Brian Goss

In vertical SaaS, the very best companies landed with a product solving a specific, burning pain point that horizontal solutions solved badly and then became broad product suites over time (ServiceTitan, Veeva Systems, Doximity, etc). My partner Gordon Ritter calls this “layering the cake”. In vertical AI, the landing wedges are much more brittle. While the painpoints they solve are very real (and often unaddressable by SaaS alone), they’re also much more likely to commodotize in the near term as the tech advances. 👀 Therefore, the need to layer the cake in vertical AI is much more urgent than in vertical SaaS. 👀 The best vertical AI CEOs not only recognize the dynamic, but talk about it openly. Helps those around them keep up the speed of innovation and their eyes on the bigger prize.

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That's why it's often very difficult to recognize new leaders – their ideas go beyond the conventional frameworks we're accustomed to. Keep your mind open. Don't let yesterday's templates define your future. #Leadership, #Innovation, #OpenMind, #FutureThinking, #venturethinking,   https://lnkd.in/eASPGsuu

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Who are the leading GTM experts in VC that you know? Think Jason Gelman who is GTM operating partner at Primary Venture Partners or Max Altschuler at GTMfund!

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🗞️ Breaking News: Red Ventures Selling CNET at a huge Loss❗️ Context: Red Ventures, the privately held digital media and marketing juggernaut based in Fort Mill, South Carolina, is selling CNET, one of the largest tech publishers on the web, to Ziff Davis for just $100 million. For context: Red Ventures bought CNET for approximately $500 million. Reason for the Sale: Total traffic to CNET has dropped by a staggering 50% over the last three years. The main driver behind this decline is a 68% drop in organic traffic (loss off Google rankings and traffic). Tables turned: This sale is a stunning turn of events for CNET, which once bought Ziff Davis (then a tech magazine firm) in a deal worth roughly $1.6 billion - more than two decades ago. Catch Up: - Ziff Davis trades publicly with a market value of $1.94 billion. The company lost about half of its marketcap over the course of the last 48 months. Strategic rationale: If Ziff Davis is able to ink a content licencing deal with Google, Bing/Microsoft or ChatGPT (or else e.g. X.AI) - like Reddit did - it might turn out to be a very smart deal …

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Hey folks, I think you might be aware that what we're building at DeepCast includes a podcast discovery and exploration platform for listeners at www.deepcast.fm. We also recently unveiled www.deepcast.pro -- a promotions, marketing, and monetization platform for podcasters (and folks like networks and agencies who support them). "You make the shows, let us help you with what comes after." Shows claimed and processed via DeepCast Pro are also published for listener consumption on DeepCast. High value all around! If you're a podcaster, claim your show at www.deepcast.pro to get started. Free speaker-labeled transcripts for all your episodes as well as generated insights for each (key takeaways, quotes, topic & keyword sets, summaries, and more) plus many more features—and growing daily! We're shipping fast over here! (Thanks to Rachel Perez Hosna Qasmei Kim Burgaard Benjamin Moon Rachel Magana Hari Ramachandran!)

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The ultimate list for the #startup founder getting it together to raise capital #funding from #Angel Investors, and #Venture Capitalist (VCs). Help other entrepreneurs find the resources they need. Like, and REPOST! 👇

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This week on the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: I speak with Mike Taylor about his new book, Prompt Engineering for Generative AI: Future-Proof Inputs for Reliable AI Outputs, as well as the skill gap in performance marketing. Find the episode by searching for "Mobile Dev Memo" wherever you consume podcasts.

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Exciting News: Schematic is publicly available and we’ve raised $4.8M in seed funding! 🚀 I’m pumped to share that Schematic is now publicly available! We've also raised $4.8M in seed funding, led by MHS Capital with participation from NextView Ventures, Active Capital, Atlanta Ventures, and Ritual Capital—along with support from incredible founders of companies like CrowdStrike, LaunchDarkly, and Salesloft. A big thank you to our investors for believing in us, to our customers for guiding us, and to Benjamin Papillon, Jasdeep Garcha, Giovanni Hobbins, Vladyslav Len, Youssef Salah, Christopher Brady, Joseph Chrzan, Mohammed Almusaddar, and Markiian Simkiv for the opportunity to build this together. ➡️ Solving the last mile of pricing & packaging At every startup, one thing is certain: pricing and packaging will always change. Product and engineering teams shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time this happens. Most companies hard-code pricing and packaging into their applications, making it slow and painful to evolve as market demands shift. ➡️ What We’re Building We're building Schematic to transform pricing and packaging for B2B SaaS companies by getting product and engineering teams out of billing projects. With Schematic, B2B SaaS companies can change pricing & packaging without code changes or billing refactors. ➡️ How It Works With just a few lines of code, businesses can implement pricing and packaging into any application—end-to-end—from feature delivery through billing and customer experience. Quickly roll out new features and tie them to your pricing plans. Target specific plans to customers and adjust them without engineering support. Experiment, scale, and manage pricing & packaging operations: trials, plans, limits, entitlements, metering usage, handling exceptions, provisioning customers, & embedding front-end purchasing components —all without code changes. ➡️ Who we’re building for We’re building Schematic for B2B SaaS companies who want their pricing & packaging roadmaps to move in sync with their product roadmaps, without slowing down their engineering teams. Some key use cases our customers are already benefiting from: 🔹Outsourcing homegrown & hard-coded entitlement services. 🔹Programmatically managing feature access based on subscription plans. 🔹Metering usage and actually enforcing limits. 🔹Updating and managing plans, add-ons, bundling, and customer exceptions 🔹Delivering embeddable purchasing experiences (pricing tables, customer portals, upgrade/downgrade flows, etc). We’re still in the early innings, but the foundation is strong—we're already handling 500K entitlement flag evaluations every month. If you’re a founder or a product leader looking to avoid building what should be out-of-the-box (feature flags, entitlements, admin dashboards, customer portals), check out Schematic and let us know what you think.

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Want to build wealth faster? Skip startups. Buy Boring Old Businesses. Here’s why: 1. They’re already making money. 2. They come with customers, systems, and momentum. 3. They’re undervalued – 2.5x profits is standard. 4. SBA loans or seller financing make them accessible. 5. Easy profit boosters: raise prices or add new products. 6. They’re easier to scale than startups. Startups fail 65% of the time within the first 5 years. But "boring" businesses? They’re built to last. Don’t build from scratch. Buy something proven. If you could buy a "boring" business, what type of business would you buy?

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INTERVIEWS OF 2024 SXSW PITCH WINNERS: Dhavel Patel of Lotus Every March in Austin, 50 of the world's most impactful startups showcase their talents at SXSW Pitch. Today we begin a series of short interviews with some of the category winners from the 2024 event. Founder and CEO Dhaval Patel has been growing Lotus for three years. At this year's SXSW Pitch, his San Jose based startup emerged as the winner of the "Smart Cities, Transportation & Sustainability" category. Patel's short answers to our questions are below. SXSW: What is Lotus?  Patel: A wearable ring that controls objects at home by pointing. See https://www.getlotus.com/ SXSW: What community does Lotus serve? Patel: Folks with limited mobility -- older adults, veteran soldiers, people with disabilities.  SXSW: Who is your all-time favorite entrepreneur? Patel: Warren Buffett. SXSW: Best startup-related advice you have received? Patel: Don't start building first, find the need first. SXSW: Current entrepreneurial trend that excites you the most? Patel: Desire for tech that is intuitive and simple. SXSW: Fail fast or perseverance? Patel: Persevere in failing fast repeatedly. SXSW: Favorite VC? Patel: Andreessen Horowitz. SXSW: Favorite gadget or device? Patel: Apple AirPods. SXSW: Government can best support startups by Patel: Moving faster. SXSW: Most over-hyped technology at present? Patel: AI. SXSW: Most under-hyped technology at present? Patel: Consumer hardware. SXSW: What did you enjoy most about your experience at SXSW? Patel: The people -- each person wanting to make the world a better place. SXSW: What is your best trait as an entrepreneur? Patel: Simplifying complex problems. SXSW: What is your best advice for other startups? Patel: Focus (say "no" to more). Learn more about Dhaval Patel of Lotus plus other 2024 SXSW Pitch winners by listening to the audio of their session at this year's event. See https://lnkd.in/gHtwQB8n Applications for SXSW Pitch 2025 will open in late summer. See https://lnkd.in/gE2hcVPK #sxsw, #sxsw2024, #startups, #founders, Chris Valentine, Dhaval Patel, SXSW, #venturecapital, #entrepreneur, #entrepreneurs, #startup, #founderstories, #sxswpitch, Lotus (Techstars'23), #techstars, #Austin, #ATX, #creativity, #innovation, #hardware, #consumerhardware, #pitch, #accessibility,

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"Sayings from Chairman Jobs" (shared by Steve Jobs at a retreat in 1983: 1. Real artists ship. 2. It's better to be a pirate than join the navy. 3. Mac in a book by 1986. Numbers 1 and 2 should probably on the walls of every startup. __ P.S. If you're fascinated by innovation and what it takes to build great businesses, join +120,000 by getting The Generalist delivered to your inbox: https://lnkd.in/eJMp5T9

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I recently rebuilt my Fierce Performance Marketing LLC website with an AI assistant. The process was easy, and the output was much better than anticipated. TechCrunch covered the emerging market of #AIcodeassistant startups. It noted a Gartner survey that found over half of enterprise organizations are currently piloting or leveraging AI code assistants. It will be interesting to watch the integration of AI into traditional #developer service models and its potential impacts on agencies. Thoughts?

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✨ Breaking: Halogen Ventures Announces New Fund.- Halogen Ventures Halogen Ventures focuses on early-stage consumer technology startups with at least one woman on the founding team. The fund announced a $10 million investment to support female founders in Alabama. https://halogenvc.com/ Please share to let other #Founders know For the ❤️ of Startups #Fusion42 #Startups #Venturecapital

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Christopher Allen wrote a great article on the lifecycle of progressive trust. Trust is not binary, and it takes time to build trust in gradients. The author broke down 10 stages of the progressive trust lifecycle. https://lnkd.in/giSWVq5D Spokeo plays a critical role in the “References” stage where trust is aggregated to provide a more comprehensive picture.

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En route to meet a potential seller in DC, I can't help but reflect on the key considerations outlined in my recent Forbes Business Council article - "Passing The Torch: Finding The Right Buyer For Your Tech Business." Founders of SMBs pour their hearts into nurturing their ventures, so the decision to sell demands meticulous evaluation of prospective buyers. A buyer’s expertise, vision, and commitment to honoring your legacy while unlocking new growth avenues are paramount. Thoroughly vetting buyers' presentations on these aspects is crucial, as it takes decades to cultivate a thriving business, but mere minutes to undermine it. The right buyer can not only preserve your rich history but also catalyze expansion into new markets by combining complementary strengths. I invite you to read the full article for an in-depth exploration of this pivotal juncture for tech entrepreneurs, and share your thoughts in the comments! P.S. if you are in DC today and tomorrow (May 16th/17th) let’s meet up! DM me. https://lnkd.in/eytRcCjX

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Great post by Josh Wagner on the importance of urgency. If you don't want to build a company characterized by urgency and extreme intensity over a long period of time - at least a decade - you would be better off not raising venture capital.

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Every one of us intuitively understands the importance of storytelling - it's one of the most human of acts. And exactly because it is so universal, we overlook the importance of investing in it. I've always felt affinity with Sherrod Davis and EcoMap Technologies, Inc. because they get that for cities, regions and other economic leaders: Everyone wants their story told but not enough are putting the time and resources to get it done! Watch this nerdy webinar of mine on how to get started, or lmk if you'd ever want to learn how we at Technical.ly do it!

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A few of my thoughts in ADWEEK on the recent success of Meta's Advantage+ https://lnkd.in/gphtZqAi

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A few of my thoughts in ADWEEK on the recent success of Meta's Advantage+ https://lnkd.in/gphtZqAi

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