Rahul Vohra
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Extra Crunch roundup: Think like a VC, CockroachDB EC-1, handle your stock options
Ants and camels are famously resilient, but when it was time to select a name for a startup that offers open-source, cloud-based distributed database architecture, you can imagine why “Cockroach Labs” was the final candidate.
Database technology is fundamental infrastructure, which partially explains why it’s so resistant to innovation: Oracle Database was released in 1979, and MySQL didn’t reach the market until 1995.
Since hitting the market six years ago, CockroachDB has become “a next-generation, $2-billion-valued database contender,” writes enterprise reporter Bob Reselman, who interviewed the company’s founders to write a four-part series:
Part 1: Origin story: From the creation of the popular open-source image editor GIMP to some of Google’s most well-known infrastructure products.
Part 2: Technical design: Analyzes the key differentiation that CockroachDB offers, particularly its focus on geography and data storage.
Part 3: Developer relations and business: How CockroachDB engages with developers while pivoting to the cloud at a key inflection point.
Part 4: Competitive landscape and future: A look at the fierce competition, and what possible exit routes might look like.
Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.
Our ongoing search for the best startup growth marketers is yielding results: reporter Anna Heim interviewed SaaS and early-stage startup marketing consultant Lucy Heskins to learn more about the mistakes her clients are most likely to make before they seek her help.
“The first is hiring a marketer too soon,” said Heskins. “I’ve come into startups thinking I was coming in to set up their in-house function. However, very quickly you realize that they’ve jumped the gun and think they’ve got product-market fit when they are nowhere near it.”
Heskins shared a few pages from her early-stage marketing playbook, in which she recommends aligning content marketing with the customer experience — as opposed to just putting pages up that score well in search results.
Because their conversation contains a lot of strategic advice for startups that haven’t yet made a marketing hire, we made it available on TechCrunch.
If you know of a skilled growth marketer, please share your recommendation in this quick survey.
Thanks very much for reading!
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
Here are 3 things you should do with your stock options
Image Credits: z_wei (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Congratulations: You’ve joined a startup and received an Incentive stock option grant! You now own a percentage of the company, and there’s no telling how much it could be worth one day.
A few questions: Do you know your 409A valuation? What’s your strike price? Surely, you know the preferred share price and which type of options you were granted?
No?
It’s complicated stuff, and for most ISO recipients, this may be the first time they start thinking seriously about how federal tax laws impact them personally.
To break things down, Vieje Piauwasdy, Secfi’s director of equity strategy, recently shared a post with Extra Crunch.
“If you’ve ever been confused about your equity, or haven’t thought much about it, you’re not alone.”
Where is suptech heading?
Image Credits: Peter Dazeley (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
First of all, what is suptech?
“The emergence of purpose-built technologies to facilitate regulator oversight has, over the past few years, garnered its own moniker of supervisory technology, or suptech,” Marc Gilman, the general counsel and VP of compliance at Theta Lake, writes in a guest column.
Gilman notes that “nearly every financial services regulator is engaged in some type of suptech activity.”
But as a primer, he focused on three areas: regulatory reporting, machine-readable regulation, and market and conduct oversight.
Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra explains how to optimize your startup’s products for lasting growth
Image Credits: Superhuman
Superhuman co-founder and CEO Rahul Vohra joined us last week at TechCrunch Early Stage to provide an in-depth look at how he and his company worked to optimize and refine their product early to create a version of “growth hacking” that would not only help Superhuman attract users, but serve them best and retain them, too.
Vohra articulated a system that other entrepreneurs should be able to apply to their own businesses, regardless of area or focus.
Dear Sophie: Tell me more about the EB-1A extraordinary ability green card
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
Dear Sophie,
I’m a postdoc engineer who started STEM OPT in June after failing to get selected in the H-1B lottery.
A colleague suggested that I apply for an EB-1A for extraordinary ability green card, but I have not won any major awards, much less a Nobel Prize. Would you tell me more about the EB-1A?
Thanks!
— Bashful in Berkeley
India poised for record VC year as unicorns head for decisive IPOs
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim dialed in on India for today’s Exchange, noting that the country is a good example of the global trend of booming venture capital dollars invested.
“The country’s venture capital haul thus far in 2021 has nearly matched its 2020 total and is on pace for a record year,” they write. “But as the third quarter gets underway, something perhaps even more important is going on: public-market liquidity.”
They looked at recent venture capital results and considered what Zomato’s flotation means for the country’s IPO pipeline. Don’t miss this analysis of an explosive startup market.
How to navigate an acquisition without alienating your current employees
Image Credits: Peter Cade (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Now that COVID-19 vaccines are encouraging the world to reopen, two trends are underway:
In the first half of 2021, mergers and acquisitions increased by more than 150% YOY to $2.4 trillion; in several surveys, an overwhelming majority of workers said they intend to seek employment elsewhere.
If your startup is angling toward an exit, the promise of a big payday may not be enough to retain employees who feel burned out or dissatisfied.
Many founders don’t have prior management experience, and, frankly, the uncertainty associated with an exit makes it a poor time for on-the-job learning. With that in mind, here are several communication strategies that can help you keep your winning team intact.
Emergence Capital’s Doug Landis explains how to identify (and tell) your startup story
Image Credits: TechCrunch/Emergence Capital
How do you go beyond the names and numbers with your startup pitch deck? For Doug Landis, the answer is one simple compound gerund: storytelling. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot of late in Silicon Valley, but it’s one that could legitimately help your startup stand out from the pack amid the pile of pitches.
Landis joined the TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising event to offer a presentation about the value of storytelling for startups, whittling down the standard two-hour conversation to a 30-minute version.
Though he still managed to rewind things pretty far, opening with, “400,000 years ago, men and women used to sit around the fire pit and tell stories about their day, about their hunt, about the one that got away.”
Khosla’s Adina Tecklu breaks down how to nail your pitch
Image Credits: Khosla Ventures
We kicked off our TechCrunch Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising event with a deep dive on all the tips and tricks required to get the most out of pitching and slide decks. On hand was Adina Tecklu, a principal at Khosla Ventures, and who formerly built out Canaan Beta, the consumer seed practice at Canaan Partners.
We talked about the importance of knowing your customer (aka your potential investor), focusing on story, typical slides in a deck, the appendix slides, formatting, and then alternative formats and which to avoid in a pitch deck.
What impact will Apple’s buy now, pay later push have on startups?
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
News that Apple plans to get into the buy now, pay later game had Alex Wilhelm wondering about the impact on startups in the space.
Shares of public competitors Affirm and Afterpay dropped on the news, but it doesn’t mean a death knell for those looking to jump into the BNPL game, Alex notes.
“Provided that Apple’s BNPL solution is rolled out over time to the same markets where Apple Pay is present, the … company could consume market shares — and therefore oxygen — from generalized rival BNPL services,” he writes.
“Those startups building more niche or targeted solutions will likely enjoy some shelter from the competitive storms.”
How to make the math work for today’s sky-high startup valuations
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
So how does the math work out for all these startups with minimal revenue, tons of cash and sky-high valuations?
Alex Wilhelm ran through the numbers, explaining why the current state of the venture capital market makes sense for startups and investors alike.
“Today we can make super-expensive startup math work out, provided that growth rates stay generally strong and public-market multiples stay rich,” he writes in The Exchange. “If the latter dips, the former has to improve, and vice versa.”
Norwest’s Lisa Wu explains how to think like a VC when fundraising
Image Credits: Getty Images / Rawpixel
At the TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising event last week, Norwest Venture Partners‘ Lisa Wu took the stage to discuss how founders can think like venture capitalists in all facets of their business.
The overlapping in job roles is uncanny: The best investors and founders have to find focus through the noise, understand the weight of due diligence and pitch others with conviction.
Wu used anecdotes and exercises — such as the eyebrow test — in the tactical, engaging chat.
Revolut’s 2020 financial performance explains its big new $33B valuation
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Alex Wilhelm weeds through Revolut’s 2020 financial results again to determine if the U.K.-based consumer fintech player’s $33 billion valuation makes sense.
“The picture that emerges is one of a company with a rapidly improving financial image, albeit with some blank spaces regarding recent customer growth,” he writes.
How we got 75% more e-commerce orders in a single A/B test for this major brand
Image Credits: Abdullatif Omar/EyeEm (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Jasper Kuria, the managing partner of The Conversion Wizards, breaks down how the CRO consultancy ran an A/B test to boost the conversion rates of a multibillion-dollar company.
“Radical redesigns that incorporate a large number of variables (instead of single-element tests) are more likely to provide substantial gains,” Kuria writes. “Another advantage to doing this is it requires much less time and traffic for your tests to reach statistical significance.”
Here’s a rundown of all the changes that led to a 75% bump in orders.
Powered by WPeMatico
These Forge cofounders just raised $5 million to work on a new, still-stealth investing startup
Sohail Prasad and Samvit Ramadurgam are cofounders who met during Y Combinator’s 2012 summer batch and went on to cofound Forge, which helps accredited investors and institutions buy and sell private company shares and which most recently raised $150 million in new funding in May.
Forge — originally known as Equidate — has taken off as demand for private company shares has ballooned. The company, launched in 2014, has now raised $250 million altogether, including from, Deutsche Börse, Temasek, Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, and Munich Re. It acquired rival SharesPost last year for $160 million in cash and stock. According to the company, it now has more than $14 billion in assets under custody.
Prasad and Ramadurgam — who helped hire Forge CEO Kelly Rodriques back in 2018 — say they’re excited about that success. They still own a stake in the company; they remain non-voting board members.
But after spending 18 months as co-president of Forge at the outset of Rodrigues’s tenure, they left early last year to begin tinkering on a new idea, one that Prasad says is centered around giving a much wider pool of people access to private company shares. Called D/XYZ (pronounced “Destiny”), the idea is to enable any investor — not just the 1% — to invest in startups whose services they use and love.
Unfortunately, the two aren’t offering much more of a curtain raiser than that right now, though Prasad suggests D/XYZ is neither a new fund nor a crowdfunding vehicle. It’s also not selling any tokens, we gather. Instead, Prasad hints at an entirely new product, saying the company is being cautious in how much it shares publicly because it first wants to “get the go-ahead from regulators, as well as to ensure we have a clear path to market,” he says.
In the meantime, the two have raised $5 million in seed funding from numerous founders who like the idea of making private company shares easier for their parents, friends, customers, partners, and everyone else who likes what they’re building. Among the round’s participants is Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam; Plaid cofounder and CEO Zach Perret; Quora and Expo cofounder Charlie Cheever; Superhuman founder and CEO Rahul Vohra; and serial entrepreneur Siqi Chen, who most recently founded a finance software company called Runway.
As for some of the nascent startup’s most obvious competition, Prasad doesn’t sound concerned. Asked, for example, about Carta, a well-funded company that helps private companies and their employees manage and sell their stock and options and that has long talked about democratizing access to private company shares, Prasad says it remains very much a direct competitor instead to Forge given that both cater first and foremost to companies, not individuals.
And what of SPACs, the special purpose acquisition companies that are moving private companies onto the public market faster, allowing (at least in theory) more people to access high-growth companies at earlier stages? It’s a partial solution, says Prasad. But the way he sees it, “SPACs are more a reflection that people want late-stage access to private tech and their best option right now is giving money to a SPAC manager who will hopefully find a promising company to merge with in two years or less.” He calls them a “layer of abstraction.”
Of course, there’s also the question of whether Forge will be a friend of foe if whatever Prasad and Ramadurgam are building succeeds. Could their tech be sold back to their first company? Could Forge come to see them as a rival to its business?
“What we’re doing now is not competitive,” insists Prasad. “It’s more picking up the mantle where we left off. Forge is focused on trading, custody, company solutions and data. It has built what some call boring plumbing.” Now that the plumbing has been erected, it has “enabled a lot of other interesting things to be built, too.”
So is D/XYZ working with Forge in some capacity? Prasad demurs. “Potentially,” he says.
In other words, stay tuned.
Pictured above, left to right: Sohail Prasad and Samvit Ramadurgam.
Powered by WPeMatico
Todd and Rahul’s Angel Fund closes new $24 million fund
After making investments in 57 startups together, Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra and Eventjoy founder Todd Goldberg are back at it with a new $24 million fund and big ambitions amid a venture capital renaissance with fast-moving deals aplenty.
“Todd and Rahul’s Angel Fund” announced their first $7.3 million fund just weeks before the pandemic hit stateside last year and they were soon left with more access to deals than they had funding to support; they went on to raise $3.5 million in a rolling fund designed around making investments in later-stage deals beyond seed and Series A rounds.
“We closed right before COVID hit and we had one plan, but then everything accelerated,” Goldberg tells TechCrunch. “A lot of our companies started raising additional rounds.”
With their latest raise, Vohra and Goldberg are looking to maintain their wide outlook with a single fund, saying they plan to invest three-quarters of the fund in early-stage deals while saving a quarter of the $24 million for later-stage opportunities. Still, the duo know they likely could’ve chosen to raise more.
“A lot of our peers were scaling up into much larger funds,” Vohra says. “For us, we wanted to stay small and collaborative.”
Some of the firm’s investments from their first fund include NBA Top Shot creator Dapper Labs, open source Firebase alternative Supabase, D2C liquor brand Haus, alternative asset platform Alt, biowearable maker Levels and location analytics startup Placer. Their biggest hit was an early investment in audio chat app Clubhouse before Andreessen Horowitz led its buzzy seed round at a $100 million valuation. Clubhouse most recently raised at $4 billion.
The pair say they’ve learned a ton through the past year of navigating increasingly competitive rounds and that fighting for those deals has helped the duo hone how they market themselves to founders.
“You never want to be a passive check,” Goldberg says. “We do three things: we help companies find product/market fit, we help them super-charge distribution… and we help them find the best investors.”
A big part of the firm’s appeal to founders has been the “operator” status of its founders. Goldberg’s startup Eventjoy was acquired by Ticketmaster and Vohra’s Rapportive was bought by LinkedIn while his current startup Superhuman has maintained buzz for its premium email service and has raised $33 million from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital.
Their new fund has an unusual LP base that’s made up of more than 110 entrepreneurs and investors, including 40 founders that Vohra and Goldberg have previously backed themselves. Backers of their second fund include Plaid’s William Hockey, Behance’s Scott Belsky, Haus’s Helena Price Hambrecht, Lattice’s Jack Altman and Loom’s Shahed Khan.
Powered by WPeMatico
Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra is coming to TechCrunch Early Stage in July
The frequent difficulty of founders finding product-market fit has been a topic of constant (and ever-evolving) discussion at TechCrunch conferences over the years.
Superhuman founder and CEO Rahul Vohra will be joining us at TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing & Fundraising in July to dive into the much-obsessed topic of product-market fit. We’re looking to dig into what exactly finding product-market fits means to the startup ecosystem of 2021.
The repeat founder’s email service platform has raised more than $33 million in funding from firms like Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital, providing users with an algorithmically-sorted email app that has set a lot of trends in emerging enterprise software on both the design and go-to-market strategy front.
The startup is oft-referenced as a prime example of the “consumerization” of enterprise software trend which has seen more and more workplace SaaS apps level-up their focus on user-centric design. We’ll ask him how he feels about the fact that “Superhuman for X” has grown to be a fairly common formula for workplace elevator pitches.
We’ll also talk with him about how he found an audience for a $30 per month subscription app and how the company has scaled its product to meet their customers’ other needs. In addition to the hat he wears as the founder of Superhuman, we’ll ask him about how he views the challenge from the other side of the table as a prolific angel investor. The fund that he manages with Eventjoy founder Todd Goldberg announced a $7 million fund last year and the duo has backed several startups, including Clubhouse, Mercury and Coda.
We think it’s going to be a conversation you can’t miss and it’s just one part of a two-day event exploring the many aspects of early-stage startups this July. And if you move fast, you can check out Rahul’s session in July as well as all of the great content happening at TC Early Stage: Operations & Fundraising in April with a dual event ticket — check out the entire April event agenda lineup here.
Our first TC Early Stage event is coming up fast, so be sure to grab your dual event ticket to TC Early Stage on April 1-2 and July 8-9 to save $100 or more before prices increase this Friday.
Powered by WPeMatico
Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra asks 6 VCs how to raise funding when the sky is falling
Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of email app Superhuman.
When I wrote about how to run your startup in a downturn, the world was on the brink of recession. The economy contracted sharply — and the effects of the 2020 recession will persist.
If you are a founder, you can help. You can build companies that connect people, create employment and spark lasting change.
“Building is how we reboot the American dream,” declared Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz. In his rallying cry “It’s Time to Build” he writes: “We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education and healthcare, to make sure that every American can realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.”
Yet building requires capital. How do you raise funding when the economy is on its knees? I spoke with six top venture capitalists to find out:
- Bill Trenchard, general partner, First Round Capital
- Dan Rose, chairman, Coatue Ventures
- Brianne Kimmel, founder, Work Life
- Sarah Guo, general partner, Greylock
- Merci Grace, partner, Lightspeed
- Charles Hudson, managing partner, Precursor Ventures
How has investment behavior changed during the pandemic?
- Deal velocity has gone up.
- The bar for investments is rising.
- VCs are nurturing existing investments and “proto-founders.”
The recession did not cause activity to stall. In fact, deal velocity has gone up.
“It’s almost like a superheated environment right now,” says Bill Trenchard, general partner at First Round. “The speed with which partnerships can quickly meet with a company that’s of interest is so much higher in the Zoom world. It’s changing our thinking around velocity in the market, which was already very high.”
“We’ve been as active as we were before,” agrees Dan Rose, chairman at Coatue Ventures. “Maybe even slightly more active because I think more good companies are raising as kind of an insurance policy. When it became clear that we weren’t going to be able to meet with founders in person anymore, we snapped to Zoom.”
Velocity may be rising, but investors now require more data to reach conviction.
“The pricing is still the same but we see risk going up,” says Bill Trenchard. “You need to be very rigorous on your investment theses and how you’re looking at companies. We’ve been looking for more grapple hooks and more data for things that we do invest in, so that we have more conviction when we do.”
“There’s been almost an immediate shift in terms of expectations from VCs,” says Brianne Kimmel, founder of early stage venture firm Work Life. “Companies have been forced to come in with more richness and customer development, a clear path to revenue, a lot more of a strategic approach around the core mechanics of the business and more specifically the business model.”
Sarah Guo, general partner at Greylock, also has high expectations for founders.
Powered by WPeMatico
Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra says recession is the ‘perfect time’ to be aggressive for well-capitalized startups
Email is one of those things that no one likes but that we’re all forced to use. Superhuman, founded by Rahul Vohra, aims to help everyone get to inbox zero.
Launched in 2017, Superhuman charges $30 per month and is still in invite-only mode with more than 275,000 people on the waitlist. That’s by design, Vohra told us earlier this week on Extra Crunch Live.
“I think a lot of folks misunderstand the nature of our waitlist,” he said. “They assume it’s some kind of FOMO-generating technique or some kind of false scarcity. Nothing could be further from the truth. The real reason we have the waitlist is that I want everyone who uses Superhuman to be deliriously happy with their experience.”
Today, the app is only available for desktop and iOS. Superhuman started with iOS because most premium users have iPhones, Vohra said. Still, many users have Android, so Superhuman’s waitlist consists mostly of Android users.
“We don’t think that if we onboard them they’d have the best experience with Superhuman because email really is an ecosystem product,” he said. “You do it just as much on the go as you do from your laptop. There’s a lot of reasons like that. So if you’re a person who identifies that as a must-have, well, we’ll take in the survey, we’ll learn about you so we know when to reach out to you. Then when we have those things built or integrated, we’ll reach out.”
We also chatted about his obsession with email, determining pricing for a premium product, the impact of COVID-19, diversity in tech in light of the police killing of George Floyd and so much more.
Throughout the conversation, Vohra also offered up some good practical advice for founders. Here are some highlights from the conversation.
On competition from Hey, the latest buzzy email app
Yeah, I’m not at all worried. I used to get worried about this. You know, 10 years ago, even as recently as five years ago, I would get worried about competitors. But I think Paul Graham has really, really great advice on this. I think he says pretty much verbatim: Startups don’t kill other startups. Competition generally doesn’t kill the startup. Other things do, like running out of money being the biggest one, or lack of momentum or lack of motivation or co-founder feuds; these are all really dangerous things.
Competition from other startups generally isn’t the thing that gets you and you know, props to the Basecamp team and everything they’ve done with Hey. It’s really impressive. I think it’s for an entirely different demographic than Superhuman is for.
Superhuman is for the person for whom essentially email is work and work is email. Our users kind of almost personally identify with their email inbox, and they’re coming from Gmail or G Suite. Typically it’s overflowing so they often receive hundreds if not thousands of emails a day, and they send off 100 emails a day. Superhuman is for high-volume email for whom email really matters. Power users, essentially, though power users isn’t quite the right articulation. What I actually say is prosumers because there’s a lot of people who come to us at Superhuman and they’re not yet power users of email, but they know they need to be.
That’s what I would call a prosumer — someone who really wants to be brilliant at doing email. Now Hey doesn’t seem to be designed for that target market. It doesn’t seem to be designed for high-volume emailers or prosumers or power users.
Powered by WPeMatico
Extra Crunch Live: Join Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra for a live discussion of email, SaaS and buzzy businesses
An email app with a waitlist? No, this isn’t 2004 and I’m not talking about Gmail. Superhuman has managed to attract and maintain constant interest for its subscription email product, with a wait list at over 275,000 people long at last count – all while asking users to pay $30 per month to gain access to the service. Founder and CEO Rahul Vohra will join us on Tuesday, June 26 at 2pm ET/11am PT for an Extra Crunch Live Q&A.
We have plenty of questions of our own, but we bet you do, too! Extra Crunch members can ask their own questions directly to Vohra during the chat.
We’re thrilled to be able to sit down with Vohra for a discussion about email, why it was in need of change, and what’s bringing so much attention and interest to Superhuman on a sustained basis. We’ll talk about the current prevailing market climate and what that’s meant for the business, as well as how you manage to create not one, but two companies (Vohra previously founded and sold Rapportive) that have adapted email to more modern needs – and struck a chord with users as a result.
Meanwhile, SaaS seems to be one of the bright spots in an otherwise fairly gloomy global economic situation, and Superhuman’s $30 per month subscription model definitely qualifies. We’ll ask Vohra what it means to build a successful SaaS startup in 2020, and how there might be plenty of opportunity even in so-called ‘solved’ problems like email and other aspects of our digital lives that have become virtually invisible thanks to habit.
Audience members can also ask their own questions, so come prepared with yours if you’re already an Extra Crunch member. And if you aren’t yet – now’s a great time to sign up.
We hope to see you there!
Powered by WPeMatico
Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra on waitlists, freemium pricing and future products
The “Sent via Superhuman iOS” email signature has become one of the strangest flexes in the tech industry, but its influence is enduring, as the $30 per month invite-only email app continues to shape how a wave of personal productivity startups are building their business and product strategies.
I had a chance to chat with Superhuman CEO and founder Rahul Vohra earlier this month during an oddly busy time for him. He had just announced a dedicated $7 million angel fund with his friend Todd Goldberg (which I wrote up here) and we also noted that LinkedIn is killing off Sales Navigator, a feature driven by Rapportive, which Vohra founded and later sold in 2012. All the while, his buzzy email company is plugging along, amassing more interested users. Vohra tells me there are now more than 275,000 people on the waitlist for Superhuman.
Below is a chunk of my conversation with Vohra, which has been edited for length and clarity.
TechCrunch: When you go out to raise funding and a chunk of your theoretical user base is sitting on a waitlist, is it a little tougher to determine the total market for your product?
Rahul Vohra: That’s a good question. When we were doing our Series B, it was very easily answered because we’re one of a cohort of companies, that includes Notion and Airtable and Figma, where the addressable market — assuming you can build a product that’s good enough — is utterly enormous.
With my last company, Rapportive, there was a lot of conversation around, “oh, what’s the business model? What’s the market? How many people need this?” This almost never came up in any fundraising conversation. People were more like, “well, if this thing works, obviously the market is basically all of prosumer productivity and that is, no matter how you define it, absolutely huge.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Superhuman founder seeks to raise debut venture fund
The founder of one of 2019’s most buzzworthy startups is putting on his VC hat.
Rahul Vohra, the creator of the $30/month subscription emailing service Superhuman, and Todd Goldberg, the founder of the marketing business Mailjoy, are circulating a pitch deck to potential limited partners, with plans to raise a $4 million debut angel fund, TechCrunch has learned.
Goldberg declined to comment. Vohra did not respond to a request for comment.
San Francisco-based Superhuman has raised millions in venture capital funding, attracting a $260 million valuation with a $33 million investment led by the respected firm Andreessen Horowitz earlier this year. Quickly, Superhuman developed a loyal fan base and inspired a new wave of startups building for the “prosumer.”
“Superhuman has become an aspirational brand and product that many SaaS companies want to emulate,” Vohra and Goldberg write in the deck, obtained by TechCrunch. “Founders of these companies seek out Rahul as an investor. This helps us get into the hottest rounds — even the closed ones.”
Vohra and Goldberg have been seeding startups for the past four years, according to the deck. Both men have completed the Y Combinator startup accelerator and funded other graduates of the program, including Tandem, which emerged from YC this summer with funding from a16z, Vohra and several others. One or both of the pair have also invested in Command E, a tool that enables instant cloud search; Mercury, a bank tailored to the needs of startups; and Sandbox VR, which is developing premium virtual reality experiences in retail locations.
Many of Vohra and Goldberg’s existing investments, such as Sandbox VR, Tandem and Mercury, are also a16z portfolio companies, as is Superhuman. We’re guessing Vohra has served as a sort of scout for the firm, bringing in attractive deals for a16z to lead, with room for him to nab a friendly allocation.
Vohra and Goldberg are hoping to collect capital from LPs to scale their investment activity. According to the deck, they will make 25 to 35 deals with check sizes ranging between $50,000 to $150,000. The fund will invest in the “prosumerization” of the enterprise, business infrastructure, health, fitness & wellness, “devsumer” & low-code/no-code, audio-first products, creator tools and “enterprization” of consumers.
Indeed, the deck is packed with buzzwords. The “prosumerization” of the enterprise is tech-speak for work products with nicer interfaces and more premium features. A “devsumer” tool is one that enables consumers to complete developer tasks on their own, i.e. without coding — devsumer products on the market include Airtable, Notion and Retool. Finally, the “enterprization” of consumers simply means the rise of business tools built for consumers first.
Vohra and Goldberg cite their experience as operators as one of their “unfair advantages,” along with their ability to secure large allocations (a decent piece of the pie) in startups, their YC network, relationships with other angels & funds and their ability to get pro rata access in later rounds.
Founders often search for established operators to join their cap tables for exactly these reasons. Someone like Vohra can help startups foster relationships with big-name venture capital backers and make critical introductions to their own rapidly growing pool of customers.
The rise of micro-funds led by networked entrepreneurs, including Niv Dror’s Shrug Capital or Brianne Kimmel’s new outfit, Work Life Ventures, for example, could pose a threat to existing institutional seed investors, who may not be as well-versed in specific sectors or able to offer as much time to potential founders. On the other hand, many micro-funds co-invest with or are backed by VCs, which means returns from the fund end up in the same pockets, in essence.
Deploying capital from a fund, however, is time consuming. How Vohra can balance building a Series B startup and investing in upwards of 35 businesses remains to be seen.
Though Superhuman was founded in 2014 — Vohra incorporated the business immediately after the LinkedIn acquisition of his previous startup, Rapportive — the company is essentially still in closed beta (those looking for access must be approved for the service in iOS’s TestFlight, where constant beta updates are delivered). Today, it’s popular in the Bay Area tech scene where the tagline “sent via Superhuman” has become a status symbol of sorts. But many are uncertain non-techies will be willing to shell out $30 per month for a luxury email tool.
With that said, Superhuman has a wait list of 180,000 people, according to The New York Times, which spoke to Vohra in June. With a large and growing valuation, an email tool with rave reviews and a set of loyal followers, Vohra will likely have no trouble navigating his way into Silicon Valley’s hottest deals.
Powered by WPeMatico