Crew Capital's Community Newsletter #20

Welcome to the April edition of Crew’s Community Newsletter!

We have a jam-packed newsletter for you this month! Starting with an amazing conversation with Guy Podjarny, the founder of Snyk, one of the largest cyber security companies in the world and a dev-first security pioneer. Next, a highly tactical discussion with Sanjeev Arya, former SVP of Growth at UiPath discussing all things GTM and partnership related. Finally, we have a super insightful and tactical conversation with Ben Fiechtner, the CRO of Clari, on guidance for early-stage startups building GTM teams.

As always, our startups are hiring for both engineering and sales roles - see more info at the bottom of the newsletter. If you or anyone you know might be a good fit, feel free to reach out to us directly.

Onto the newsletter!

Content from the Crew Collective

Founder Insights: Guy Podjarny, the founder of Snyk, is a visionary in the?world?of developer security. With a?mission?to?make the digital world a safer place, he?founded?Snyk in 2015?and built it into?a leading, category-defining cybersecurity business?valued at over $7 billion. Guy?joined us at?the Founder's Day event we co-hosted with Boldstart Ventures last month. To open up the event we hosted a conversation with Guy?to discuss his journey in building Snyk, the challenges of finding product-market fit,?scaling technical teams, the future of AI, and more.

?? Check out the whole article!

A short preview:

The most common problem that founders face at this point is that they come to the discussion with potential customers from their technical perspective. But customers do not care about their product. Customers care about their problem and whether you can solve it or not. From there, it’s just execution. Constantly talk to customers.

Operator Expertise: We recently spoke with Sanjeev Arya, former SVP of Growth at UiPath, and discussed his incredible journey in the tech industry, advice to first-time founders, and the implementation of new go-to-market strategies. With nearly 3 decades of experience, Sanjeev has been instrumental in steering growth-stage companies towards realizing their full potential through his expertise in executive leadership and business development. Despite all the success, Sanjeev remains incredibly humble and purpose-driven. He emphasizes how much people can accomplish when working together on a mission, and that successful companies should always keep their sights on making a positive impact on their customers.

?? Read the whole article!

A short preview:

We look outside to bring people in with a unique perspective, a different experience,” he said. “The attitude that the new person brings in helps, but the failures they’ve endured, the ‘why’ behind those, and their approach to learning from them is even more relevant.

Portfolio Roundtable: We hosted a roundtable led by Ben Fiechtner the CRO of Clari, a leading enterprise revenue platform designed to enhance the sales process by unifying account engagement, conversation intelligence, and revenue operations. Ben is an experienced sales leader with a history of scaling teams at global enterprises such as Salesforce and UiPath. During the discussion, we explored how startups should formulate their sales playbook, leverage different channels, and structure incentives for sales compensation, amongst a variety of other exciting topics.

?? Read the entire article!

A short preview:

What I found is that product-market fit matters the most on that first call. If we’re not speaking the language of the clients, they move on to someone that they think can. Lead routing is both an art and science but magic when you get it right,” he said. “If somebody’s self-selecting in, push to the individual expertise you need. Time over target matters, and I think as a buyer myself, first calls are often wasted.

Want more Crew content? Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube for insights on company building from some of the best founders and operators across the software industry!

Recent Events

This month, we hosted an Enterprise AI Happy Hour with Comma Capital, gathering our friends from some of New York City's biggest tech companies, including Palantir, UiPath, MongoDB, Meta, and Netflix, as well as some of the city's most exciting startups, including Rilla, Databricks, Portable, CalypsoAI, Taktile, and Rippling!

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

Huge congrats to Subskribe, Integration.app, Lucid, MaintainX, and Taktile for being featured as high performers and leaders in the G2 Spring 2024 Reports!

• Reco launched the Reco SaaS App Factory, which helps users build new application integrations using low-code / no-code development. Reco leverages AI and LLMs to provide context that determines what should be prioritized within the app across posture, identities & data.
• Aiven has recently enhanced its platform with several new features. These enhancements include integrating AI capabilities for personalized database performance insights, a Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) feature for AWS to boost flexibility and cost efficiency, Tiered Storage for Apache Kafka and Clickhouse to reduce storage costs and improve scalability, upgrades to Aiven for OpenSearch and PostgreSQL to include new search tools, enhanced alert functionalities, and support for PostgreSQL 16, improving performance, security, and the developer experience.
• The newly released Version 2 of the Common Paper Cloud Service Agreement marks a significant enhancement to their cloud and SaaS offerings. Building on the successful Version 1 - trusted by thousands and key in closing millions in deals - this update adds provisions for AI training data, expands support for trials, and includes numerous other enhancements to streamline processes and enhance security, helping companies accelerate negotiations, deal closures, and collections.
• Integration.app has introduced the Connector Builder, a tool that revolutionizes the creation of customer-facing integrations with API-using software through OpenAI's latest models. This platform accelerates integration development by 10x compared to traditional methods. It simplifies the integration process by automatically extracting API documentation, offering AI-driven suggestions for data operations and schema optimizations, and ensuring accurate and efficient integration testing to minimize setup errors and mismatches.
• MaintainX introduced External Work Orders, simplifying vendor interactions via mobile or desktop. The new Vendor Management feature boosts productivity, drives efficiency, and optimizes spending.

Job Openings

We're always on the lookout to connect exceptional candidates with our portfolio companies. To learn more about the opportunities, reach out to our Head of Platform, Sonia Damian at [email protected]. If you want to explore all available job opportunities within our portfolio companies, please visit our career page.

• Integration.App, the AI-powered integration stack, is looking for a Sales Engineer based in Eastern Europe.
• Quarter20, the collaborative platform for hardware design & documentation is looking for a Front-End Engineer based in the US.
• Seal Security, the first generative AI solution for automated, scalable open source vulnerability remediation is looking for their first Account Executive based in US or Israel.
• Rillavoice, the leading conversation intelligence software for outside sales is looking for a Partnership Manager, Software Engineers, Client Growth Associates, AI/ML Engineers and Talent Acquisition Partners based in New York.

Quote of the Month

"One of the things I've noticed is that people have different expectations about startup life, and sometimes the hiring team doesn't know how to explain it in a way that really gets the message across. I try to be very honest when hiring. Startups are not for everyone. That's the honest truth. If a candidate has never experienced a startup before, you need to dig into their personality and objectives to figure out what it is about them that will really shine, and they need to ask themselves if they would actually thrive in a startup."

Vidal Gonzalez, Co-founder & CTO of Cerby in Building Early-Stage Engineering Teams