be actively investing regardless of the market environment, and supporting founders with a long-term perspective on building companies with enduring value to the economy and society.

Content from the Crew Collective

HR Round Table: We held our first virtual round table for Crew Capital portfolio companies, hosted by Marius Istrate . Marius is the former Chief People Officer of UiPath, and helped grow the company from 100 people when he joined, to over 3,000 globally - in just three years. We discussed employer branding, talent acquisition, and more.

5 key takeaways from the event:

1. A startup’s future employees are a lot like its first customers.
2. Keep employer values consistent with the company - even when the company changes.
3. To stand out in a competitive war for talent, be authentic, realistic, and aspirational.
4. Take the long view.
5. Go where your employees are - and take account of the local culture.

At Crew, we believe companies live and die by their people and culture. Taking the time to develop a robust, flexible, and evolving employer brand strategy can ensure startups get the best talent and in turn, have the highest odds of success.

Marius’s insights were concise, actionable, and spot-on. Read more about them in our full recap of the event here .

A View from Ukraine: Last week we had the pleasure of sitting down with Sasha Reminnyi . Sasha is the founder and former CEO of StepShot, a provider of process documentation software that was acquired by UiPath in 2019. Sasha is an entrepreneur, operator, startup adviser, and academic. He is based in Ukraine, from where he spoke to us virtually.

We discussed building technology companies in Ukraine, the evolution of the startup ecosystem in the country, what it was like selling his company to a strategic acquirer, and advice for founders considering acquisition offers for their startup.

A short preview:

The Ukrainian startup ecosystem evolved a lot in recent years and now we have both human capital and venture capital, and many issues to work on. So this just makes us more resilient, and more creative. I also see that people's attitude towards risk has changed - we are more willing to take risks. Today, a lot of businesses started looking for customers abroad, and expanding internationally, while before they were more local.

On top of this, Covid19 gave us a crash course on how to work in disconnected environments. If you were able to sell during that time, you should be able to sell now under any condition.

Even given the current circumstances, with martial law in full effect, there is the possibility to travel abroad as a representative of a company if you have permission from the Ministry of Digital Transformation. For example, last week we had 10 Ukrainian startups visiting San Francisco for TechCrunch Disrupt. For me, being able to still feel safe enough and being allowed to work on your ideas, while unfortunately, the Eastern part is being bombarded, is amazing.

It was an amazing and candid conversation with actionable advice for startups, read the full interview here .

What have our start-ups been up to this month?

• Several nominations went to our portfolio start-ups this month. Xentral , SEON , and Ledgy were included in Accel ’s top 100 emerging cloud startups list. Cedar , Melio , Jeeves , and Chainalysis made it to the 2022 CB Insights Fintech250 list. Congrats to all of them!
• Productiv announced their new product release which enhances three critical areas to provide customers with 1) a trusted system of record for all SaaS decisions, 2) insights for collaborative cost optimization, and 3) data-driven procurement for confident negotiations.
• Common Paper launched the new Terms of Service for product-led sales of cloud services and SaaS.
• Check out Spiff ‘s 2022 fall release where you’ll see better dispute resolution and changes to the way admins can manage teams, users, and plans — making every commission cycle as painless as possible.
• Chainalysis just published the 2022 Geography of Crypto Report , with key trends and insights on global crypto adoption.

Job Openings

We're always on the lookout to connect exceptional candidates with our portfolio companies.

We have several high-visibility roles currently available at a few of our companies, including:

• CFO - Series D & B companies, the roles can be based in USA or Europe.
• CMO - Series D company, the role can be based in USA or Europe.
• Machine Learning Leader - Seed stage company, the role is based in London.
• VP of Engineering - Seed stage company, it can be based anywhere in Europe.

To learn more about the opportunities, reach out to our Head of Platform, Sonia Damian at [email protected].

That’s all for this #2nd edition of Crew’s Community Newsletter!