Work-Bench

Every year, Work-Bench throws a celebration to bring together the best of the best in Enterprise SaaS in NYC for an epic night of networking, drinks, and connections🗽 🎉 This year, we're amping up: 😎 We're partnering with a dream team of NYC Pre-Seed investors: Comma Capital's David Ongchoco & Adarsh Bhatt, Darkmode Ventures's Raphael Danilo, Formation's Leeor Mushin, Kearny Jackson's Sriram K., Nebular's Finn Murphy, Opal Ventures's Owen Willis, and Vermilion Cliffs Ventures' Ashley Smith 🌉 We're heading to Williamsburg If you're a founder or operator building the next generation of NYC’s SaaS scene - register to join us! https://lnkd.in/dtE8TUJQ

Join our ML Engineering Happy Hour co-hosted by Priyanka Somrah, Donny Greenberg and the entire Runhouse team 😎 We're gathering our NYC technical community of practitioners across the ML Engineering ecosystem to come grab a drink, mingle, and kick off the Fall 🍂 https://lnkd.in/ex5AaJEg

It is with tremendous excitement that we share the newest addition to our Work-Bench team: David Politis, as CEO-in-Residence 🎉 David brings over 20 years of founder and operating experience with three startups acquisitions under his belt, including Vocalocity (SaaS-based communications provider acquired by Vonage), Cloud Sherpas (cloud computing advisory acquired by Accenture), and most notably as founder and former CEO of BetterCloud, a SaaS Management platform which was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in 2022. We first met David in 2013 when BetterCloud was a Seed-stage startup demoing at our NY Enterprise Tech Meetup. After that meetup, David scaled BetterCloud into a leading company in the NYC tech scene, growing it to hundreds of employees and securing funding from top-tier VCs. But with the high highs, come the low lows. He’s also navigated macro downturns, company pivots, and existential moments of impending failure (that he detailed with honesty and humility in his Startup Founder Survival Guide). When David was contemplating what to do next, we caught up over some Japanese whiskey (a favorite choice of ours over the years) and pounced on the opportunity to leverage his rare open calendar and formalize his involvement with Work-Bench! 💪 👉 In this official role, David will work alongside our Work-Bench team to support our early-stage founders and teams in the trenches – from being a guiding light as founders navigate the dark forest of pre-product market fit to building the engine for a high-velocity and repeatable sales engine. David is no stranger to supporting early-stage enterprise founders. He has the rare combination of experience and empathy to earn founders’ respect and trust in his advice. Beyond that, David upholds everything we believe in at Work-Bench: an unmatched passion for enterprise software, being long on NYC, a rare down to earth, open, and humble attitude, boundless energy in sharing lessons learned, and a belief that creativity is what breaks the mold.  Over recent years, he’s already proven to be a tremendous asset as he’s partnered with us on NY Enterprise Meetups, NYC Enterprise Operators Retreat, masterclasses, and dinners. This partnership has been a decade in the making, and the timing couldn’t be more perfect. Please join us in welcoming David to the Work-Bench team! And buckle up for an epic Fall. 🚀

Many early-stage cybersecurity founders aim to sell to large enterprises, specifically financial services. The challenge: There are a lot of nuances in navigating selling to financial services in respect to the specific threats and risks involved and how the tech integrates and operates within these businesses. Kelley Mak chatted with a number of security leaders at Fortune 500 companies and found the most common myths about sales: ❌ Everyone in a financial services ICP is the same ❌ Providing value is all that matters ❌ POCs are easy Read more in his recent post (in comments) to learn how cybersecurity companies should examine data, scale, prioritization, and budgets to knock down these myths and create a better process to close a deal.

We’re thrilled to announce that our Work-Bench portfolio company Spring Health has raised a $100M Series E at a $3.3B valuation, led by Generation Investment Management 🚀 When we first invested in Spring Health's Seed round in 2018, we were moved by co-founders April Koh and Adam Chekroud’s massive vision to use data to transform mental healthcare. Spring Health’s clinically-validated “Precision Mental Healthcare” approach reduces the traditional trial-and-error method of treatment. By analyzing a vast range of data, including patients’ specific symptoms, alongside socio-demographic information and other key factors, Spring Health is able to significantly reduce the average time for a patient to match with a caregiver, as well as shorten the duration from the first appointment to successful treatment and recovery. Spring Health now covers more than 10 million lives across companies including Microsoft, Target, J.P. Morgan Chase, Delta Airlines and more, and the team continues to innovate on offerings to eliminate every barrier to mental health. Congratulations to the entire team! We're so proud of the tremendous impact Spring Health continues to have on millions of lives everyday.

Pumped to welcome another portfolio company to the Work-Bench family: We led GovWell’s $4.5M Seed round, with participation from existing investor Bienville to support their mission to help governments serve communities better with modern software. 🏛️ The Problem: Right now, America’s 80,000+ local governments spend $1.8T per year on a wide range of essential services. Yet, this software is clunky, on-prem, decades-old, and lacks the digitalization users crave. Needless to say it's inefficient or in many cases...completely unusable. However, Baby Boomers (who make up a majority of government officials) are planning for retirement, making way for a younger, more tech-forward generation. 👨💻 Their Solution: GovWell built a cloud-native, multi-tenant, no-code solution that automates core workflows for local government agencies, including Building, Planning, Fire, Public Works, Parks/Recs, and Health departments. Today, they serve 12+ government agencies in 7 states representing 200,000+ citizens. Customers are seeing as much as a 90% reduction in time to renew licenses, issue permits, and conduct inspections. 🤓 The Team: What truly sets the team apart is their deep connection and passion for government: → CEO Troy LeCaire studied government in college and graduate school, and while working in the U.S. Senate saw how services affecting millions of people rely on antiquated software. → CTO Ben Cohen grew up working with his dad, a self-employed general contractor, and struggled to get permits quickly from local governments to build new homes. The team’s early hustle, massive vision, and relentless energy has made them an unstoppable force and we know they're just getting started! Check out our blog post and their TechCrunch feature in the comments for more!

So excited to welcome ShiftRx to the Work-Bench portfolio after leading their $3.5M Seed round, with participation from Inflect, Tau Ventures, and Opal Ventures. 🎉 💪 From meeting in high school while their fathers were undergoing chemotherapy, to pursuing careers across healthcare and serving in the military, co-founders Autumn-Kyoko C. and Leann Haddad are unrelenting in their vision to transform the future of healthcare staffing. 🏥 The Problem:  Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the pharmacy staffing shortage has intensified, significantly impacting healthcare systems operating models and bottom lines. Despite pharmacists’ integral role in the healthcare system, they’re experiencing rampant turnover and high burnout rates. 👩⚕️ Their Solution:  ShiftRx’s AI-driven, intelligent staffing platform unifies the sourcing, hiring, onboarding, and compensation for pharmacists. Their product integrates into existing clinical workflows with customized training modules to accelerate the end-to-end process. 🚀 ShiftRx is currently launched in TX and CA with a beta of 100+ pharmacies, 2K+ pharmacy professionals and a waitlist of 10K+ sign-ups. Check out our blog post in the comments for more about their creativity (from a viral marketing strategy on TikTok to how they used fax machines to get to their earliest users)! 

Our Work-Bench NYC Enterprise Operators Retreat is one of our most anticipated events of the year. Why? We bring together 150+ operators to connect on building from 0 to 1. Our first speaker of the day, Dylan Fox, Founder and CEO of speech AI model AssemblyAI, walked us through the tactical takeaways he’s learned now running a company with $115M in fundraising, 100+ employees, and 5000+ customers. We recapped his top 10 pieces of advice for founders (or operators marinating on founding a company in the future). See a few below and more in our blog post linked in comments. 🤑 On fundraising: Articulate what you’re building clearly. Dylan sees a lot of Seed fundraising decks that clearly explain the market, but generally lack one critical element: a description of what the actual product is and does. YC's application is designed specifically to get founders to articulate this messaging clearly. So, he recommends even if you're not going to apply, to look at their application questions as a forcing function to describe what you're building, fluff free. Create urgency with a compelling “why now” event. Dylan doesn’t believe it's effective narrative of “I need cash and here is information about my company.” Investors want to be dazzled with creativity, imagination, potential, and opportunity. To meet that demand, try to be specific on why they should invest, but more importantly, why they should invest now. Why is this specific moment in time important? Did you just sign up a slew of customers? Did you just reach product-market fit? Are you seeing a big increase in top of funnel? 🚀 On scaling: Take time to define your company values/operating principles early on. Having this info at the ready will be a competitive advantage to talent scouting out different companies. Leaders you hire are super important. While it's tempting to recruit executive leaders from some of the world’s biggest tech companies (think Google, Meta, etc.), they often don’t have the hustle and startup experience needed to lead at an earlier stage. Make sure each hire has experience around your current stage - these are the people most well-equipped to handle the challenges that will be thrown at you as you scale. Invest in GTM before you need it. Most early hires will be builders (developers, engineers, product) to get the company product off the ground. Oftentimes marketing is put on the backburner in the earliest days, however, it's nearly impossible to scale to $25M+ in ARR with no marketing and on word-of-mouth alone. So make sure to get your marketing function set up before you need it, so they can hit the ground running when it’s time.

Earlier this year I published a document called "Startup Founder Survival Guide: 50+ Rules to Live By". It includes 60+ pages of lessons learned over the last 20 years of operating, advising and investing in SaaS companies (link in comments). I've received amazing feedback from hundreds of founders who have read the document. There are three themes that most of the comments fit into: 1. This mirrors experiences or lessons learned from their own journey. 2. This validates how they're feeling about a certain situation or decision they're facing. 3. This helped navigate a challenge they were dealing with at the moment they were reading the doc. What I love the most is when a founder is sharing this feedback with me live and we can talk through more of the nuances and details of the lessons that resonated with them. It's hard to get some of that through just reading the document. So, I've been thinking about different ways and channels to share these lessons where I'm able to add more detail and context to the lessons. I've done a couple of speaking engagements at in person events but next week I'll be holding my first webinar to share these lessons. The webinar is part of the Work-Bench Enterprise Masterclass series. I'm going to focus on the 5 lessons that I think are the most relevant to any founder regardless of stage and that have resonated the most with the people who have read the survival guide. I'm also thinking of trying something a little more interactive on the webinar, we'll see if it works. You can register here: https://lnkd.in/eK7asfTH

We’re thrilled to announce that our portfolio company Courier Health has raised a $16.5M Series A led by Norwest Venture Partners. Courier Health provides the only patient-based CRM platform developed specifically for biopharma field access, patient services, and marketing teams to gain complete visibility and control over the end-to-end patient journey. Over the past decade, the number of specialty medicines has surged, accounting for 93% of all drug approvals and dominating R&D pipelines. Despite this progress, 60-70% of patients prescribed specialty medicines either never begin their treatment or discontinue within the first few months. Their platform connects disparate data sets, enabling centralized patient and provider management, omnichannel workflow automation, and advanced analytics, which are helping life sciences customers working with Courier Health achieve double-digit improvements to patient starts, time-to-start, and ongoing adherence to life-altering therapies. Huge congrats to Danny Sigurdson and the entire team! We couldn’t be more honored to have led the Seed and be a part of Courier Health’s journey as they enable critical access to life-saving therapies for thousands of patients 🎉 PS: They’re hiring across product, engineering and GTM!