Crew Capital's Community Newsletter #21

Welcome to the May edition of our Community newsletter! We have some exciting announcements to share including a portfolio company coming out of stealth, and a new Series B financing at one of our portfolio companies.

To our friends in New York City, we will be hosting an exclusive wine tasting event with Rubik Hub on June 6th. Crew Capital Partner Dylan Reider will be leading an exciting fireside chat alongside Alex Urdea, CFA, Managing Partner at Deep Ocean Partners, where they will share insights on the state of the early stage venture market. We’d love to see you there! Register here!

Recent Investments

Coheso: This month we congratulated Ned Gannon, Aditya Rathod, Manish Agnihotri, Chirag Mehta and the entire Coheso team on coming out of stealth! We're excited to work with the team as they pursue their vision of transforming legal operations in every company.

Coheso supercharges in-house legal teams by enhancing legal ops workflows across the organization, reducing repetitive tasks, and allowing legal teams to focus on higher value projects. Their platform delivers instant responses to routine queries, streamlines request management, and automates work product generation.

Content from the Crew Collective

Operator Insights: Few people embody channel marketing like Jay McBain, the Chief Analyst at Canalys - a leading global technology marketing analysis firm. With nearly 30 years of experience, Jay excels at helping vendors refine their partner and ecosystem strategies across the technology universe. He is a leading figure in the channel marketing ecosystem, previously named Channel Influencer of the Year by Channel Partners Magazine. We recently sat down with Jay to discuss all things channel marketing including early-stage strategies, leveraging generative AI, and measuring success across channels.

A short preview:

“Your first channel person should be your co-founder, your CTO, your tech leader. They should live and breathe integrations,” Jay said. “If you think you’re going to build your own SaaS tool today and sit out on your own island, you’re not. You have to build your company inside an ecosystem.

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Startup Experiences: Rilla is the only company providing AI-powered analytics to outside sales reps, has pioneered a new category and is on its way to transforming the way companies do outside sales. We recently sat down with Theo Carrel, a software engineer at Rilla, to discuss Rilla's unique company culture. As one of the fastest-growing startups in the world, Rilla operates with high velocity. Theo told us about the challenges and opportunities that come along with this, what it takes to thrive in such an environment, and broke down what a day in the life is like for engineers at Rilla.

A short preview:

Walking in and meeting everybody, the energy and their ambition were infectious, and that was exactly what I was looking for in an early-stage company. You need to have that energy and drive to be successful.

?? Read the whole article!

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!

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

• Congrats to Spring Health on being named to CNBC’s 2024 Disruptor 50 List for the second year in a row! Spring Health’s mission to eliminate barriers to mental health care is more important than ever before!

• CRMBonus announced their Series B financing led by BOND with participation from Valor Capital Group! Alexandre Zolko, Luiz Fernando Dias Guedes and Eduardo Vieira are building Latin America's leading consumer commerce data platform, starting with a core loyalty software and expanding into digital rewards and advertising. It's been amazing watching their platform’s development since we initially invested at the Series A, and we couldn't be more excited for the CRMBonus team!

• Grafana just announced Flame graph AI, their new AI-powered graph analysis tool that leverages large language models (LLMs) to power flame graph data interpretation so users can identify bottlenecks, root causes, and suggested fixes faster.

• Common Paper now integrates with HubSpot, Slack, and Vanta, bringing Common Paper agreements directly into your CRM alongside your contacts, companies, and deals.?Send new contracts, track the progress of deals in-flight, get quick access to historical agreements, and even send nudges to get signatures all from within your CRM.

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.

• Aktos, the operating system that powers the $18B Credit Collections industry is looking for a Senior Full-Stack Engineer (ideally backend leaning with Python), as well as New Grads Software Engineers passionate about Python. The team is split across LA, NYC, and Canada, and is open to different geographies for this role, though time zones in ET or PT are preferred.

• Stealth company ?leading the transformation of how primary market research is created and consumed by leveraging cutting-edge voice capture and AI, is looking for a Full-Stack Engineer Contractor based in NYC.

• Rilla, the leading conversation intelligence software for outside sales is looking for Software Engineers, Account Managers, AI/ML Engineers and Talent Acquisition Partners based in New York.

Quote of the Month

"One of my mentors put selling into three categories:?political, rational, and emotional. The political side is that the founder is able to convince the prospect that: “You talking to us is in your own interest because we are also talking to other people in your peer group.” Rational selling is showing that your product has all the functionality required to solve a customer’s biggest problem. This is your value proposition. And emotional selling is the most important. It’s about touching and feeling the product, if possible. I always tell the sales guys: “Is it possible for the customer to use your product and experience it during the sale?” Because, if that is possible, there is no bigger sales tool. People get used to it, and there’s an emotional connection. It’s the salesperson’s job to bring the customer back to the emotional side so that they sign the contract."

Kedar Dani, GTM Advisor & Investor in Building a Scalable Sales Engine at Early Stage Startups