Bipul Sinha

PE - 3 ideas for the next 3 years - just like every traditional company needs to be a SaaS company, every SaaS company needs to ultimately be an AI company - ramp up revenue growth but always protect the profits - today is the time to innovate (i.e. not re-invent) your business model & strategy - importantly, this applies not only to PE portfolio companies but also to PE firms to get the best IRR --- #pe #privateequity #business #strategy #saas

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Microsoft’s #AIstudio hugs Nasuni’s file storage so their customers can natively unlock business insights from their global #unstructuredfile data. This is possible as Nasuni’s #cloud-native global file system inherently consolidates customer file data on near infinite #storage. This is just one of many #filesservices you can now activate. I love #investing in #extraordinary #founders!

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Enterprises spend more on security but aren’t benefitting from the extra spend. Palo Alto Networks’ customers who buy security across 3 platforms spend more than 40x those that secure just one. Despite those dollars… “Adding incremental point products is not necessarily driving a better security outcome for them.” - Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks The average enterprise uses upwards of 70 security products. Many of these products produce alerts identifying phishing emails or network access issues or odd device behavior. The security operations center (SOC) reviews these alerts. Estimates suggest the typical team receives between 5,000 & 11,000 alerts per day - every day. Worse still, every SOC team is short-staffed. No wonder these teams can’t keep up with the deluge. Fewer than 10% of alerts are ever reviewed. Many security breaches could have been detected earlier with broader coverage. Dropzone provides AI SOC analysts that never sleep. Leveraging the power of LLMs, Dropzone’s analysts collect alerts, fetch relevant information from other systems, and then triage alerts. These agents also inform copilots that empower security analysts to ask questions of their environment leveraging the insight of the AI analysts. RSA selected Dropzone a top 10 Finalist in the Innovation Sandbox. We’re thrilled to support Edward & the Dropzone team in fulfilling their mission. As Senior Principal Scientist, Edward architected the AI systems at ExtraHop, a network security company acquired for $900M. Our partner Andy wrote in greater depth about our vision for the company here : https://lnkd.in/dyUy6M_3. And if you’re curious to test it on your own, you can test drive it here : https://lnkd.in/djzXcwjs.

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Wise advice from Vinod Khosla on board members/advisors: Look for those who... ▶ Went through the pain of building companies ▶ Took decisions when future was not clear ▶ Lived through situations of not getting paid If they haven't founded, it's hard to relate to the founder's journey. Entrepreneurial experience and shared struggles are invaluable for providing genuine guidance. #entrepreneurship #board #advisors #founderjourney #startups #founders

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In an era where innovation outpaces regulation, how can entrepreneurs embed social responsibility into the DNA of their startups? 🌐💡 Recent conversations and insightful pieces, particularly one by Lyel Resner and Dr. Wilneida Negrón, have sparked a profound consideration in my thinking: the imperative for responsible innovation in tech ventures. They posit a tantalizing question - what if the tech giants of tomorrow were built on the foundations of public interest and social responsibility today? Diving into this thought experiment reveals more than just an ethical proposition; it opens up a paradigm where businesses can be both profitable and purposeful. Embedding social responsibility from the outset could guide ventures to prioritize long-term societal well-being over short-term gains. Imagine a future where companies are not just evaluated by their financial performance but also by their contribution to solving societal issues. The notion is ambitious but certainly not unattainable. This approach challenges us as entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators to rethink our roles in shaping the future of technology. It's a call to action to pioneer a new wave of responsible businesses that are equipped to address, rather than exacerbate, global challenges. Let’s discuss: How can we as part of the startup ecosystem integrate these principles into our work from day zero? Your thoughts could light up paths not yet traveled. 🚀🌍

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🚀 Insights from Venture Collision Conf Today! 🚀 Privileged to learn from industry leaders at today's event: Paddy Cosgrave, CEO of Web Summit, Rashmi Gopinath from B Capital and Shailesh Lakhani from Peak XV Partners. Here are some key takeaways: - Rise in Bootstrapping startups: More bootstrapping startups this year than ever, emphasizing a trend towards building with limited external funding. - Secondary Market Activity: The secondary market is more active this year, reflecting dynamic investment strategies compared to last year. - Engineering Talent: Strong engineering talent is crucial for building successful teams. Talent hotspots include the Bay Area, Beijing/China, and India. - Capital Dynamics: The excess capital raised in 2021 and 2022 has intensified competition in certain sectors, diluting opportunities and leading to an unsustainable environment. A return to stability will take time. Grateful to everyone who shared valuable insights today! #Venture #collision2024 #Startups #Innovation #Entrepreneurship #TechTrends

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I had a lot of fun recording a podcast episode with Shiva Singh Sangwan. We discussed the evolution of Humba Ventures & Susa Ventures; tips for raising and building a fund; how to improve investment sourcing & picking; the role of luck in investing, and so on. https://lnkd.in/eiqsStej

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Woke up to seeing Arjun Vaidya's post on deck hygiene (link in comments) and, while agreeing with everything mentioned, felt compelled to add a few points. 🖥 Yes you need a deck: It may not be fun, you may feel that you're the brightest star in person or over a call, but them's the rules of the game. It makes it easier for funds to have a reference point to look back to, quickly assess whether you're a fit within fund mandates and current thesis, as well as gauge your abilities. After all, if you can't pitch your own company for investment, sales will be a VERY uphill task. ❗ Deck hygiene matters: We actually do read decks, and if you end up contradicting your deck in your pitch, we will catch it. Poorly formatted decks showcase a lack of attention to detail, which, once again, acts as a signal that this is the founder mindset (hint: no one wants to invest in a founder with lack of attention to detail) ⚖ Mandates exist: Most funds are very very open about what they are looking for, on their websites, blogs, Partner/Principal's LinkedIn etc. If you choose to ignore all of these and pitch to a fund completely unaligned to your business, it's probably going nowhere. 🤝 Outreach works: The biggest reason why people cry that they don't get responses from VCs is because you're ignoring any good form of engagement. A LinkedIn message saying "Hi, I'm building the next Airbnb, would you like to join me and make so so much money" will likely get ignored. A message like "Hi, I'm building XYZ to solve ABC, which I realized was a problem while working across 123. We currently have 10 paying customers generating $$, with a pipeline of 20 more. I'm looking to raise $100 to help expand and hit Y metric, I'd love to share more about what we are doing. I've attached my deck with more details", this I reply to 100% of the time ✅ ✅ ✅ A few more rules of thumb: 💲 - Have a financial model ready. If you don't know how to make one, we have the length and breadth of human knowledge available via devices we're reading/typing this on 💥💥 - Traction wins, followed by experience, followed by hope. If you don't have traction, showcase your experience. If you don't have traction or experience, fundraising will be hard, bet on hope. 🙌 🙌 🙌 - The market is always right. This doesn't mean VCs, it means paying customers. Phil Knight funded what today is Nike by working a full time job at PWC to get to scale. VC funding is one way to grow, NOT the only way. #funding #fundraising #venturecapital #startups

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Episode 341 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Somak Chattopadhyay, Managing Partner at Armory Square Ventures. Yes, markets like the Bay Area, NYC, and Boston get a lot of attention when it comes to building startups and having the ability to raise capital, but there are lots of other places to build a successful company. This has always been the case, but the pandemic definitely pushed this reality further.  This is why a firm like Amory Square Ventures exists. There are lots of secondary markets where entrepreneurs need access to capital and it is also a very important matter for the local economy for these companies to grow and create jobs, versus relocating. Somak shares the details of what led him down the path to start Armory Square Ventures, a seed and early stage venture fund, and why their approach of investing in seconday markets has not only been a differentiator for their firm but what they also consider as an optimism engine and a community catalyst for regions outside Silicon Valley. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Advice on how founders can push back on advice from investors. * Somak’s background story and his early career in startups. * How he landed in venture capital at Edison Ventures and Tribeca Venture Partners. * The details on what they are targeting for investments and portfolio company examples like Machinery Partner and ACV Auctions, a Buffalo company that went public. * Somak’s anti-portfolio, companies that he reviewed and an investment didn’t work out and went on to be a successful company. * Advice on building a marketplace. * And so much more. #venturecapital #startups #marketplaces

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What do you do when a radical new technology puts your main product right in the crosshairs of disruption? Listen to David Okuniev — co-founder of Typeform | Ask awesomely — discuss the challenges of innovation within existing structures. David shared a game-changing insight: Radical innovation is really, really difficult to do inside your own product. He emphasized the need to break free from the constraints of familiarity and embrace change from outside the box. Henrik Werdelin and I have both seen our fair share of this in our respective careers. What struck us most was how David leveraged structure to overcome the innovator’s dilemma. By creating a culture of experimentation and providing space for bold ideas, he propelled Typeform beyond incremental improvements. What other hacks have you seen or employed to help your organization overcome the innovator’s dilemma? Share your stories below! 👇 And if you want to dive deeper into our conversation, click the link in the comments to catch the full podcast episode!

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Why IBM's Acquisition of HashiCorp is a Game-Changer for Investors IBM's $6.4 billion acquisition of HashiCorp significantly bolsters its hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities, positioning it as a leader in the AI era. HashiCorp’s expertise in cloud infrastructure, lifecycle management, and security automation complements IBM’s strengths, creating an end-to-end cloud platform. This strategic move enables IBM to offer enhanced solutions for managing complex cloud environments and generative AI workloads, providing investors with robust growth potential and a competitive edge in the evolving tech landscape. #IBM #HashiCorp #CloudComputing #AI #InvestmentOpportunity #PINCommunityAdvocate #IBMPartner

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I joined a Venture Capital Fund as a Limited Partner (LP) - at age 29. And not just ANY VC fund… Last week, it was announced that a number of current and former LinkedIn executives and leaders have joined forces to launch inVest Ventures, a LinkedIn Community VC fund that invests in LinkedIn alumni-founded companies, where every Limited Partner ("inVestor") is either a current or former LinkedIn employee. -- When our former VP of Engineering, Erica Lockheimer, asked me if I wanted to join, it was a no-brainer to say YES. Because the talent that comes out of LinkedIn is extraordinary. Many former LinkedIn employees have gone on to found wildly successful companies including: Figma, Notion, Cameo, Cricket Health, Confluent, Superhuman & dozens more. -- It’s why the term “LinkedIn Mafia” exists. Because there is a disproportionate number of unicorns founded by LinkedIn alumni. The hypothesis: LinkedIn's diverse product suite and business model promote a culture of cross-functional collaboration and multi-domain expertise. It’s this unique environment that is preparing alumni for high-level success in diverse ventures. -- BUT if you know me and you look at those companies above, you might notice something: The vast majority of these companies were founded by men. Not exactly in alignment with my brand and investor thesis as a “women’s economic advancement advocate”. So when I pledged my investment and support, it was important for me to challenge our inVest Ventures team to be thoughtful about ensuring we have a healthy, gender-diverse founder pipeline. And not just that but when we think what lead investors to follow, we should also be intentional about following the lead of more successful female- and/or minority-led funds who are more likely to invest in underrepresented founders tackling underserved problems. -- Only 2% of VC funding goes to all female-founded startups. Before 2021, only 93 Black women founders in the United States had ever raised $1 million or more in funding. I’m excited to invest and learn alongside tech leaders who’ve had a tremendous impact on our industry over the past 20 years. And you better believe I will put my vote to good use. #investventures #venturecapital #vcfunding #femalefounders #showherthemoney

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I had the honor of delivering the Grand Keynote at #TiECon2024, an event hosted by TiE Silicon Valley. Engaging with successful entrepreneurs was truly inspiring. I want to extend my gratitude to Anita Manwani, Surbhi Kaul, and R. Paul Singh for their kind invitation to speak at this remarkable event. At TiEcon 2024, the theme was "AI Ubiquity: Envision the Future," highlighting AI's transformative power. I spoke on the future of cybersecurity and #AI, read more about my AI + Cybersecurity predictions: https://lnkd.in/gw9qvZCC I also shared the top 6 lessons I’ve learned throughout my career as an entrepreneur:   Disruptive vs Incremental: Selecting the right area to do a startup is important: you can do a small change or a significant change. It’s the mega shifts that create new market leaders. Your customers are often looking to solve incremental problems so they won't be asking for a transformational change; therefore, you need to drive with your conviction and your gut.   It’s all about the team: Make sure that you hire a founding team that is passionate and driven. I look for hungry and rising stars who are eager to prove themselves who have a special spark in them. A startup journey is a long one, so choose your team wisely.   Culture is critical to drive: Culture is critical to the business, it’s the result of leadership behaviors that drive culture. It’s how you work, how you approach risk, and how you fail fast. In the early stages, it’s critical to be hands-on, so the entire team needs to be focused on getting things done with bias to action. Innovative technology helps but sales & marketing are keys to success: Quite often, entrepreneurs think that if the technology is great, then it will speak for itself, but that’s not true. The #1 sales person in any company needs to be the founder. As a CEO, I spend at least one-third of my time with customers. Customer and growth obsession are fundamental to my success. CEOs: The buck stops with you: One of the rules I have is to hire fresh talent to my executive team who can broaden my horizons and bring new ideas. You need a leadership team who are not “yes” people. If you have two strong people who agree with you all the time, one of them is redundant. As your company grows, it’s natural for leaders to evolve and some will move on. I believe that, for companies to grow, CEOs need to be constantly evaluating what the business needs to succeed and make the tough calls. Raising money or selling your company: Don’t build a company to get rich quick as you’ll be desperate to sell it. If your mindset is to always sell your company, you might not be able to make the right business decisions. If you’re in a position of strength, you don’t need to be concerned with following the money, and you can sell your company when the time is right. We built Zscaler with a long-term mindset, we wanted to build a lasting public company and we didn’t take any shortcuts.

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Every day, AI is revolutionizing various cybersecurity functions, transforming how we approach identity verification, DevSecOps, threat detection and response, and security services. These AI-powered solutions are streamlining workflows and fortifying environments for enhanced security. If you're an Indian founder gearing up for RSA Conference 2024, don't hesitate to reach out! Let's connect and brainstorm on what you're building - feel free to DM or drop an email at vtandon@bvp.com. Anant Vidur Puri Aparna Chaganty #cybersecurity #AI #startups #india

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At an LP’s annual meeting: ~100 quality VC and growth equity firms gave brief overviews. <5 said they invest in consumer. The consumer is the engine of the economy and 2/3 of GDP but is a bad word. Watch - we’ll look back and this will be a great time to invest in consumer.

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Great panel at CAASA Start-Up Round-Up 2024 with Prathna Ramesh, Michael Branco and Ricky Mehra on the Gold Rush in #AI! Here's a summary of their talk: 🎲 Role of VCs in AI: Mike and Rick agreed that VCs are critical in sifting through the noise to find valuable investments. This involves rigorous due diligence, understanding the customer problems, and focusing on practical use cases of AI. VCs then derisk the ventures, for example, by introducing tier 1 customers, supporting the back office that the founders might not have cared about, and figuring out the right team to scale. Mike pointed out that founders might overlook business operations, particularly those from technical backgrounds. ⏳ Time Horizon and Growth Rate:  The panellists discussed the speeding up of investment horizons in recent years, even for traditional long-tail industries like telecommunications. They also emphasized the need for investors to stay ahead of emerging trends, focusing on what's coming in the next 12 to 18 months and how the future will roll out in 3 to 5 years. 📊 Data & Distribution: Prathna emphasized that data and distribution advantages are key to getting to market better, faster, and cheaper than competitors. It’s about being really good at execution and leveraging these strengths effectively. Rick discussed the challenge of proprietary data in healthcare, highlighting the potential of having a single dataset of longitudinal patient data to revolutionize the industry. The challenge is the outdated HIPAA and GDPR regulations, which must be updated to keep up with digital health advancements. 🏗️ Build vs. Use Existing Models: Mike discussed the efficiency of using existing models, such as Meta's published model with base datasets, to solve previously too challenging problems. He gave an example of using AI for weather forecasting for big events and how the amount of data needed to process was too big to handle before AI. ⚠️ Risks and Concerns:  Rick raised concerns about the potential existential risks posed by AI and the need to carefully consider its impact on humanity, especially in his space in healthcare. For example, misdiagnosing due to AI's black-box nature can be more problematic and cause more deaths than human error. It is crucial to evaluate if the AI system you're building is the right solution for the problem and at what risk. AI is the first time something more intelligent than humans might be created, so linear projections from past technologies like phones or the internet are inadequate. Rick stressed the importance of slowing down and spending time thinking about how AI will impact humanity. Very insightful panel! Thanks CAASA - Canadian Association of Alternative Strategies & Assets for the event! #investing #startup #tech

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Many SaaS solutions resonate most with directors/VPs/department heads. For the past 5+ years the approach for selling to these folks was to get them very excited about your solution and price in such a way that they could get a deal done with minimal sign off. In enterprise this could run as high as 500k. Now, there is scrutiny on 25k deals. Smart sellers realize this and are running a totally different play. A little different flavor of the traditional top down model. These folks are still doing well. Folks running the old playbook? In struggleville. P.S. - when times are hard it’s actually easier to do big deals…if you know how to sell transformations.

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A common question we receive from founders is about the timing and allocation of hires. While each company is unique and headcount decisions should align with specific milestones, here is a chart from our recent Beyond Benchmarks report illustrating how headcount was distributed by department across different ARR ranges.

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We've been investing quite a bit at the frontier & intersection of AI+Security. Security and compliance continue to be the main enterprise blocker for deploying and getting ROI out of generative AI; AI will reshape and transform the threat landscape for every enterprise. Sanjay Kalra, the former CPO of Lacework and a pioneer in cloud security, has one of the most articulate frameworks for thinking through how AI will transform the security landscape. On the latest episode of Practically Intelligent, Join Sinan Ozdemir and I as we explore: - The alarming speed at which generative AI tools are being adopted despite acknowledgement of security risks  🚨 - Strategies for implementing AI technologies securely and responsibly  🔐 - The future landscape of AI security and the proactive steps organizations must take 🌍 Shoutout to existing Tola AI & Security founders in this space: Saurabh Shintre monzy merza Sanket nAIk Sravish Sridhar Adriano Soares Koshiyama And of course to our many CISO advisors who help us leverage their expertise and insight - you know who you are :) YT: https://lnkd.in/d8XMEnZs Apple: https://lnkd.in/d9AwTVuv

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