Crew Capital's Community Newsletter #23

Summer is under way and July has been a busy month for us here at Crew! In this edition of Crew’s Newsletter, we’ll dive into recent events, updates within the portfolio, and more on what’s to come!

Content from the Crew Collective

Operator Expertise: Earlier this month, we held our annual European Founders' Dinner in London, co-hosted with our friends at Salesforce Ventures. We had an insightful fireside chat on company building led by Nowi Kallen , Managing Director at Salesforce Ventures, featuring Mati Staniszewski , Founder & CEO of ElevenLabs, Michael Reitblat , Founder & CEO of Forter, and Sunil Rao , Founder & CEO of Tribble. They shared their experiences and insights around differentiated talent acquisition, achieving product-market fit, navigating remote vs in-person collaboration, and maintaining alignment with their company's mission statement.

?? Read the highlights of the discussion here !

A short preview:

“We created this simple website with a text box of 100 characters where users can input text. Out of the blue, we noticed one of our users, an author, started copy-pasting one of their books into the text box, creating an audiobook, then uploading it to audiobook providers. “You couldn’t really do that in the past,” Mati said. “It started getting some traction and reviews, and then the author brought five other authors over to us – and mentioned: ‘Hey, these are your users, you need to cater to them’. And so we did - we made a full fledged audiobook creation workflow.” That brought a hearty laugh from the crowd, but showed how Mati was listening closely to his users to help guide decisions on evolving the product.

Portfolio Roundtable: We recently hosted a comprehensive roundtable discussion with Crew Capital's portfolio companies, led by Kiersten Gaffney , CMO and GTM Advisor on all things marketing for early-stage software startups. Kiersten has advised multiple high growth startups including Dragonfly, Redpanda, and Fermyon. During the conversation, we discussed refining product positioning, enhancing demand generation, and optimizing sales efforts.

?? Read the entire article !

A short preview:

To Kiersten, leveraging in-house talent for marketing helps an organization set itself up best for GTM success. Similar to founder-led sales, founder-led marketing allows the people who know the product best to evangelize about it. This requires bandwidth from a founder, yet presents a better use of resources early on compared to hiring a marketing executive too soon in a company’s journey.

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

Our annual European Founders' Dinner in London, hosted in partnership Salesforce Ventures was a blast!

The Crew Capital Enterprise Tech Pitch & Showcase brought together over 100 NYC tech founders and operators for an evening of networking, and insights.

Congratulations to founders Anmol Sahai from Composure , Rafi Wadan from Stargazr , Nick Anthony from Flybyrd , Qingqhen Wang - DeepLeeds , Dan Cleary from PromptHub and Vlad Philps from Simbol AI who pitched their products to the audience! A big thank you to our panel: Dylan Reider from Crew Capital, Michael Droesch from Bessemer Venture Partners, Douglas Hanna from Grafana Labs, and Lukasz Niepolski & Kunal Abichandani from Rilla .

?We’ll be hosting more events later this year, stay tuned!

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

• G2 announced their Summer 2024 Reports highlighting leading software vendors across the industry. Huge congratulations to the teams at Subskribe , Tribble , Lucid Software , Productiv , and Taktile for being recognized as high performers & leaders across multiple categories by G2!
• Aiven has launched their new AI Database Optimizer ! ?? Troubleshoot PostgreSQL? and MySQL database performance issues within seconds, get instant optimization recommendations, and reduce your database costs.

• MaintainX introduced MaintainX Reporting , the ultimate tool to transform your maintenance and asset management strategy. Their powerful analytics suite converts data into actionable insights, offering visibility and control across your organization.

• Trickest introduced internal scanning and penetration testing to help organizations secure their entire attack surface. Their solutions include Network Service Scanning for risk management, Attack Surface Management for continuous monitoring, and Vulnerability Scanning for unpatched software. On-site penetration tests simulate real-world attacks, while lightweight Private Agents running on Docker offer 24/7 monitoring and flexibility, even behind VPNs and office networks.

Startup Monthly Spotlight

Powering the Future of Accounts Receivable Management

?? Mission: Aktos is revolutionizing the Accounts Receivable Management (ARM) industry with its cutting-edge operating system. Their platform is designed to streamline and optimize the ARM process, providing comprehensive solutions for debt recovery, compliance, and customer relationship management.

?????? Meet the CEO: Peter Wang , the co-founder of Aktos, was an early Product Manager at Text IQ (acquired by Relativity), a legal & compliance AI startup where he worked across GTM, product strategy, and product marketing for F500 customers. And of course, Peter always pays his bills on time…

?? What Sets Them Apart: Aktos stands out with their comprehensive Generative AI-powered platform that integrates seamlessly with existing tools and APIs. Collectors using Aktos touch 3.5x the accounts per day compared to those using legacy systems, driving dramatic improvements in productivity and revenue collected. The platform's no-code automation and workflow tools reduce administrative workload by more than 50%.

?? Discover More: Check out Crew’s investment thesis , and more on Aktos here .

Need an intro? Reach out to us at [email protected] or [email protected]

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 .

• SurrealDB , the ultimate multi-model database for tomorrow's serverless, jamstack, single-page, and traditional applications, is looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to grow they Cloud team and their first Head of Security, based in Europe.
• Aktos , the operating system that powers the $18B Credit Collections industry, is looking for a Senior Full-Stack Engineer (ideally backend-focused with experience in 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,?building the next-gen market research platform for buy-side investors, corporate development & strategy teams, and investment banks by using cutting-edge AI-powered voice capture. They are looking for a Lead Backend Software Engineer with Typescript experience based in NYC.
• Rilla , the leading conversation intelligence software for outside sales is looking for Software Engineers, Sales Development Representatives, Account Managers, AI/ML Engineers and Talent Acquisition Partners based in NYC.

Quote of the Month

"Your friend circle is never enough to build the team. Expanding beyond one’s immediate network to build a large candidate pool and a diverse team is imperative to scale effectively and mitigate biases. A large candidate pipeline and a rigorous selection process are key." - Durga Pandey , CEO & Co-founder of Subskribe in Scaling the SaaS Ladder: Subskribe CEO Durga Pandey on Navigating from Seed to Growth Stage

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If you're a founder or know any exceptional early-stage B2B SaaS founders looking to raise, feel free to reach out to us here .