Sriya M.

inVest Ventures, a LinkedIn Community VC Fund, launches today! LinkedIn alums have already founded some amazing companies: think Confluent, Notion, Cricket Health, Figma, and many more. inVest Ventures launches today to build more amazing companies by connecting LinkedIn alum founders with LinkedIn employees past and present: not only as a source of funding but also as a source of advice, relationships, and support. Every inVest Ventures limited partner (”inVestor”) is either a current or former LinkedIn employee: - Many inVestors built LinkedIn from a startup to what it is today, creating its culture, its strategy, and its playbooks - And many inVestors have already benefited from these LinkedIn lessons to found, lead, or invest in dozens of other notable tech companies Now this group of inVestors is focused on building the next generation of transformational LinkedIn alum-founded companies as part of inVest Ventures. It’s been a blast partnering with the core inVest Ventures team of Glenn Borok, Neil Khare, Karen Chi, Lauri J. Moore, Lizzie Youshaei, Mia McConnell, and Erica Lockheimer over the past 4+ months to get us to today’s launch. And to reconnect with such a wide swath of LinkedIn folks as we’ve built out such a strong inVestor community. A special shout-out to Mia for being the mastermind behind this wonderful video and to Amy Lokey, Annabel Liu, Arvind Rajan, David Henke, Erica Lockheimer, Erika Rottenberg, Florina Xhabija Grosskurth, Gyanda Sachdeva, Hari Srinivasan, Kiran Prasad, Lora Blum, Mike Derezin, Mike Gamson, Prachi Gupta, Ryan Roslansky, Scott Roberts, Steve Sordello, and Ya Xu for starring in it. Hello, inVest Ventures. I’m inVested. #inVestVentures #IAmInVested

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Founders, don’t make this common mistake early on (#4 in series): Rely too heavily on referrals without any process. Every founder knows referrals are the holy grail of hiring. Who doesn’t want a warm intro to a strong candidate that comes vouched for? So founders ask their team for referrals anytime a new role opens up. Maybe they’ll get a few leads. But without structure, referrals stall: • Current employees get distracted by their day-to-day. • They forget to tap their networks. • High-quality references dry up quick. Your new goal: Systematize referrals. • Set aside dedicated time every quarter to re-engage your team on referrals. Remind them of open roles and relevant skill sets you seek. • Provide clear guidelines on who and how to refer. For example, share ideal candidate criteria and specifics on where they should introduce you. • Incentivize referrals with gift cards or team rewards. And track submissions to notify when a referee gets hired. Putting a structured referral program in place reduces ad-hoc asks and motivates your team to proactively tap their trusted contacts. You’ll see candidate quality and hiring velocity increase overnight. P.S. This is post #4 in my series uncovering common founder hiring mistakes that burn cash. Follow me to catch the rest of the series.

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Day 3/1000 of posting cute cat pictures on LinkedIn instead of doing my work. While you're here, my co-founder Tarek Khalil (TK) just published an insightful blog post on why #WhatsApp is the next big platform, with some excellent guiding info for anyone who wants to build on or invest in it. Check it out and give him a sub if you'd like more 👇👇👇 https://lnkd.in/dMY8vxsW

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🚀 It's been nearly a week since our Persana AI Product Hunt launch, and the momentum is still going strong. We're onboarding hundreds of users each day and are excited to be featured in Zain Kahn's Superhuman newsletter. 🗣️ We're also growing our Sales Slack community, where we discuss the latest outbound strategies that convert, support one another's content, talk about new features, and so much more. If you're in the sales, GTM, or the outbound space, you must join! (Link in comments) We're also launching our Persana Pros program for sales experts! If you're a sales rockstar looking to level up your game and grow your business, this is your chance. Earn a significant commission for a year on sales you bring in, get showcased on our app, referrals for clients, get access to an exclusive community of experts, and so much more. (Link in comments) 🔥 As a Persana Pro, you'll also get early access to our latest sales tools and features, and the opportunity to speak at our virtual and in-person conferences. This is your chance to accelerate your career, connect with awesome people, and help revolutionize outbound. Let's dominate the sales world together! 💪 Reach out to me or S. Can Timağur if you have any questions.

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In the past few weeks, I've been following discussions in the Discord channel for the first cohort of the HASAN accelerator. The quality of the startups and the mentors in this cohort is incredible. One startup has 2+ million users without any VC funds. It's said that every decade, a new wave of innovators creates new markets and products (I made this up). I'm convinced that events in recent years have given rise to startups building solutions for their communities. Muslim founders and faith-based investors, stick to your guns. The ecosystem is realizing we can solve our own problems. For years, ethical investors focused on real estate investments due to non-Shariah compliance restrictions. That's changing! Now, investors can explore alternative instruments and private equity opportunities that deliver above-market returns without earning interest. If you're looking to invest in halal startups through the HASAN accelerator, reach out to Umar Munshi or Mohd akhtaar. You can also DM me to get more details. If you found this post useful, consider resharing ♻️ so others can benefit.

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Good luck convincing the VCs on this. The platform VCs and visionary VCs do not exist anymore. There are very few who will come and support anything remotely close to this at the seed stage. Most VCs usually say they will come in "later...." once you become OpenAI probably🤷🏽‍♂️😄 Sam did admit to this openly: here is the video https://lnkd.in/gsFX_3DE #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Platform #Startups

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Every month the Section 2D YC W24 crew meets for ✨ founder therapy ✨ During these calls each team gets - 2 minutes to give a progress update - 8 minutes to discuss their largest problem - Set a 1 month goal for our next meeting We use each other as a think tank to get advice & dig into vulnerable tough topics. I highly encourage all founders to find a group of consistent founders to lean on. It could be the difference between default alive and default dead! Magic Hour TensorFuse (YC W24) Agentic Labs Retell AI CodeAnt AI (YC W24) Further AI camelQA

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“I have worked at several startups and worked in startup-like environments within a giant company, so my resume is full of scars, chaos, hardships, and startup life-saving antibodies.” Abdulrahman Abbag You Have likely considered joining an early-stage startup to become a millionaire where you envision the following events: 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝗼𝗻𝗲: Join an early-stage startup. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝘁𝘄𝗼: Hope the founder is competent, ambitious, and crazy enough to make it work. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲: Stick with it for a while. Eat a low-calorie salary, wait for that rainy day, exercise your options, and join the millionaire club. The problem is that it is highly unlikely that you will become a millionaire. The odds are stacked against you. So, it might be time to update your own assumptions and start thinking from first principles. You should join a startup if: 4. It is the only way to get a job or experience. 3. It is the only and best way to get exposure to an industry, function, or problem you are excited about. 2. If you are thinking about starting a startup. 1. Find out in my blog. Don't join it for the FOMO, fun, stability, and your cousin’s best friend’s cousin became a millionaire working for a startup. In other words, don’t join one to get rich; join for the right reasons. ___ My new article is live. It's about why early-stage startups are not for everyone. Full post: https://bit.ly/4d55zHn

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aim to have your first revenue in the first three months

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Hire a "Customer Obsessed Engineer" – Like seriously. We've got ours at Rasayel → Amr Nashaat 😉 So what's this seemingly made-up title all about? 🤔💭 Yeah, they're kinda like a Customer Support Engineer but way more startup-y. ⚒ They're legit engineers! 👥 They feel energised working closely with customers 🐞 They can dive deep into technical issues, investigate, and troubleshoot 🪛 They whip up internal tooling for support 💊 They do technical onboarding for customers ⛺️ They act as solutions engineers on sales calls 📜 They craft killer technical docs Most importantly – they work independently and can swim across product, engineering, sales, and support to unlock more value for the prospect or customer. Oh, and BTW, our engineers dabble in this stuff too 👆 Your engineers will be even more empowered knowing that there is a generalist hero backing them up. #hiring #customersupport #softwareengineer

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Halfway through our Y Combinator batch, over 60% of the startups in our cohort (including us) were stuck pivoting. That’s when Paul Graham flew in from England to talk about finding a great startup idea. Here’s what he told us: 1️⃣ Turn off the three ‘bad idea filters’: By turning off the ‘bad idea filters’ in your head, it instantly becomes easier for good ones to emerge. 1/ The sanity filter: Often, the greatest startups come out of ideas that originally seemed insane. So don’t shut down ideas because they seem impractical. For eg, when Airbnb started, no one ever thought people would let strangers sleep in their homes. 2/ The money filter: Money is important for a startup, but if you’re able to drive strong growth without generating revenue, don’t discard the idea. For eg: JustinTV (now Twitch), began with a guy live-streaming his life with a camera strapped to his head. There was no revenue stream initially. 3/ The schlepp filter: Don’t dismiss an idea just because it seems like too much work. For eg: Stripe had to handle unholy amounts of legal and regulatory work to get banks onboard their payments platform. Still, they did the hard work, and Stripe solved a problem that hundreds of their contemporaries were afraid to work on. Often, the impractical hard work becomes the moat that protects your startup from competition. 2️⃣ Don’t build for boomers   If you’re only building for boomers, your company will die with them. Whatever you’re building needs to become popular amongst the younger generation. If you’re a college student and you find a lot of your peers using what you’re building (and not just because they’re your friends), it could well be the start of something big. 3️⃣ Stop thinking all the best ideas are taken As founders, we often come up with an idea only to realize another company has already built it. We then find ourselves wishing that such other company didn't exist. You need to throw that mentality out the door. One quote I’ll always take away from PG’s talk is that there are billions of years of existence left. It would be practically impossible (and quite frankly depressing) for all the good ideas to run out by 2024. These tips really helped us zero in on what we’re building today. At our last startup, Desklamp, we’d spend weeks on end producing each feature launch video. During our pivot phase, PG’s talk inspired us to ask ourselves if we could automate that process using AI. That bold question led us to Clueso (YC W23): end-to-end AI automation for producing software videos for companies. #startups

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2008: YC founders hustling to grow with presidential cereals. 2024: YC founders hustling to grow with selfies on LinkedIn.

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Recently, in talking to a Y Combinator backed Founder friend he shared the most of the companies in his batch have struggled to find product-market fit and it's been a couple of years since they got started. To make matters worse, most of these founders have already raised significant amounts of funding and are now under the gun to grow rapidly. This sets up a "perfect storm" for these founders because finding PMF takes time, because selling takes time. Time and resources spent perfecting the pitch deck are a colossal waste of time pre-PMF. On the other hand, when you have PMF, the pitch deck almost writes itself! This is why the First Round Capital PMF program fills such a burning need in the market. https://pmf.firstround.com A great initiative by Todd Jackson and the First Round Capital Team to start this program. I think many others will follow. For more details see video link of Lenny Rachitsky interview with Todd Jackson in the comments below #productmarketfit #pmf #founder #startup #yc #ycombinator

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on picking founders who are good people: What made YC successful was being able to pick good founders. We thought Airbnb was a bad idea. We funded it because we liked the founders. During interviews, Robert and Trevor and I would pepper the applicants with technical questions. Jessica would mostly watch. A lot of the applicants probably read her as some kind of secretary, especially early on, because she was the one who'd go out and get each new group and she didn't ask many questions. She was ok with that. It was easier for her to watch people if they didn't notice her. But after the interview, the three of us would turn to Jessica and ask, "What does the Social Radar say?" Having the Social Radar at interviews wasn't just how we picked founders who'd be successful. It was also how we picked founders who were good people. At first we did this because we couldn't help it. Imagine what it would feel like to have x-ray vision for character. Being around bad people would be intolerable. So we'd refuse to fund founders whose characters we had doubts about even if we thought they'd be successful. As we later learned, it probably cost us little to reject people whose characters we had doubts about, because how good founders are and how well they do are not orthogonal. If bad founders succeed at all, they tend to sell early. The most successful founders are almost all good. - Paul Graham #startups #yc

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There are two types of founders: 1 → Build in stealth for a million-dollar scale at ZERO revenue. 2 → Iterate, build in public, and work with users to buildd a brilliant product. The first type seeks to impress. The second seeks to improve. #startup

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Building a strong network is crucial for startup success, especially when it comes to fundraising. I learned this the hard way. Initially, I thought I knew how to navigate the VC world on my own. But over time, I realized that seeking support and mentorship is invaluable. I'm sharing this as a reminder to myself as well. Raising funds from LPs and family offices is no different than engaging with VCs. You have to seek advice, be humble, and remain curious. Here are a few key points to consider: 1. Networking Strategies: Building and maintaining professional relationships is essential. Attend industry events, join online communities, and don't hesitate to reach out to potential contacts. 2. Mentorship: Having mentors and advisors with a track record of raising funds can provide invaluable guidance. Don’t be afraid to seek out experienced founders and ask for their help and advice. Their insights can help you avoid common pitfalls and refine your approach. And remember, offering a small equity stake can motivate and excite the right mentor—someone whose heart is in the right place and who genuinely wants to see you succeed. 3. Collaborations and Partnerships: Strategic partnerships can accelerate growth and open new opportunities. Look for partners who complement your business and share your vision. 4. Community Engagement: Being an active part of entrepreneurial communities can provide support, inspiration, and valuable connections. Participate in discussions, share your experiences, and learn from others. 5. Personal Branding: Building a strong personal brand enhances your credibility and can attract investors, partners, and top talent. Be authentic and share your journey, including both successes and challenges. Remember, you don’t have to go it alone. Leveraging your network, seeking mentorship, and building strategic relationships can significantly enhance your chances of success. Let’s support each other and create a thriving ecosystem for all entrepreneurs. 🌟 #Networking #Mentorship #Fundraising #StartupSuccess #Entrepreneurship #Community #Venturestudio #Fmailyoffice #PersonalBranding

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This should be a helpful reference for marketplace founders that might be on the fence about applying to Y Combinator. Aziz Alghunaim shares how he's not only benefited from it once, but now twice as a second-time marketplace founder building Nash. My quick takeaway from it is to apply.

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