Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the Unusual blog.

Adding a partner is a significant decision in the life of any growing team. At Unusual Ventures, it is not enough to just be a great investor or operator, our team and our culture demand that you put founders and the team first. Kevin Compton, someone I am proud to call a mentor, once counseled me: “When you add a partner, you’re going to ask yourself a million questions. But at the end of the day, there is one question that matters most: Are you proud to introduce this person as your partner?”

At a time when the world could use more positive news that brings people together, we are excited to announce that early stage founders have a new world-class executive available to help. Today we are extremely proud to introduce Sarah Leary as our newest member of Team Unusual.

We started Unusual Ventures with an ambitious mission to reinvent early stage venture capital and build a firm that would raise the bar for the entire industry. Building anything of importance starts with people and a shared set of values. Sarah is a tremendous entrepreneur and human being, having co-founded Nextdoor, one of the most important and successful consumer technology companies in history. A former collegiate national champion in lacrosse, Sarah has a long history of competing and winning. She’s a master practitioner when it comes to building and growing community-driven businesses and she joins Unusual with a passion to share all her lessons learned with the next generation of founders.

Our team met Sarah and immediately connected over our shared vision to provide an unprecedented level of support for entrepreneurs and our mission of greatly improving many of the entrenched dynamics in the venture capital ecosystem. When we walked her through our approach to provide founders with hands-on help via the Unusual Method, it resonated with her desire to roll up her sleeves and get in the trenches with founders in the early years of their journey. Equally important, she wholeheartedly embraced our intentional approach of working for HBCUs, hospitals, and foundations as LPs because she shares our passion for creating value for institutions that will help make the impact we want to see in our communities.

Sarah will partner with Andy Johns to continue to build out our consumer practice and will focus specifically on investing in opportunities that tap into the power of community, marketplaces, and social networks. She also will work with Andy to scale the consumer side of our Get Ahead Platform (GAP) and Unusual Academy. Sarah is a product and company builder, and will be a fantastic coach and partner for founders.

We could not be more proud to say we are shoulder to shoulder with Sarah Leary. The venture capital community just got a whole lot better with Sarah in the game and we can’t wait to see the impact she will have on our founders and the industry more broadly.

Onward!

Sarah shares why she’s excited to join Unusual

Forbes with more on Sarah’s move to Unusual

Welcoming Sarah Leary to Team Unusual was originally published in Unusual Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the Unusual blog.

Today, we are excited to publish our most recent module in the Unusual Field Guide, The Unusual Guide for Raising Seed and Series A Capital. For every entrepreneur, fundraising is a wild journey full of unexpected twists and turns. At the same time, it is a skill that can and must be learned. Ultimately, to build a startup into an enduring, valuable company, it’s a requirement to successfully execute the fundraising process multiple times.

Jyoti and I started Unusual to reinvent the venture capital experience for early stage founders and provide an unfair advantage in every way. Decoding the most critical processes founders need to successfully execute and providing a step by step insider’s guide is one of the core objectives of The Unusual Method. We’ve taken our collective experiences as an investor and successful founder, our obsessive study of the best practices of other master practitioners, and we’ve packaged everything and made it available to every founder through our Unusual Field Guide.

Our new fundraising guide is a cornerstone module for our Field Guide. We’ve shared all we’ve learned over the years about the fundraising process from our own experiences, other successful founders, and premier venture capitalists, including:

• A set of easy to follow steps with the intention of empowering founders to capitalize on the lessons learned.
• An explanation of how the best entrepreneurs break down a startup’s journey into intermediate goals and organize their fundraising efforts.
• A detailed process to follow on how to set up investor meetings and how to manage the process from first meeting to closing the deal.
• A slide by slide outline complete with explanations and objectives for each part of an ideal investor pitch deck.

As a founder or CEO, job #1 is to make sure your business has the capital it needs to succeed and that requires mastering the ability to compel the best investors to join you. We hope you will dive into our Unusual Fundraising Guide and share any feedback you have. Please follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and subscribe to our newsletter for future modules.

Onward!

Team Unusual

Read The Unusual Guide for Raising Seed and Series A Capital for best practices about the fundraising process

Announcing the Unusual Guide for Raising Seed and Series A Capital was originally published in Unusual Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the Unusual blog.

From Unusual Ventures’ inception, our mission has been clear: to redefine seed stage investing and build a firm that would provide founders with a distinct advantage through the hardest leg of a startup journey — from Idea to Product Market fit. Today we’ve taken an important step towards fulfilling our mission. We are proud to officially make available The Unusual Method and our Unusual Field Guide.

The Unusual Method is our proprietary approach to early stage company building based on our experiences building and investing in some of Silicon Valley’s best companies over the past 20 years. We are obsessed with decoding the best practices of the most successful entrepreneurs and packaging their lessons and techniques in an innovative way that will help founders win. The Unusual Method includes the core knowledge base we’ve assembled (the Unusual Field Guide), interactive workshops with hands on help from the successful entrepreneurs behind the lessons (Unusual Academy), and for our portfolio companies, full time operators who will join your team to produce the actual deliverables and results The Unusual Method is built on (Unusual Get Ahead Platform).

The Unusual Field Guide is now available on our completely redesigned website that was built on one non-negotiable principle — “Founders First” — and is organized around the critical obstacles that every early stage founder faces. Each obstacle has an associated module, which presents an example of a founder/company that overcame the obstacle, an abstract on the process that was followed, and a tool founders can use to put the process into action immediately and track performance. The Unusual Field Guide is not a book that needs to be read sequentially from Chapter One. We designed the resources to each stand alone, so founders can jump into the most relevant content for wherever they are in their journey. By publishing the Method on our website for free, we hope to stay true to our mission and help make specialized knowledge and tools more accessible for all founders.

We recognize that every founder’s journey is unique and that a lot has been written about early stage company building. But here’s how the Field Guide is different: it’s highly tactical, provides direct insight from the industry’s best experts, and is accompanied by tools founders can immediately apply to their startup today.

We’ve been iterating on the Unusual Method and the written Field Guide for several years in some shape or form. To finally launch it in a cohesive, organized way is an exciting milestone for our team. This is just the beginning, however. We have many more ideas, including adding multimedia formats and adding more examples and tools along the way to make the user experience even richer. The Field Guide is a living library and we will be adding additional content as we grow our own repository of startup knowledge. Our aim is to consistently improve and constantly raise the bar for our founders. To that end, we welcome feedback, so don’t hesitate to reach out. Thank you for being on this journey with us — we’re excited for what’s to come.

Onward!

Check out our tactical Field Guide for all of the best practices and tools founders need to solve the most challenging early stage problems

Introducing The Unusual Method was originally published in Unusual Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When Jyoti Bansal and I first launched Unusual Ventures, our mission was clear: to generate world class returns for entities we are proud to support and facilitate entrepreneurs on their journey to becoming leaders of substance and impact. In 2019, we made massive strides towards phase one of building Unusual Ventures into the premier early stage venture firm by raising our second fund, partnering with additional consumer and enterprise product visionaries, and building a world-class team of people obsessed with serving founders at the early stage. Now, as we move into phase two of building Unusual, we are excited to announce that Noah Carr will be joining our investment team as an Enterprise Partner and Bill Hodak will join the Get Ahead Platform (GAP) Team as Marketing Partner to help us continue to offer an unprecedented level of service and support to our founders.

Noah Carr

Noah and the Unusual Team connected over our shared belief that the traditional venture market is broken and needs to be rebuilt to better support entrepreneurs. To add someone of Noah’s caliber to the team is fantastic for our portfolio, our founders, and demonstrates what Unusual is all about as we scale the organization. A true student of what makes startups successful, Noah has worked in technology investments for almost ten years and embodies the characteristics we look for in every member of the Unusual Team — he’s humble, empathetic, and scrappy. Throughout his career, Noah has a history of helping early stage companies — such as Evident.io (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), Armorblox, and LeapYear — and going to great lengths to support them. Every founder we spoke to raved about working with Noah and his tireless efforts to help make them successful.

Noah’s credentials are impressive with stints at Bain Capital and Point72 Ventures where he partnered with enterprise software companies. At Unusual, his focus will remain the same, specifically focusing on cybersecurity, developer tools, open source, and data infrastructure companies. By leveraging his strong network and deep market expertise, Noah will be an all-in partner for Unusual’s founders to ensure they achieve their goals.

Bill Hodak

One of the core innovations at Unusual is our Get Ahead Platform (GAP). Originally designed by Jyoti based on his experience in the first few years of building AppDynamics and Harness, the GAP was created to provide an unprecedented level of hands-on support for early stage founders. Focusing on the most critical obstacles founders need to overcome to reach product market fit — recruiting the core team, iterating on product messaging, and selling the first few customers — the GAP places world class specialists fulltime inside Unusual portfolio companies. We’ve learned that understanding how to articulate the value proposition of a startup’s product in an empathetic way is essential for success. We’ve also learned that it is HARD to do! It is extremely rare to find an executive capable of crafting the early narrative that takes a highly innovative, often deeply technical idea, and communicates it in a way that a customer immediately understands as a solution to their pain. For several years now, we’ve coveted the skills Bill Hodak has when it comes to doing this. As New Relic’s first product marketing hire, Bill was responsible for strategic messaging and marketing that went head-to-head with Jyoti’s marketing team at AppDynamics. We were quite often impressed (and frustrated!) by Bill’s thoughtful approach during the AppD days, so as we looked to scale the GAP Team, he was at the top of our list of people we wanted to help us better serve our founders.

With a multitude of product marketing experience obtained at top technology companies, such as LaunchDarkly, Sift Science (now Sift), New Relic, VMWare, and Oracle, Bill’s expertise will significantly help our founders as they develop their go-to-market strategies. Passionate about helping companies at the early stage, Bill excels at figuring out initial core messaging and bringing it to life. He is not only a prolific product marketer, but also has a breadth of experience leading marketing teams across various roles. We believe he will be a tremendous asset to our founders as they not only develop their go-to-market messaging, but also as they build and scale their marketing teams. And, as if Bill’s demonstrated history isn’t enough, he is also an incredibly humble person and is a great addition to the Unusual Team.

One of Unusual’s core values is innovating on the venture model to better serve founders at the seed stage. With inventive platforms like Unusual Academy and the GAP, Unusual has been built from the ground up to provide entrepreneurs with the resources, tools, and hands-on support they actually need. Throughout our discussions with both Noah and Bill, it was very clear they shared our passion for helping early stage founders and believed in our innovative approach, strategy, and mission. We are thrilled to have Noah and Bill onboard and are looking forward to seeing the impact they are sure to have on our portfolio companies. Onward!

Follow Unusual on Twitter for the latest firm updates

Unusual Ventures Welcomes Noah Carr and Bill Hodak was originally published in Unusual Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today, Unusual Ventures is thrilled to announce that we have partnered with BluBracket to execute on its vision of securing today’s most valuable and vulnerable enterprise asset — code. We are pleased to lead their $6.5M seed round in partnership with Point72 Ventures, SignalFire, and Firebolt.

BluBracket, the first comprehensive security solution for code in the enterprise, gives companies visibility into where source code introduces security risk, while also enabling them to fully secure their code without altering developer workflows or productivity. BluBracket’s CodeInsights and CodeSecure products give companies the key to unlock software innovation via cloud native, Git, CICD, and open source, while protecting their enterprise infrastructure and valuable intellectual property. With these solutions, companies for the first time can discover and classify code, detect and monitor risks, protect valuable code, and enforce security policies. Founded in 2019, BluBracket has already partnered with dozens of CISOs and CTOs from Fortune 500 companies to specifically design its product suite from the ground up for today’s modern enterprise.

BluBracket’s co-founders, Prakash Linga and Ajay Arora, are seasoned security experts and their track record, combined with their vision made our decision an easy one. For a company at their stage, we’ve been impressed with not only the customers they’re already working with — such as Compass and The Pokémon Company International — but also the recognition of Blu’s technical lead in this important new category, as they’ve recently been named a finalist in the RSAC Innovation Sandbox Contest. Though the team has consistently shown their deep knowledge both in security and building successful companies, we have also witnessed their ability to be humble students when they participated in the Beta Cohort of Unusual Academy last spring. Both Prakash and Ajay showed a hunger to learn and the capacity to pivot and make changes quickly — characteristics the Unusual Team looks for in every team we partner with.

In today’s digital economy, code is everywhere, driving advances in virtually every industry from healthcare to financial services to consumer products. Ajay and Prakash understood that no security solution will be viable if developers won’t use it and the need to build a platform that will enable the enterprise to keep code secure without harming developer workflow or productivity. The problem that BluBracket is focused on is a tough one, but an important problem we believe their team is best suited to take on. Congratulations to Prakash, Ajay, and the rest of the BluBracket Team!

Read more about BluBracket’s seed announcement

To learn more about Unusual Ventures and what our portfolio companies are up to, follow us on Twitter

BluBracket — Securing Code in a Software-Driven World was originally published in Unusual Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By John Vrionis and Haley Daiber

Unusual Ventures is excited to announce that we have partnered with Kloud.io to bring simple data access to financial analysts and increase productivity across enterprises. We are thrilled to lead their $4M seed funding round in partnership with Firebolt Ventures and Jason Calacanis.

Kloud.io, a spreadsheet-based application, enables financial analysts to automate routine processes and directly access data from multiple sources, such as Salesforce, Oracle, NetSuite, and more. Through Kloud.io, a financial analyst can enable the automation of data integration and transfer without involving the data engineering team and/or leaving their spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Smartsheet, or Airtable. By eliminating a data middle man, Kloud.io has greatly reduced inefficiencies and enabled financial professionals to be 10x more productive. One customer, a video streaming giant, estimates that since implementing Kloud.io, it has saved engineering teams 10,000 hours annually — the equivalent of 5 full-time engineers — which in turn has increased the productivity of financial analysts.

We were excited about the opportunity to partner with the Kloud.io founders, Sathish Raju and Krishna Bhat, from our first meeting. Team Unusual had been looking for product builders with a vision for how this space would evolve over the next decade, and Krishna and Sathish have unique insights given their experience as data engineers and solution architects. They were looking for an investment partner who believed in their abilities and could specifically help them with their goals of growing their team and increasing traction over the next 18 to 24 months. We all felt Unusual’s early stage strategy and founder services — Unusual Academy and the Get Ahead Platform (GAP) — would provide Kloud.io a distinct advantage. Additionally, we were impressed by the traction the Kloud.io team has achieved with its customers, including Rakuten Rewards, Oyo Rooms, ICGAM, and Endurance. Kloud.io’s customers raved about its product and we heard consistently that it is a game changer for the modern enterprise.

We believe the Kloud.io team is early on in their journey to building a disruptive and enduring company. In the short time we’ve worked with them, they’ve embraced our Unusual approach and are already seeing results, such as attracting top talent to help them deliver on Kloud.io’s vision. We’re excited to see what’s in store for Kloud.io and are humbled to be partners with them. Onward!

Read more about Kloud.io’s seed announcement

To learn more about Unusual Ventures and what our portfolio companies are up to, follow us on Twitter

Kloud.io — Democratizing Data Access for Financial Analysts was originally published in Unusual Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A crucial aspect of every successful startup’s journey is the ability to figure out what to prioritize when it comes to the product roadmap. As every founder knows, there are always more things to build than there are people to build them or time to deliver. At Unusual Ventures, we strive to help entrepreneurs succeed at the seed stage and a big part of that is helping them figure out what to build first and to deliver.

Recently, my partner Jyoti and I were working with a group of founders in Unusual Academy and we found ourselves digging into the process of product roadmap prioritization. I listened with admiration as I heard Jyoti explain in great detail how to manage the competing product requests that result from the different types of functional conversations — sales, customer success, engineering, and the CEO/CPO — a startup has, and ultimately deliver a prioritized product roadmap that the engineering team produces on a schedule everyone can count on. He calls this “the Four Lists” process.

We all see the world from where we sit. Ask a salesperson what should be prioritized in terms of the product roadmap, and you will hear about features that “must be delivered in order to close the key deals they are working on.” Ask customer success and it will be “functionality to make sure we don’t churn these existing customers.” Ask engineers and the list is quite often focused on the “technical debt” we have to make up. And finally, ask the CEO or CPO and the priority features typically revolve around what advanced functionality the company needs to deliver “to beat the competition and be a leader in the market.” Whose request do you prioritize? How to decide?

A big part of what we do at Unusual to help founders and management teams at startups realize their potential is to distill the wisdom of master practitioners. Well, here’s how Jyoti, one of the very best entrepreneurs of this generation, and his teams have learned to make product priority decisions at AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco for $3.7BN) and now at Harness (which is well on its way to being another unicorn) in his own words.

List #1: What Sales Wants

The objective of List #1 is to build functionality that enables sales to win new customers. Sales is in the field on a daily basis fighting hand-to-hand combat. To product leaders, the message from sales is usually “if we just had X we could close this six figure deal!” Every competitive situation could turn in our favor if we only had certain features. At Harness, we call these “opportunity gaps.” If you want to stay competitive, you have to close those gaps. Some features you may want to build quickly to compete in that same deal cycle. Others you want to prioritize and build over the next three to six months, so you can keep winning against your competitors over the long term.

When you’re building out this list, ask yourself, “What do you need to win in this market?”

At Harness, we put in place a system for every opportunity in our pipeline and use a tool called Vivun (one of Unusual’s portfolio companies) to track these opportunity gaps. That gives us a dashboard, where we can quantify how “expensive” each opportunity gap is for us. As an example, consider a scenario where one particular opportunity gap came up in five different opportunities in the pipeline and each of those opportunities is worth $1 million of pipeline. Tracking gives us visibility into which product features would be just “nice-to-have” vs. massive costly gaps and allows us to prioritize based on dollar impact. The second trick we always use is the win-loss analysis. Every time we lose a deal to a competitor, we ask the prospective customer for the technical reasons that we lost or whether there were other reasons.

Gaps from the field help drive decisions on multiple dimensions. Revenue is a big one, but these gaps also help prioritize based on severity of need (i.e. will it cause the prospect not to buy vs. just cause friction in the deal?), the segment of the need (i.e. are we meeting the demands of our target market or are we being pulled in new verticals, geographies, company sizes?), and the competitive impact of the need (i.e. should we bolster areas against our top competition?). For example, your sales list will start to look different if you prioritize for moving into the enterprise, expanding internationally, or taking out a competitor.

Keeping track of product requests with List #1 from Sales is incredibly important. But that’s only one consideration — or list — of product features you (as the CTO, CEO, Founder, or Product Leader) should be thinking about.

List #2: Existing Customers

As product leaders, acquiring new customers and tracking the opportunity gaps are unfortunately not the only features that require consideration. If you focus only on closing gaps with competitors, you would neglect your existing customers and what they might need to continue to be successful. List #2 focuses on those users who already use your product and what’s important to them. Often times, existing customers discover they need certain features that they didn’t think of at all in the evaluation process. That’s because as they implement the product and go from being new users to power users over time, they start finding gaps in the product and begin asking for different capabilities. If you don’t listen and demonstrate an ability to offer those features that they need, those customers become dissatisfied and are less likely to renew. One example might be a customer that needs an integration that works with their internal user database, so they can pull in all their users. If you don’t build that feature, their adoption of your product would be limited to a small number of users and they would find decreasing value in your product over time.

The most important thing to consider for this list is being proactive and looking at customer usage and adoption as key metrics. That means examining the data on user engagement and seeing if a customer is becoming increasingly disengaged. You don’t want to wait until they churn, and ask them after the fact why they stopped using your product because by then, it’s too late. Instead, you want to collect product requests from existing customers before they churn and really seek to understand the reasons why customers are not using the product as much as they once did.

At Harness, for every account, one point person is responsible for putting together a list of three things that that customer needs to succeed and three things the customer needs to succeed even more. There are a number of tools that can help you track this. At Harness, we use Natero to keep track of these requests and score customers red, yellow, and green. (Red meaning they’re using our product very little, yellow meaning they’re using the product as expected, and green meaning they’re power users of the product.) We use this scoring system as the leading indicator to determine if our customers are happy and whether or not they’re likely to renew.

Once you have this information about customer satisfaction and requests, there may be several reference points you use to determine which product requests to take on. For instance, you might consider the ARR value of the account or whether the customer is in a strategic vertical you want to dominate. Or maybe it’s a small account, but the customer is really upset. (We refer to this as reading the “temperature” of the customer.) All these things might factor into your prioritization for new product features, but it’s hard to be formulaic about it. At the end of the day, you have to make a judgment call as product leaders.

Delighting customers is extremely important for any startup these days. Almost every successful company has really high metrics for customer retention. So that’s really the second list you have to start tracking and work towards.

List #3: Technical Debt

List #3 is maybe less exciting, but just as important as the other two lists we’ve described. As you quickly iterate and scale as a startup, you start accumulating what people call “ technical debt”, which you chose to take on as a tradeoff to build your product quickly. That technical debt may require you to re-architect a system at some point or slow down and work on test automation. These are not customer-facing features so they don’t impact the sales or customers, but cleaning up technical debt is something you have to keep doing to maintain and/or improve product quality.

List #3 is where your engineers track any accumulating technical debt. This may mean pausing or slowing down while you make improvements. Other times, it may mean redesigning a certain feature or writing more unit tests. Working through technical debt can also mean cleaning up bad code that has been assembled for some time. In terms of how you incorporate this into your sprints, companies dedicate every 3rd or 4th sprint to technical debt. Others prioritize a couple of items from this list in each sprint or allocate a fixed bandwidth in each sprint to technical debt. In any case, don’t go too long without working through your technical debt. If you don’t take care of your technical debt and keep building more features, eventually your product architecture gets so unwieldy that product quality suffers and it creates more serious problems in the long run. That’s why it’s critical to maintain this list and track it as you build out your product.

List #4: Innovations

The fourth and final list comes down to engineering toward future growth. It’s about building innovations that your customers are not yet asking for, but are designed to expand your total addressable market. In Unusual Academy, we teach our founders to find their beachhead market and expand from there. That means constantly thinking about your next innovation. Ask yourself, “What do I need to do to expand my total addressable market?” You can’t depend on existing customers to source these innovations because they often aren’t the ideal customers for new features or product lines. They care about what they bought, not about what you don’t have yet.

For example, our first product at AppDynamics was Application Performance Monitoring (APM) for Java applications and our customers who were Java programmers were asking for certain features. That was our beachhead market and we had to deliver against Lists 1 and 2 to stay competitive and delight customers in that space. But at the same time, we had a playbook for expanding into .NET applications and had to build out this capability, which most of those existing customers were not requesting as they didn’t have any .NET applications. Eventually, we built out our third product, End User Monitoring (EUM) and our fourth product, Synthetic Monitoring as we continued innovating and expanding our market.

Essentially, you have to approach this fourth list by working backwards from your revenue goals. Say you want your revenue to be $100 million ARR five years from now, $30 million ARR three years from now, etc. You have to have enough addressable market for your product, so you have to ask yourself what you need to do to keep expanding that market and hit those revenue numbers. That means you have to keep working on product expansion and innovations. Otherwise, your growth will slow down.

Balancing the Four Lists and Making Tradeoffs

Ultimately, whatever you decide to build comes down to those four buckets, which is what any product leader should be weighing when they make tradeoffs and define the priorities for the product roadmap. Some requests on the lists are lighter lift and can be done immediately, like a bug that needs to be fixed. Others take a little more effort and can be accomplished in the medium-term, like slight product enhancements. Then there are the major product requests, which require building out completely new services and features for new customer adoption. There’s variation in the magnitude of requests that the product leader has to balance.

Whether you’re the Head of Engineering, Product Manager, CTO, CPO, or startup CEO (and wearing all those hats at the same time), tracking these four lists can help your team align and ensure they are focusing on the right things. But how exactly do you get the balance right between these four lists? It’s a very tricky balance to pull off and you will have to adjust the balance as business priorities change. That means that at any point, you may want to spend more time on one list over the others. Say you’re losing a lot of leads to competitors and are struggling to get revenue going. That means you probably need to put a lot of your focus on List #1 and make the conscious, deliberate decision to slow down on technical debt or innovations and market expansion.

Or maybe you’ve sold a lot of product, but your customers are unhappy or you are having quality issues and churning customers because you’re not keeping up with the things that customers are asking for. Then you may want to slow down on the other lists and spend your energy on List #2 and List #3. In an ideal world, you want all four lists to be executed extremely well at the same time. But in the world of startups — where time and resources are constrained — finding the right balance right is key.

Structuring Planning Cycles

One thing we’ve found helpful at Harness is putting in place a system where every three months, our team goes through what we want to achieve and creates a planning cycle based on that three-month timeframe. Then, the team does an additional mini planning cycle every two weeks. It might not perfectly match up with the three month planning cycle, but it should align more or less with the broader three-month goals. Finally, we look at what we ship every day. By tracking those daily, two-week, and three-month sprints, we can see how we are making progress across the four lists.

Once a week, our CTO Rishi will meet with our Sales Engineering team to go over the first list and what is important to buyers. Then, he meets weekly with the Customer Success team to understand the second list and what’s important to our existing customers. He also meets weekly with engineering managers and asks for their lists of technical debt. Once he’s accumulated the lists from key stakeholders, he and I talk about the product expansion and innovation list every few months. Then, he balances what goes into a two-week sprint. It’s impossible to implement all ideas across all four lists all at once. Instead, you want to make sure that you are systematically going and adding the next 10% of your vision and going from 30% to 40% and 40% to 50% and 50% to 60% and so on until you reach your full product vision.

Unfortunately, unlike like a social product where millions of users can give you instant feedback, you don’t get immediate feedback on the enterprise side. It may take you months to get the data points to understand if one of your new product features is effective or not. That’s why there’s no exact science behind this process and why it becomes even more important to use the four lists to track high-level trends. If you’re systematic about capturing which requests recur most often across each list, you can get a sense pretty quickly for the most prominent high-impact product features, allowing you to prioritize your engineering and product roadmap.

Using the Four Lists process, you might wonder how the feedback loop works to update the company on the status of what product features were picked and how they were chosen. Sharing this framework/concept with everyone at the company gives everyone the important context that there are multiple requests to balance. At Harness, we have one wiki page in Confluence where everyone can see the lists and we mark progress in Salesforce using Vivun, so the sales team knows which new product features we’re working on and when each will be ready to roll out to customers.

Another thing to keep in mind is that as your company grows, this process changes as well. Usually, you start as a “single product” company and stay that way for the first few years or so. Once you have multiple products, you will likely need to have separate Four Lists for each of your products.

Many Ways to Succeed

At Unusual Ventures we recognize there are alternative methods to solving this challenge of product prioritization. We wanted to share this concept of “The Four Lists” approach because we’ve seen it work and we hope we can help every founder in some way. Enjoy the journey and good luck! Onward!

Interested in learning more about Unusual Ventures? Follow us on Twitter.

Jyoti Bansal’s Secret to Managing a Startup’s Product Roadmap: The Four Lists was originally published in Unusual Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with Harry Stebbings, creator of The 20 Minute VC. Our team at Unusual consists of several Harry Stebbings superfans and listens regularly to the show, so I was excited to have the opportunity to chat with him and share perspectives on the venture capital industry. Harry was incredibly prepared and had several insightful questions and deep industry perspective for us to debate, but what blew me away was his ability to connect on a human level. The conversation turned to discussing how each of our lives have been impacted by having a parent with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and how that has affected how we think about investing, working with founders, and life decisions in general.

Sometimes in life we stumble upon a kindred spirit — I am grateful for the opportunity to know Harry and look forward to seeing his rocket ship ride continue. If you’re so inclined to hear our conversation, here it is. We’d appreciate any feedback you have.

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20 Minute VC: My ‘Unusual’ Conversation with Harry Stebbings was originally published in Unusual Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By: John Vrionis and Haley Daiber

Today, Unusual Ventures is excited to announce that we have partnered with Vivun to execute on its mission of unlocking the strategic potential of Presales. We are thrilled to lead the company’s $3M seed round.

Vivun, the creator of the world’s first software for Presales teams, Hero by Vivun, transforms the way B2B tech companies go to market. Hero taps into the potential of Presales, which typically consists of the sales engineers, solution architects, or Field CTOs — essentially the people at a company with technical backgrounds who understand the product from a functional level who can explain the details to the user and buyer. The power of Hero lies in its ability to keep product and sales teams aligned, improving product-market fit, accelerating deals in flight, and capturing dormant sources of revenue.

We were introduced to Vivun after learning about the solution from the Presales team at Harness, where our Unusual co-founder Jyoti Bansal is the CEO. The passion was palpable over how intuitive Vivun’s product is, its ease of use, and its ability to greatly improve productivity across the entire Harness organization. The feedback from the Harness team certainly had our attention and then the talented management team blew us away. The four founders — Matt Darrow, John Bruce, Dominique Darrow, and Claire Bruce — all brought different skill sets around product, operating, sales, and marketing to the table. They were also authentic as both Matt and John previously ran Presales teams at Zuora and SignalFx and understood the pain firsthand. It was clear that there’s no product quite like Vivun out there that is specifically designed for Presales teams, creating an exciting new market opportunity.

Team Unusual has been working closely with Vivun over the past few months as they have participated in Unusual Academy and engaged with our GAP Team. Throughout Unusual Academy, they have been wonderful to work with. They’re humble, they show up, they work hard, they learn fast, and they have already put into practice the tools they have been exposed to. On the GAP side, we’ve helped them hire a number of key employees, improved their messaging, and helped build up their sales process and outreach to become industrial strength. They have also expanded their product from Salesforce.com into other channels, such as browser extensions and mobile apps, while also building out integrations to systems like Jira and Github. Even more impressive, at their early stage, they are working with Presales teams on a global scale across a wide range of companies, including startups and publicly traded companies such as SignalFx (now Splunk), Flexera, and Xactly.

We believe the Vivun team has a bright future ahead of them and are well on their way to creating a new category. This is just the beginning and we’re honored to be partners with them on this journey.

Congratulations to Matt, John, Dominique, and Claire! Onward!

Read more about Vivun’s seed announcement

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Vivun — Unleashing the Power of Presales in the Enterprise was originally published in Unusual Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Unusual Ventures is thrilled to announce that we will be continuing our partnership with Banyan Security to accelerate product development to meet growing demand from enterprises looking to secure ever-expanding and increasingly complex remote access environments. We are excited to announce the company’s Series A financing along with Shasta Ventures.

Banyan Security, a leading provider of a next-generation secure remote access solution, was built with architectural principles based on Google’s model for a zero trust framework, BeyondCorp. Essentially, Banyan secures applications in a continuous authorization framework that reside in the cloud or on-premise and is designed to replace legacy VPNs via least-privileged access, continuous verification, and fine-grained authorization policies. The solution integrates with existing security tooling and leverages signals to create a trust score allowing quantified access policy enforcement. Instead of granting one-time access to a corporate network based on just user credentials, Banyan considers the holistic picture, such as the business sensitivity of the data, typical access patterns, device status and the security profile of the user’s location to determine real-time access for that specific request.

We met Jayanth Gummaraju, Banyan’s co-founder and CEO, when he was a PhD student at Stanford in 2008, and Tarun Desikan, Banyan’s co-founder, shortly thereafter. After we launched Unusual Ventures in 2018, Jayanth connected with us to share the vision for Banyan and introduce Yoshio Turner, a former research scientist at HP Labs who was part of the founding team. We were immediately impressed with their insightful vision and their plan to replace VPNs — virtual private networks — and conquer a multi-billion dollar market. We shared their thesis that as more and more enterprises move to the cloud, VPNs were going to become an archaic way of solving access challenges and solutions like Banyan would become the new standard in terms of how people secured their applications.

In the past year, the Banyan team has made significant progress on all fronts. The founders have been joined by a stellar team, the product is now generally available, and they’ve added marquis, evangelical customers. The Banyan team has a great combination of startup and technology sensibilities. Jayanth, Tarun, and Yoshio are incredibly hardworking, honest, and consistently persevere to do better for their customers. They’ve been both dogmatic and pragmatic — which is what great entrepreneurs do — as they’ve stayed true to their initial insight, while also adjusting priorities based on learnings from their customers. We’re delighted with the progress the Banyan team has made and are looking forward to the next phase of their journey.

Congratulations to the Banyan team!

Read more about Banyan’s Series A announcement

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Banyan — Securing the Enterprise with Zero Trust Remote Access was originally published in Unusual Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.