Unusual Ventures

When Abhi Sharma, CEO + Co-Founder of Unusual portfolio company Relyance AI, recently recommended the book Unreasonable Hospitality to our team, he shared that it had uniquely influenced his perspective on leading his team and building his company, and we can see why. This month's Unusual Book Review features 5 of the most memorable lessons we learned from this book (and it was nearly impossible to choose just 5). Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara is an honest look at what it means to be a “hospitality-first culture.” Check out our latest book review and give the full book a read if you can — you won't regret it. https://lnkd.in/gwemuKbd

Congratulations to Vanta on raising their Series C round! We were lucky to chat with Christina Cacioppo a few months ago about the early days of building Vanta: https://lnkd.in/eK3FehdD A quick summary of how Christina described her journey to Sandhya Hegde: 1️⃣ Christina taught herself to code to gain confidence in her technical abilities. Right out of college, she worked at a venture firm where she met a lot of founders, and it gave her a better understanding of why people start companies, and what qualities they had in common. 2️⃣ While founders acknowledged that security was a concern they should take seriously, they deprioritized it in favor of competing needs (such as building product features). Vanta’s value hypothesis emphasized helping companies become SOC-2 compliant so that they could grow their business and acquire new customers. 3️⃣ The Vanta team spent 6 months interviewing people, testing, and iterating to ensure they were building the right product. They began coding only when they knew they were building something people wanted. 4️⃣ Initially, the company offered CTOs checklists for what good security means but did not find traction. However, when they pivoted to preparing companies for compliance certification, they were much more successful. 5️⃣ The Vanta team focused on building their business with the idea that if they did so, funding would take care of itself. Christina believes that VCs want to fund businesses that don’t need their money as much as businesses that do.

Congratulations to Notion on passing 100M users! This spring, Sandhya Hegde chatted with Akshay Kothari about Notion's early days. Watch it here: https://lnkd.in/gTfMesSZ Here's a summary of Notion's PMF story: 👉 When Notion launched publicly, it was a small team of people supporting extremely rapid growth. Akshay joined as the 9th employee and spent his first months doing over 100 customer support tickets per day. 👉 Creating early templates was a “game changer” for the early Notion team. They realized that people weren't likely to build full solutions from scratch. So they created templates for common use cases like wikis and task boards, allowing users to get started in just one click. 👉 Notion noticed early on that power users were proudly sharing the workflows and templates they built on the platform. The idea was to try to make these “builders looks cool.” They decided to spotlight these community stars rather than just promote the Notion brand. 👉 Rather than hire content marketers, Notion looked at influencers in the productivity space. Notion convinced many YouTubers and bloggers to adopt Notion for their own workflow needs, resulting in organic video reviews and recommendations. As Akshay explains, they wanted other people to be “creating content about Notion” to promote the brand. 👉 Notion aimed to strike the right balance between leveraging AI to enhance productivity while providing users with control and the ability to customize their experience. Notion’s AI team prototypes new capabilities and then hands it off to product teams to commercialize. This allows them to experiment rapidly while still maintaining product quality and user trust.

Insights don’t just come to founders looking to start a company. Insights are problems that founders face in their own daily lives and believe deep down can be solved in a better way. So how did founders of AI-native companies such as Perplexity, Deepgram, and Writer come up with their unique insights? Check out Sandhya Hegde's conversations with the founders of these companies in the Startup Field Guide podcast to learn more! Episodes links in the comments ⬇

"Pitching is more art than science; it’s about creating a strong connection with investors." Unusual GP and 3x founder Lars Albright provides founders with 5 concrete tips to nail their first pitch! Link to the full blog post in the comments!

🌊 The rising tide of enterprise AI SaaS adoption is almost here. So many startups have just had (or are having) an incredible Q2 2024. This comes at a fascinating moment. The frontier AI labs are having a "quiet" summer as they grapple with the limitations of deep learning. Analysts and investors who leaned in aggressively in 2023 are anxious at lack luster returns and high-profile acqui-hire outcomes - rightly so, AI has been a bloodbath for most big VC funds so far. Meanwhile, the enterprise buyers of AI are starting to figure out how to buy (and roll out) tools that have clear value and are giving them some solid productivity gains. They were asked to do more with less, they are giving it a go! And what's working is somewhat counterintuitive - here are some observations: 1️⃣ The extreme GTMs are working best. Either you have an incredible self-serve product that's being bought bottom up you have built a CXO relationship at a company with an AI slush fund. Partnerships with consulting firms is another path to power. Look at who's praising the tool in public - is it the end user or just the buyer? 2️⃣ While there are still products getting bought on demos, the companies that have focused hard on enabling outcomes have found their champions. Customers successfully activated 6 months ago are driving pipeline now. Get your case studies and referral requests lined up asap! 3️⃣ The use cases finally getting adoption are the same demos we all got excited about over 12-18 months ago. RAGs for support. Copilots. No-code LLM apps. Design generation. Language generation. This is how long it takes to form the right expectations, make the tool somewhat reliable and unlock budget. 4️⃣ Customers are not wasting time deciding if the SaaS tool they are piloting is a wrapper. They have now wasted many hours on trying to make LLMs work themselves or created sh*tty videos no one wanted to watch. They love products that get the job done - what models are being used is nearly irrelevant except if it bumps up against security postures they need to route around. 5️⃣ Service providers to companies have been on the leading edge of AI adoption are often pivotal to introducing traditional buyers to tools. While we declare that AI agents bring us the services-as-software revolution, we might not know yet what shape it will take. Huge congrats to the AI SaaS founders celebrating this summer and if you are still wandering through the idea maze - stick it out, it's going to be worth it.

🍰 Who doesn't love cake? We especially love a good cake-based metaphor for building great companies! Jyoti Bansal (co-founder of Harness, Traceable, and Unusual Ventures) explains why great companies need a 3-layer foundation of: 1️⃣ Product excellence 2️⃣ GTM excellence 3️⃣ Operational excellence  At the end of the day, investing in these three layers enables you to have your cake and eat it too — you create a strong business you can scale around.

"Now it's 2024 so if if I don't ask you a question about LLMs, then an angel in heaven will die." 😂 😂 Sandhya Hegde to Kareem Amin (CEO and co-founder of Clay). 🎧 Don't miss our latest podcast episode with Kareem: https://lnkd.in/e3yuJiC2 How did Clay integrate AI models like GPT-3? ➡ From the beginning, Clay was built to aggregate data sources and tools, making it easy to integrate AI models. ➡ Clay was able to quickly ship data extraction, summarization, and writing personalized messages: tasks that previously required years of NLP investment.

When they started Unusual Ventures, John Vrionis and Jyoti Bansal established a core ideology for the firm: "Founder Obsession" This core ideology drives our work throughout the firm. We stay true to our goal of supporting founders across all functions and delivering world-class investment returns to LPs who are making the world better through education, healthcare, and research. Our team recently read "Built to Last" by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras to learn more about why core ideologies are central to building visionary companies, and why it's important to protect your core ideology during challenging times. Check out our entire review:

Happy 4th of July from Team Unusual!