Rocketship Investors who chase the unicorns to bring them to $10B+ valuations.

A few years ago it was a founders dream to get a $1B valuation - Ultimate Unicorn status. In recent years that is becoming a less exclusive of a club. According to CB Insights there are a total of 817 Unicorns and 418 of them are in United States.

There is another massive trend going on where large funds who I call the Megatrons are coming together to invest in $1B+ companies and getting them to $10B, $30B, and in some cases $100B valuations pre-IPO(Stripe valued at $95B).

**Megatron is a leader whose goal is to rule the universe and destroy everyone in his path. Not unlike many of these funds who take out competition but massively funding the market leader. So I found it appropriate to call these investors Megatrons.**

Now that our fund Array Ventures is privileged enough to have companies with unicorn status my founders are asking me about investors who invest in companies valued beyond $1B. Who are these investors who can do that and value your company at $10B or $40B (recent Canva valuation!)

So I started putting together a list. Maybe there are many more investors I have missed but please send the names my way so I can include them. Maybe just like the rapidly growing unicorns this list might also get unmanageable but let me attempt to put this together. Here are some current Megatron funds that have been actively leading these rocketship rounds:

I have organized them in the order of how close to $1B vs $50B valuation they can invest.

1. Tiger Global — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tiger-global
   Tiger needs no introduction as they have been investing in a range of valuations even some starting at Series A including an Array Ventures Series A company.
2. Softbank — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/softbank
   Similar to Tiger, Softbank has also been investing at all stages such as their recent Series C investment in Sendoso and of course many other $1B+ investments we have seen over the years.
3. Sapphire Ventures — https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/13/jumpcloud-raises-159m-on-2-56b-valuation-for-cloud-directory-tool
   Sapphire recently invested in JumpCloud at $2.5B valuation and they have certainly invested in Array Venture’s Series B stage company, Safegraph.
4. Addition — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/addition-7af4
   A new entrant with spin out from Lee Fixel who used to be at Tiger Global has led a few deals across the “growth” spectrum as well. They certainly also start early such as Series A as well.
5. IVP — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/institutional-venture-partners
   More of the earlier side of $1B investment rather than later but certainly growth stage. They invested in Array Ventures company Series C round of Productiv.
6. Insight Venture Partners — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/insight-partners
   Insight manages over $26B and invests across all stages but if you can believe it their 1st fund was $25m. To all emerging managers this is a great case study for us.
7. Goldman Sachs — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/goldman-sachs
   Goldman has been a traditional multistage Series B+ to IPO investor including investing early in Uber.
8. Iconiq Capital — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/iconiq-capital
   Fund that manages money for many Silicon Valley billionaires such as Zuckerberg has been investing across all stages also starting from Series B.
9. Singapore GIC — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gic
   They are one of the more serius later stage investors and led Series C for Solugen which is one of Array Venture’s portfolio company.
10. Temasak Holdings — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/temasek
    Temasak also invested in Solugen
11. General Atlantic — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/general-atlantic
12. T. Rowe Price — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/t-rowe-price
    Recently marked up Canva to $40B and Gusto to $10B.
13. Dragoneer — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/dragoneer-investment-group
    Looks like they just led Discord’s $500m round at $15B valuation
14. Wellington — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wellington-management

Some other mentions such as Hedge Funds, Private Equity Funds, and Investment Firms who are also Megatron investors especially if it fits their specific thesis. Many of these can invest closer to IPO.

1. Franklin Tempelton — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/franklin-templeton-investments
2. Bond Capital — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bond-57ec
3. Fidelity — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fidelity-management-and-research-company
4. Altimeter Capital — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/altimeter-capital
5. BlackRock — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/blackrock
6. Capital Group — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/capital-group
7. Silver Lake — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/silver-lake
8. Lone Pine — https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lone-pine-capital

There are a series of traditional VC firms have also stepped up to invest across multiple stages of companies including ones that are valued over $1B. They still do traditional early stage investing but have also raised large Growth Funds to invest all across the later stages. My sense is currently they invest closer to $1–5B valuations vs. $50B.

1. General Catalyst
2. Founders Fund
3. Sequoia
4. Andreessen Horowitz
5. Social Capital
6. Lightspeed
7. Maverick Ventures

Hope the unicorn founders find this list valuable. Please feel free to comment or email me (hello@array.vc) to add more names to the list. No promises!

For more on this topic subscribe to our newsletter here. If you found it valuable re-share it here on linkedin and also on twitter.

Founders spend so much time picking the ideal investors for their round. They also spend a lot of time trying to get intro to all the right investors. If the company is lucky to have been oversubscribed then they spend a lot of time picking the perfect mix of investors for the round.

After the round closes, oftentimes it’s the virtual crickets in terms of investor communication. Most founders don’t know how to activate their investors. The excitement and the high from a new investment wears off and the investors think you don’t need them beyond the money which is often not true.

In the early days, companies spend a lot of time trying to look for intros to design partners and customers. The chances that your curated investor and advisor list having a warm connection to many of these customers is very high.

You should regularly update your investors monthly since this keeps you accountable and also gives you a chance to engage them with a particular ask or advice on a pressing issue that can have a 10x impact on your business.

Common Concerns with putting together updates:

• I am busy building a company and I will get around to updating investors.
• I am worried the update might get shared around and leak our inner workings.
• I’m not killing it right now. I’ll wait till I have something positive to share.
• It’s a lot of work and I rather focus on the company.
• I have a board now and those early investors are a bit out of touch.

I can address these one by one but in summary I can tell you that the benefits outweigh the concerns. This short 5 line template takes away the “I am too busy” argument and no investors don’t just want to hear from you when things are going well. Investors want to know if they could have helped you when things were not going well and you asked for help so at least they were aware of it. Asking for help makes you look stronger and confident in your ability to leverage your network to succeed.

*** If you are that worried about your updates being shared share them over docsend. ***

I also tell founders that even if you fail this is one way you can have your investors back you again for your next venture.

Some of my companies have done a great job of updating their investors in ways that are convenient to them. Sometimes that’s just what they are sharing internally with their company and a version of that with the investors. The point is to not do double the work but to stay on investors top of mind.

• Series B: Placer.ai sends weekly aggregated new customer emails to investors.

From the CEO — This style of updates has resulted in 100+ intros over time, because investors are engaged, and they see the examples, and “have ideas”.
- Noam Ben-Zvi, CEO of Placer.ai

• Series Seed: RadAI sends weekly milestone emails with new customer contracts and upsells
• Series Seed: Mapistry sends all sorts of impressive metrics and charts in their monthly updates.
• Series Seed: Openprise sends monthly financials along with target revenue vs. actual review every month.

“I get sprinkle of feedback. It also forces me to think about what aspects of the business investors maybe interested in learning more about.”
 — Ed King, CEO of Openprise

• Series A: PulseQA shares a version of their deck from the board meeting

“Someone always writes back and does intros. Keeps us honest and transparent. And including the team on it also keeps them accountable”
- Mayank Mehta, CEO of Pulse.qa

• Series Seed: Capsule shares an updated version of their investment memo on notion. I love this as if someone were you invest at that exact moment there is a lot of clarity on how the company comes across to their audience.

How to structure the updates in 5 bullets?

1. How’s it going? Any major things to note? Churn, Big wins, what’s working / not working
2. Company Dashboard: What are you tracking? MRR, Engagement, Burn, Money in bank (Runway)? When is your next raise?
3. Your next milestone: 30 customers in 3 months, $1m ARR in 6 months, 10 new hires, etc.
4. Help you need to get there:

• Strategic: Pricing, upsell, etc. or Intros to customers, open job roles (always share a link), etc.
• Ideal Customer Profile — List of Companies & Roles of people you want introductions to. Kinds of companies you want introductions to — size, sector, certain tech stack, etc.
• Blurb: Your new company blurb to share with potential intros.

5. Upcoming press and Investor call to action — retweet, share, blurb to use, etc.

Think of the investor update as a checkpoint for your startup journey as writing the update can be both humbling and exciting. Building a startup can be a lonely journey and keeping your investors in the loop on a consistent basis will make sure you are always part of a team that wants you and more importantly wants to help you succeed.

Array Ventures (website) is the first investor alongside angels with $1M checks in B2B SaaS companies. We invest across the enterprise stack with our thesis of Intelligent Enterprise. Here are a few areas Array Ventures is looking to invest. Connect with us if you are thinking about starting an enterprise software company.

Crowdfunding

We launched a sidecar fund to work with some operators who want to help and invest in our companies. It’s also a 506(c) fund which means we can publicly talk about the fund. With new types of fund structures — rolling funds, Reg CF, and funds like Array taking advantage of 506(c) it’s definitely a space to watch as the venture capital asset class becomes more accessible to everyone.

Welcome new investments to the Array Family:

• Capsule — Short-form video creation platform. Hiring community manager and designer.
• Cast — Digital customer success company. Hiring designer, engineer, and marketer.
• Intentomatic — Future customer dashboard for your SDR/BDRs. Hiring operations lead and product manager.

We started 2021 with our annual meeting followed by a very successful #AllThingsB2B Summit with a stellar line-up and here are the recordings from the sessions and founder pitches if you want to watch.

- Founders from fast growing companies such as Databricks ($28B), DataRobot ($2.7B) talked about the Role of Data in Intelligent Enterprises

- Investor panel discussed the VC Outlook in Enterprise with Mamoon Hamid (Kleiner), Asheem Chandna (Greylock), and Gaurav Garg (Wing)

- Katie Roof (Bloomberg) and Eric Ries (LTSE, The Lean Startup) discussed SPACs

- Jon Oberheide talked about his 0–1–100M ARR growth journey. Duo Security was acquired by Cisco for $2.35B

Portfolio Notable Rounds & Exits:

• Safegraph raised a $45M Series B led by Sapphire Ventures and hiring
• Uniform raised a round from Elad Gil and hiring for demand gen manager
• Wootric was acquired by InMoment

Job Opportunities at our Portfolio Companies

If you know people in your network please share it with them. Most of our companies are looking for engineers (fullstack, front end, computer vision), marketers, community managers, marketers, Operations. It depends on what future and industry do you want to help change! See this map of our companies by category. You can also see some of the founders talk about their companies here at our annual meeting.

Press Mentions & Business Updates:

• Shruti Gandhi was the recipient of the Chicago Booth 2021 Distinguished Young Alumni award which is only given to one alum each year. More on my story here.
• Business Insider featured our efforts in lead a in Capsule and creating an all female investor cap table
• Podcast on “reverse engineering” your career choices
• How to become a Venture Capitalist
• Podcast on how Array ventures invests in solving big problems
• Vertalo had quite an eventful quarter where 5 leading Reg CF (Crowdfunding) portals — FundersUSA, Fundopolis, Infrashares, Netshares, and Raise Green — will use their APIs
• EraDB launched EraSearch to provide IT teams with an alternative to open source ElasticSearch software for managing logs at scale
• Blumira had a solid 2020 and announced plans to double its headcount by the end of the year hiring across leadership roles and growing its sales and engineering teams.
• Uniform announced it has joined the MACH Alliance, the group of independent tech companies dedicated to advocating for open, best-of-breed technology ecosystems
• CasaOne’s blog is a good guide to help you create a perfect pandemic comfort living for your study, living room, or bedroom!
• Future of Fundraising: Blendid raised a succcessful crowdfunded round where can invest as little as $5. In the US a company can now raise up to $5m via crowdfunding.
• Placer’s blog is a gem of resources of all trends in retail that I highly recommend you follow.
• Look at how many amazing ads for superbowl, black history month, International Women’s Day and more were powered by Catch&Release’s platform.
• Lastly if you are a CIO I would not miss the research created by PulseQA team before you make any purchasing decision.

Q1 2021 Market Observations

• Venture Funding: Enterprise tech closed the pandemic stricken 2020 with $15.3 Bn in funding across 687 financing deals in the Q4 of 2020, 50% more than Q4 2019. This is the highest since 2011 and is a watershed moment to highlight the potential and resilience of enterprise startups. DataRobot received the largest funding round of the quarter ($270 Mn) and we were glad to have Dan Wright, President & CEO at DataRobot at our annual LP event to share his thoughts.
• Enterprises increasingly shifted to open source software solutions in 2020 with Linkedin and Spotify leading the way.
• A study done on IT cloud spend highlighted that cost savings from moving to the cloud will triple from 9% in 2020 to 27% in 2021.
• Here is a Pulse report on what IT leaders are spending on this year.
• U.S. ecommerce spend was $861.12 Bn in 2020, up by 44.0% y-o-y, the highest annual U.S. ecommerce growth in at least two decades.
• While we are very bullish on enterprise, another key area where we see improvement is the role of women in tech. While a third of our portfolio companies are women-led, a recent report shed some light on this pressing issue that just 2.3% of VC funding went into women-led startups. The impact of remote working can make a big difference here and we are optimistic there will be a positive change in the role and impact that women in tech will have in the coming year. In a small effort towards that the founders of Capsule and I engineered an all female captable which has never been done before and Business Insider covered our story.

We at Array will continue to fund more B2B women founders and diverse founders in general. Please reach out to us if you are thinking of starting an enterprise company.

If you made it this far then thank you for reading. I like hearing from you as well. Please feel free to respond with your favorite market insight stories!

Also, I try to send this newsletter once a quarter. For updates between newsletters follow me on Twitter and Substack. Share this newsletter with your friends or reply with their email to add them to the distribution. Let me know if you find this valuable and any other things you would like to see!

Making Customer Success a Profit Center vs. a Cost Center with Cast

Welcome Cast team to the Array Ventures Portfolio!

Product-led growth has gained tremendous traction in how enterprise software companies go-to-market. Many companies such as Twilio, Slack, Dropbox, and others have been able to grow faster and efficiently by leveraging product to build an active pipeline of customers. This move to product-led growth will continue for the foreseeable future. As a result, the relationship with the customer might not always be strong. As a board member of B2B companies one of the most important questions I get asked is how to scale your customer success teams especially for customers you can’t connect with on a regular cadence.

Most customer success team tap out at 150–300 customers. This problem helped me build a conviction to lead an investment in Cast.

Covid, Cloud, and SaaS is changing who businesses sell their products to. Large 6-figure contracts that took months to sell are becoming more rare. Businesses are looking at shorter sales cycles with smaller contract values and then upselling those customers with good customer success over time.

This sounds good but there is a problem with this approach. It is very expensive to build up a good customer success operation. It’s also very hard to find good customer success talent. So what sounds like a good initial plan ends up being a bad strategy with high customer account churn because companies couldn’t keep all their customers happy.

Customer success teams only have bandwidth for a small portion of their top 10% high paying customers. The others that might have had potential to be upsold to churn because they didn’t get enough attention.

Team & Product

When Dickey Singh and Daljeet Virdi pitched their vision for Cast I saw the value of their product. Cast.app is humanizing customer success by automatically generating personalized videos, slide-decks, and podcasts effortlessly to keep their long tail of customers happy so they buy more of your product instead of churn. For 63% of the Customer Success teams that have revenue responsibility, Cast enables renewals, up-sells, and cross-sells directly within the Cast platform. Cast makes customer success a profit center vs a cost center. And customers such as Google, Pure Storage, Comcast, Aruba believe in their approach.

Cast creates personalized content for their customer depending on their role in the company. So each user within a company gets different content depending on what Cast thinks the user needs to make them successful in their role.

Forward looking companies, like Plaid, Slack, Notion, and LinkedIn with deep investment budgets, have built homegrown tools for digital customer success, but today look to Cast.app to replace these efforts.

Humanize your customer success operations

If you are an organization growing rapidly and struggling to keep all your customers happy and growing you should connect with the Cast team.

And if you are a designer, engineer, or marketer please join the growing Cast team.

Investors in Cast include angels Jason Warner CTO of Github, Mickey Alon CTO of Gainsight, Rav Dhaliwal former Head of CS at Slack, few a16z angels, and other CS experts and funds such as Soma Capital and New York Venture Partners

Array Ventures leads first check rounds of $1.5M-$2M in enterprise deeptech AI/ML companies

Here are 11 Enterprise Opportunities Array Ventures is looking for. So if you see good teams solving these problems then please get in touch with us.

** We are ramping up for Fund 3 in 2021. In the meantime, we wanted to work with some awesome angel investors especially women angels investors and launched a parallel fund! Reach out to me for more details on it. **

Array in the news:

- Forbes: Women in AI

- Business Insider: Future of work trends for 2021

- Additiv: Wealth management predictions

- Business Insider: Seed stage funding trends

- Techcrunch: Top 10 VCs that founders like (I was covered in this list based on recommendations from founders)

- SF Business Journal: Shruti Gandhi shares red flags when vetting founders.

<< Array Ventures had 2 exits, invested in 8 new deals (led 6 of them) & 14 follow-on rounds of which we participated in 8 of them. We launched a parallel fund to work with amazing angels. >>

Here are some details:

• Array had 2 exits Passage AI and Wootric where we returned hard $$ to our LPs in a pandemic year.
• We have returned 20% of our 1st fund already within 4 years! As a fund manager it’s awesome to see your strategy working.
• When I pitched to my investors about our fund model I said as per power law some startups will breakout and do well. But for downside we will not have many write-offs.
• We have one of the lowest failure rates and highest follow-on rates for our portfolio and stage.

Array Ventures First-check Investments

We invested first checks in:

• Uniform (JAMstack solution for the enterprise) — Traditional web interfaces have struggled with slow time-to-market, slow performance, weak security and limited scalability that can be addressed with a new generation of technologies described as JAMstack. Uniform fills the gaps and enables brands to embrace the JAMstack approach without having to compromise on the marketing features they depend on
• Blumira (Automated threat detection and response) — Cybersecurity platform that offers both automated threat detection and response. It eases the burden of alert fatigue, complexity of log management and lack of IT visibility. Blumira’s cloud SIEM can be deployed in hours with broad integration coverage across cloud, endpoint protection, firewall and identity providers including Office 365, G Suite, Crowdstrike, Okta, Palo Alto, Cisco FTD and many others
• Mozart Data (Modern Stack Engineering Solutions) — The growth of SaaS means that more data is being siloed across Salesforce, Stripe, Shopify, and application databases. Mozart collects, organizes, and orchestrates that data by managing a data warehouse ETL pipelines, and scheduling of data transformations. No matter the tools you use, join it together, and start automating dashboards and generating insights without any engineering
• Shipyard (Infrastructure as Code provisioning tools) — A cloud-based workflow automation platform that removes complexity and increases visibility of automation efforts. It empowers Data Teams to focus on launching, monitoring, and scaling their business solutions instead of infrastructure
• Invisible Commerce (Micro-influence Commerce Platform) — A unique social commerce platform that enables you to build a free digital store embedded within your website, Facebook and Instagram. They also offer a curated, high quality broad selection of merchandise along with shipping and fulfillment systems

And 3 other stealth deals!

Kudos to our companies for growing and raising follow-on rounds in 2020. I’m so impressed by their execution.

This year we had great mix of angel investors and venture firms that invested in our companies:

Wishing you a healthy, happy, and abundant 2021! Best is yet to come!

I shared an original version of the update on Twitter. Feel free to share it with others.

Covid has been a catalyst to enterprise adoption of tech such as cloud, security, collaboration, and artificial intelligence that we expected to see in the future.

We are entering 2021 with a little more clarity after the haze from the fires of 2020. Not just with a visibility into Covid-19 vaccines but also new administration in the US.

Biden administration will more of less be more favorable to the big tech and innovation. They are more favorable to immigration and will lax current laws to important talent for US companies so we will see how this impacts the remote work trend.

Here are some high level investment themes we are closely watching as we head into the new year. If you are a technical founding team working on some of these solutions then please get in touch with us.

Lot of these are horizontal ideas that work across industries. Our investments won’t be limited to these areas and we are also open to some vertical industry specific ideas as well.

1. General AI Tools

Companies that help AI developers be more efficient. This is still a large opportunity and the AI adoption in enterprise is just in its infancy.

2. Enterprise Compliance

More startups need to go through security and compliance checks such as SOC2 and HIPAA before they can work with their customers or go through M&A. We are looking to make a bet in specific thesis here.

3. Procurement

Enterprise buying motion is changing. Decision making is shifting to disperse teams with ad hoc buying patterns. New tools around global and local vendor management, data around things like vendor product showcasing, supplier / buyer onboarding, etc.

We have recently made a stealth investment in this space but excited to do more.

4. API Management

With the rise of microservices there is a need for better management, discovery, security, search of APIs across companies and with their customers.

5. Product Discovery

Corporates are inundated with startup requests. We are looking for a way to manage and facilitate the process of startup discovery for large companies.

6. Dynamic Access Management

Managing application by application access and dynamic access as necessary is the next gen of data and identity management.

7. Metered Pricing / Value-based Pricing

We believe the current billing tools don’t work well with the next gen of usage based pricing companies.

8. Email and Application Security

Next gen of tools around phishing, spam, fraud, etc.

9. Data Tools

Companies around data lineage or cataloguing, synthetic data generation, data management.

10. Large Scale Online Transactions

Getting rid of manual invoices and payments even for large transactions. Bringing transparency, trust, and automation across all industries.

11. Marketing and Sales Tools

The one thing that’s clear is companies that nailed marketing during covid won in sales. Enterprise sales was hard without the “wining and dining” and tools that help companies close deals are essential.

We are closing an investment in this space but excited to track for some unique approaches here to help companies close large contracts.

Generally, companies that enable a future we can work in more productively, securely, and collaboratively

Future of work is going to be hybrid with in-person and remote offices but with better collaboration and knowledge management tools. The world has experimented with outsourced teams, local teams, and now we are entering a new wave of experiments with dispersed talent.

There will be a set of solutions and laws that emerge for this unique combination of global vision with a local touch that will provide distributed teams to manage employees from different countries / jurisdictions and the laws that govern respectively. Everything from onboarding, collaboration, performance measurement and employee benefits will be areas where startups can look to build scalable cost effective solutions.

This phenomenon will allow for quality talent to be accessible from anywhere allowing for more focus on building a company culture that fosters employee retention. Hiring remote talent can also allow for a more inclusive and diverse employee base.

Two vertical industries worth mentioning that we are excited about are health and fintech.

If you are starting companies in these categories, haven’t raised capital, and excited to build a fast growing large company then please reach out to Array Ventures. We lead and can follow first check rounds providing value-add on customer development and general go-to-market.

Check out our website and investments here.

*If you agree with these areas of opportunities then please share this article and help reach future founders we can fund to solve these problems.*

**Follow me on twitter for more ideas and opportunities.**

Sourcing strategies

Best investors often get access to good deal flow. Often that’s referred to as “sourcing” good deals. But the key to sourcing is not about getting a ton of deals your way, it’s also about getting the right kind of dealflow.

What that means is finding deals that -

• Fit your investment thesis
• Introduce you to a great founding team
• Have the potential to scale in big & exciting markets

Building dealflow is not signing up on Angellist or going for networking events. As a new investor, this will be not differentiated and you won’t get a chance to build relationships directly with the founders. Below are few suggestions that would help you better which are:-

1. Joining the right networks to generate dealflow
2. Build a thesis as your investment criteria
3. Attract founders with your value-add as a potential partner/customer

1. Building a network to generate dealflow

You hear about networking as being one of the most important skills in venture capital. Does it mean you are out to events every night? Well yes and no. But mostly no. (You can’t even do that currently in the middle of a pandemic.)

There is a big assumption that a good deal comes from reliable and predictable networks (Google, Facebook, Stanford, etc.)

VCs already know how these networks operate and can reference people building companies from these “known” networks. As a new investor, getting in the middle of the best deal flow coming from these networks would be very important. If you have worked at these companies then you have a head start. Check your alumni networks as sometimes there are alumni angel groups.

Here are some university, company, regional angel groups or entrepreneur networks you can join if you are an alumni. You can find one or create your own-

Company Alumni Groups:

• Xoogler — ex-Googler network
• Facebook
• LinkedIn

University Angel Groups:

• UChicago Angel Network
• Stanford Angels
• MIT Angels with various regional chapters
• Columbia Angel Group

General Entrepreneur Groups:

• TIE Chapters around the world for south asians
• AllRaise for women

These are not exclusive, there are also local groups (e.g. Houston Angel Network) and sector specific groups (e.g. Element 8 investing in cleantech). Think of creative ways to join and find deal flow through these channels

I have also seen new investors pile capital into companies coming out of accelerators and incubators such as Y Combinator and others. They initially invest in companies that come out of these networks and gradually build a relationship with larger networks over time.

2. Use an investment thesis to get specific and quality dealflow

If you are an expert in a specific area, such as procurement, supply chain, manufacturing, dev tools, etc. you may have a strong point of view on areas you want to invest in. This allows you to bring in a unique angle in that space. You can then use this thesis in three ways

1. Filter and identify startups or founders that fit your point of view making your dealflow more focussed
2. Create and publish content in your area of expertise. This can attract the right founders get in touch with you.
3. After you build a convincing thesis as a next step, if you respect some people you think that might be able to build a good company then you can also convince them to leave their jobs and start the company while you can help them seed it. Also, you can help them because of your expertise.

3. Show founders and investors your value is more than writing a cheque

A founder always loves investors and advisors that can help them build their company and help with good customer introductions. Founders love strategic investors who can open doors for them.

If you are in a position to buy products for your company or help founders close new customers with your relationships then you have a great chance of being able to invest in that company.

You can also offer your help to investors and their portfolio companies. More specifically, you can offer to help the VCs during diligence in specific areas of your expertise. Every VC loves to add value-add investors to the captable. Your willingness to help them with diligence and after with the company will definitely entice them to make room for a check from you.

Getting a quality deal flow is more important than quantity. In a fund you typically only have an opportunity to invest in 25–30 deals over a few years. Also, competitive deals are hard to do so you want to make sure you invest in the best company in that category that you can continue to love 5–10 years down the road as well. That is why it’s important to do all this work in generating good deal flow for you.

Also, remember that investing is a long term game and it can’t be transactional. If you start building goodwill things will come back to you in many ways and people will reach out to you and include you in their deals. Good luck investing!

For more on this topic subscribe to our newsletter here. If you found it valuable re-share it on linkedin and also on twitter.

This is certainly a very exciting role and there is definitely a lot to learn about a job in venture capital. You can learn first hand what it takes for a company to grow from 2 people to 100 people. You can learn why 2 companies with similar ideas don’t result in the same outcome.

While there is a lot to learn, it’s a job where you sow what you reap. If you don’t work hard enough you don’t get anything out of it. Lot of people I come across are surprised by what this job entails and what it takes to succeed. Most everyone is surprised by the “not so fun” work you have to do.

This is a chief of staff role so it’s a role where you help me the General Partner succeed. So you have to help me with projects that I need help with which do not just include deals and diligence. Those are often the last things I do need help with.

While investing isn’t the primary job, we invest in 1 company per month on an average. You will learn a lot by supporting me with activities that eventually help me invest in more companies.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of this role are broad. You would help with some or all of the following activities:

• Identify and source potential investment opportunities.
• Support the existing portfolio (here are some of the companies you’d be working with).
• Conduct market research and help with diligence (depending on your background).
• Build and support the Array Angel Network and Bootcamps.
• Manage administrative housecleaning and schedule meetings.

What I’m looking for

I’m taking our time to find the right person who is:

• Humble and eager to do both fun and not so fun managerial tasks.
• Good with quick communication and keeping projects on track.
• Clear, structured, and critical thinker. Can articulate your thoughts and POV.
• Intellectually curious and deeply immersed in tech.
• Incredibly driven and autonomous. You should be able to come up with your own work.
• Attentive to detail. It’s a good thing if you obsess over presentation and the “small” things because they matter.
• Optimistic and realistic!
• Remote works for part-time but if this ever becomes a full-time role it might be hard (or impossible) to transition if you are in a very different time zone and can’t attend pitch meetings.

Why you might be interested

This isn’t a traditional role. Those that are eager to learn and are considering a future career as a founder or investor would be a good fit. You might be a student or full-time employed professional.

How to apply

If you’re interested in joining, apply here with answers to the following:

1. A link to your AngelList, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles.
2. What’s your current job and what do you love about it?
3. What do you hope to get out of this?
4. Describe a side or creative project you worked on? Did you learn anything from it?
5. What spaces within enterprise tech (e.g. dev tools, cloud, security, etc) are you particularly interested in and why?
6. If you had $100K to invest in one early stage startup, which one would it be and why?

Time Commitment:

• I am looking for someone to start working part-time (6–8 hours on average a week) with potential to convert to full-time.

**Thanks to Ryan Hoover for being so thoughtful about this role and letting me use his job description. **

Hope you and your families are safe and healthy. We have been good and busy on many fronts. Please read on for some information on how venture capital and startups industry is doing, job opportunities, and covid trends especially in the enterprise.

Exit and Notable Rounds

• PassageAI sold to ServiceNow this year.
• EraDB, database company, launched from stealth and announced a $7m round led by Foundation Capital
• Almanac, collaboration tools, launched publically and announced a $9m round led by Floodgate Capital. Check out some of their playbooks on anti-racism, sales, community, and many more.
• Xwing raised $10m towards autonomous aviation

Welcome new investments to the Array Family

• Uniform — JAMstack company for enterprises
• Blumira — Automated threat detection and response. Fully remote investment in 2020.

Array in the News

• Axios, Business Journal, covered the launch of $1m allocation and office hours for underrepresented founders. Please apply here.
• Article in the Venture Capital Journal and report for emerging fund managers

Portfolio Updates

• Placer has been quite ahead of the retail trends during covid informing us how people have been moving around. See their mentions on Forbes, Nasdaq, and Cheddar.
• Catch&Release founder gave tips on how to communicate and collaborate more effectively from a distance, quoted by Fastcompany and Toolbox. They have powered great covid commercials with their platform, including these on — Kleenex & Facebook.
• Productiv was named a May 2020 Cool Vendor in the Digital Workplace report by Gartner.
• Blendid is launching a new cloud service, in response to the rising demand for robotic automation in the food service.
• Modal saw a surge on their platform of ecommerce volume since the pandemic started.
• Zecops has uncovered large scale bugs on iphones, tackling remotely triggerable security issues, and is getting apple to share instant fixes, mentioned in WSJ.
• Goodtime has scheduled over 1.2 million interviews and will be releasing data monthly on which industries are actively hiring.
• Openprise launched an Agile Customer Data Platform (CDP) solution, to automate hundreds of business processes with no-code.

Jobs

• Solugen (Texas) and CasaOne (SF Bay Area) are looking to hire a Chief of Staff.
• Productiv is looking for B2B Customer Success leader.
• EmpInfo is looking to fill various marketing roles.
• Zecops is looking to fill an SDR role.
• Go to Array Ventures investment for other roles not listed here.

Covid Trends

Q2 was certainly the most unique time in all of our lives. While there have been many challenges from getting groceries, unable to see our loved ones, subdued celebrations of major milestones, and eating our own cooking…every single meal, many people I have talked to have tried to make the best of it. There has been a rise in charitable giving over the last few months.

We have all heard the impact of covid on certain businesses. Zoom, food delivery, rise in remote work, online education, TikTok videos, and animal crossing (nintendo stock up during covid) are the most talked about.

Below are some other noteworthy covid trends to track.

1. Enterprise companies such as DataDog, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, and others have held their own and seen good growth in multiples. Enterprise spend will increase in these 3 categories as per a survey with 100s of CIOs on Pulse.qa.

• Collaboration Tools — To collaborate internally and with customers
• Security — Protecting employees and company data from hack
• Cloud — Increased adoption from remote work

2. E-commerce saw 10 years of growth in 3 months. E-commerce jumped $52 billion and an 18% increase in online shopping sales is projected for 2020.

3. Fintech: Banks are sitting on a lot of cash — $2T surge in January, and increased by $865B in April alone.

4. Travel especially local travel surges. If public, Airbnb would have been a pretty volatile stock maybe behind Tesla. Similarly, there is a surge in RV popularity along with Hertz bankruptcy fiasco.

I try to send this newsletter once a quarter. For updates between newsletters follow me on Twitter and Medium . Share this newsletter with your friends or reply with their email to add them to the distribution. Let me know if you find this valuable and any other things you would like to see!

Array Ventures: Exciting Reads, Industry Updates, & Job Opportunities was originally published in Array Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Just like in almost every sector of the country, racial and gender inequality pervades the startup landscape. An overwhelming majority of startup founders in the states are white and a disappointingly small number of founders from minority groups receive venture-backed funding.

After a decade as an engineer, I still felt helpless when I embarked on my entrepreneurial ambitions. While I had the technical skills, I lacked network connections and advisors to give me feedback in addition to hard cash. I knew no one who would write me a small check to quick start the process — I was unknown and unproven. I was just a woman (and a good team) with ambition, but with no deep pocketed investor connections.

Getting access to pitch to the right investor, even before you form your company, can set you up for years of success. I saw the power of getting kickstarted when founders could just raise money by asking their friends to back them.

As I started my journey in Venture Capital, I noticed how many founders faced similar issues to me: All they needed was a nudge in the right direction to get their company off the ground. I once heard that even a 1 degree nudge to a sailboat can send it off in a completely different direction. That nudge often comes in the form of capital as a means of support. To this day, I see that kind of access and aid given to a very limited number and kinds of founders.

According to an article on Crunchbase from 2019, 77% of founders are white, of which a mere one percent of venture-backed founders are black. Only 9% of investments went to women-funded startups. Less than 2 percent of founders that received funding were Latino and less than 3 percent were Middle Eastern.

These racial discrepancies could be due to a variety of reasons, but it is likely that founders from underrepresented minorities are simply not granted the same amount of opportunities and experiences, specifically when it comes to funding.

That’s exactly why I started our fund, Array Ventures. I felt that not enough investors have funds focused on enterprise deep tech at the pre seed stages.

Now that I’ve been in the venture business for almost a decade, I can also confirm that there aren’t enough funds run by underrepresented minority fund managers investing in enterprise deeptech companies in areas such as AI/ML, cloud, data, security, infrastructure, etc. This signifies that smart people, who want to start companies in these areas, may not know who to talk to, to run things by with, and to raise funds from.

While multiple venture capital firms have initiatives to diversify their funding, the statistics demonstrate a need for a stronger effort.

We have already been doing our part in little ways on general diversity initiatives. We have backed 25% Women and 53% Immigrants so far.

Not enough is being done, so I am starting by setting an example: Array VC has decided to hold office hours for potential enterprise deeptech founders who identify as an underrepresented minority to give them feedback on their company, their pitch deck, and on how to fundraise. If you are specifically thinking of starting a B2B company with a data/deeptech/AI/ML focus, then this is a great opportunity for you. In the office hours, we will approach your ideas from all sides — idea, team, market, and go-to-market even before you write a single line of code or quit your jobs.

In addition, we are also allocating $1 million for underrepresented founders we find through these initiatives. To attend an office hour APPLY NOW.

Let’s work together to make the startup world a more equal and inclusive place for everyone.

Array VC allocates $1m For Underrepresented Enterprise Founders was originally published in Array Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.