This week Harness made the Forbes Cloud 100 list! Jyoti Bansal (founder and CEO of Harness) is passionate about founder-selling, especially in the early days. He learned the hard way that an effective sales strategy matters. For founders who may be sales skeptics, Jyoti offers 4 concrete steps to help you embrace founder selling. Step 1️⃣ Accept that sales matter Step 2️⃣ Build your sales machine Step 3️⃣ Relentlessly focus on people (and champions) Step 4️⃣ Remove surprises from the sales process Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eZKM_EQa
Unusual Ventures
Financial Services
Menlo Park, California 36,674 followers
Seed Stage Venture Capital
About us
Unusual Ventures is raising the bar for what founders should expect from their venture investors. We enable startups with the hands on support and expertise they need to be successful during their early stage journey. Unusual Ventures is an early-stage firm that invests in both enterprise and consumer startups.
- Website
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http://www.unusual.vc
External link for Unusual Ventures
- Industry
- Financial Services
- Company size
- 11-50 employees
- Headquarters
- Menlo Park, California
- Type
- Privately Held
- Founded
- 2018
- Specialties
- venture capital, investing, recruiting, hiring, customer development, seed stage, fundraising, marketing, sales, storytelling, technology, enterprise, consumer, startups, information technology, data, back office, finance, advice, and growth
Locations
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Primary
200 Middlefield Rd
Menlo Park, California 94025, US
Employees at Unusual Ventures
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Sarah Leary
Co-Founder and CMO/CBO of Nextdoor. Technology Founder, Executive, Board Member, and Investor.
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Luan Lam
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Jyoti Bansal
Jyoti Bansal is an Influencer Entrepreneur | Dreamer | Builder. Founder at Harness, Traceable, AppDynamics & Unusual Ventures
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Wei Lien Dang
General Partner at Unusual Ventures | Investing in AI, data, security, dev tools, OSS
Updates
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Congratulations to the Launchable team!
We’re thrilled to announce that Launchable is joining the CloudBees family. This exciting acquisition will supercharge our #software delivery with Launchable’s AI-driven test optimization. By integrating their capabilities, it will speed up testing, improve accuracy and boost efficiency. ⏱️ Full announcement can be found here. ➡️ https://lnkd.in/gKsDmpQT
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🎊 Congratulations to the teams at Harness, Webflow, Arctic Wolf, and Carta on being named in the Forbes Cloud 100 list! We are incredibly proud of these companies and their many accomplishments! Check out our podcast interviews with Jyoti Bansal (Harness), Brian NeSmith (Arctic Wolf), Bryant Chou (Webflow), and Henry Ward (Carta) about the early days of each of these companies. Episode links in the comments ⬇ Read more here: https://lnkd.in/etRHGNfs
Forbes Cloud 100 2024 List - Best Cloud Computing Companies Ranked
social-www.forbes.com
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Once you’ve qualified and signed on design partners, you’re ready to dive into building your minimum viable product (MVP). But how do you create a successful working relationship with your design partners so that both parties benefit? Check out Wei Lien Dang's 10 tips for creating a win-win situation for your company and your design partners. https://bit.ly/4aPtsAi
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🤔 What can those of us in the world of VC and startups learn from the hospitality industry about creating unforgettable customer experiences ? ❓ What if every business were in the hospitality business? On Abhi Sharma's recommendation, we recently read Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. If you are a fan of 'The Bear,' you'll love this book. Key lessons from Guidara include: ➡ Customer service should be about building authentic connections ➡ Take care of your employees the way you want them to care for your customers ➡ Manage 95% of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5% foolishly Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gwemuKbd
Unreasonable Hospitality is good business: 5 lessons from Will Guidara
unusual.vc
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M&A can be an emotional journey with plenty of twists and surprises! While news headlines highlight M&A transactions that seem to have happened quickly and easily, most transactions take considerable time, effort, and luck. Lars Albright provides 10 tips to help founders increase their situational awareness while navigating M&A! His recommendations include: ➡ Identify product advocates early, willing to take the risk and stand strong against any negative pushback. ➡ Run a time-boxed process, and mutually agree upon a timeline ➡ Embrace the challenge. Focus on what you can control instead of only thinking about the end game. Read all 10 tips! Link in the comments!
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Congratulations to Team Dopt!
Congrats to Airtable on landing Alon B., Joe McKenney and Phil Vander Broek! Can’t wait to see the cool AI experiences y’all ship. As day 0 investors, we know not every startup we bet on is going to IPO. There are thousands of problems that deserve to be solved but their time isn’t now. We love founders who are obsessively passionate about their craft and leave it all on the field. https://lnkd.in/gWqH4BuU
Airtable acquihires onboarding startup Dopt for AI talent | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com
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Unusual Ventures reposted this
The right test for your growth marketing investment isn't whether it cost zero. I hear founders say this all the time - "we have made no investment in marketing, our AI SDR is generating X touchpoints at practically zero cost, etc etc" All this tells me is you haven't figured out yet how to turn capital into growth. This is not a problem if you have been growing via word of mouth and are still an early stage company. You just need to be self aware that not having "invested in marketing" is going to be your next problem to solve - not necessarily an achievement.
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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
Unreasonable Hospitality is good business: 5 lessons from Will Guidara
unusual.vc
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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.