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Vertical software has become more of a thing over the past few years. These companies build for a singular or niche audience, allowing them to tailor their offerings. VCs have often pushed back, saying that by going niche, they're shrinking the market they're selling to. We’re still early in vertical software and fintech, adtech, and logistics support are still relatively untapped opportunities.
Written in 2019, this article seems particularly relevant today. We’re seeing a lot of dynamism in VC – the winding down of funds, GPs leaving bigger funds to start their own, and partners jumping to the operator side – how should you react as a founder if your champion at a firm leaves?
Here are 10 US venture-backed enterprise fintech unicorns with a high likelihood of going public.
A free tier can be a great option for your startup. Companies like Slack, Zoom, and Canva have had huge success here. However, it’s not going to solve all your user acquisition problems. If you don’t already have a lot of eyeballs on your website or product, turning on a free tier won’t change that. Free tiers are a way to convert the traffic you already have, but only when you know how to convert the traffic to paid.
As companies of all sizes embrace hybrid work, they’re turning to gamification to help boost productivity within certain domains, like onboarding, training, and collaboration. Gamification attempts to improve engagement and encourage creativity by adding an element of fun to the task, like winning awards or completing questions.
Here’s a probing question that invites a useful thought experiment – if your company could have only one single advantage over the competition, what would it be? The answer to this question could have a cascading impact on your prioritization and competitive positioning.
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We’re seeing layoffs everywhere in tech, from small startups to public companies. The primary goal is to cut costs or change the composition of the business. Here are some signals that might suggest a layoff is on the way and how you as a founder or executive team can make the hard call.
Dealing with a lot and not breaking down is part of the founder's job. This podcast explores some tactics you can deploy to better understand your physical and mental state.
ServiceNow, a $150b market cap company, last week announced that its gen AI products drove the largest net new ACV contribution for its first full quarter of any of its new product family releases ever, including its original Pro SKU. We’re already seeing enterprise-level AI applications drive meaningful revenue growth – that’s cool.
Your focus determines your reality. This article has a collection of quotes and positioning statements that help encourage you to focus, reduce the noise, and think long-term.
We use the term “optimization” a lot in tech. Optimization is about making tradeoffs between multiple variables that create the best outcome as a whole, whilst maximization is taking one of those variables to the extreme. Understanding whether you’re optimizing or maximizing is important.
US-based venture investors took part in 1,863 European rounds in 2023 — a nearly 40% decline from 2022. It seems they’re now focusing on core markets.