John Gannon

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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One of my proudest moments as an investor occurred today as Alaffia Health announced its series A because it shows how the Aperture® Venture Capital vision of multi-level, multi-generational #impactinvesting is succeeding in the marketplace. Here’s the model in its most basic form : ✅As diverse fund managers with meaningful capital to allocate, we are changing the VC landscape every day just by doing our day jobs. ✅As Black/Brown investors with ~40 years experience collectively, Aperture GPs have access to talent /excellence that others do not, so our portfolio *organically* is more inclusive by race, gender and geography even while optimizing for financial outcomes (all about the alpha). ✅Our most successful portco’s are using financial #innovation to solve market problems that impact underrepresented demographics and underserved communities. Alaffia Health is a shining example of the impact portion of our overall fund thesis, and we couldn’t be prouder of TJ Ademiluyi and Adun Akanni, MPH, PMP - the dynamic brother-sister founder duo whose vision we have steadfastly supported on their journey. Congratulations to TJ and Adun from William Crowder and myself, as well as the whole Aperture team- Marjorie King Philip McKenzie Yves Louis-Jacques Tanvi Lal Michelle Dhansinghani Lisha Bell Katie Kelly Amy Chung Cindy Chong, CFA Brian Fernandes-Halloran Monroe France Jayden Pantel Darren Herman Evan Wladis Neal Triplett Thomas Scriven Peter Ammon Irina Bit-Babik Tim Milanich Rob Rahbari

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Of note: Your health records are coming to new apps This in an interesting change, and a somewhat Epic change. All puns intended. If you don’t know, the leading medical record storage solution in the US is operated by Epic. A rather critical problem is that if you walk (well drive) between two hospital in the US, the medical records tend not to follow you, unless you carry a large Manila envelope. Having Epic (and others) via TEFCA allow export of records arguably allows you to only carry your phone, which is a very siginificant change. This also (arguably) opens up a huge new innovation sector. Epic is one of the organizations that has been helping the US federal government establish the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, or TEFCA. The goal being to iron out both the legal and technical requirements for sharing patients' data at scale. Health-care data in the U.S. has historically been siloed and difficult to move around. Clinics, hospitals and health systems can store their information in a variety of formats across dozens of different vendors, and there hasn't been a trusted nationwide mechanism in place for transporting it securely. This means if a patient moves to a different state or visits a new hospital, their medical records tend not follow. PS. If you want appreciate how profitable the US medical sector is, Epic HQ has a restantant designed to look like Kings Cross from the Harry Potter movies. https://lnkd.in/g8NaWza8

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As we explore a seed round of VC funding for Avnir, a mentor has driven into me to "interview them as much as they'll do their due diligence on you!" When I consider professional etiquette important to me (and probably every serious founder), I am reminded of what I've coached hundreds of executives on over the past two decades: "Your culture is a culmination of behaviors you're willing to tolerate!" So, here is a Top 10 List of Professional Etiquette crucial to long-term strategic relationships between VCs and founders: 1️⃣ Respect for Time—Punctuality, Efficient Communication, and Timely Feedforward are demonstrated and genuinely felt. We would both rather me invest time in building the business. 2️⃣ Transparency—Clear Expectations, Honest Feedforward, and Disclosures on conflicts of interest or resource limitations save everyone unnecessarily wasted cycles! 3️⃣ Professionalism—Politeness, Confidentiality, and Objective Evaluation allow courteous interactions, respect for proprietary information, and avoiding bias in evaluating the founder's meritocracy. 4️⃣ Empathy—Understanding the Journey and Constructive Dialogue acknowledge the uphill battle founders face while avoiding unnecessary criticism and providing supportive guidance, demonstrating a genuine interest in their vision. 5️⃣ Integrity—Fair Terms, Follow Through, and Avoiding Overpromising honor commitments during discussions, and create realistic expectations from the relationship. 6️⃣ Co-Creation—Value-adding Mindset and Team Player Attitude accelerate the founder's ability to gain traction and position the VC relationship as transformational vs. simply transactional. 7️⃣ Humility—Avoiding Arrogance, Condescension, and Open-Mindedness acknowledges that both parties have unique expertise to add and enhance the receptivity to unconventional ideas, approaches, and perspectives. 8️⃣ Listening Louder—Present, Engaged, and Clarity of Intent eliminates distractions, brings out what's not being said, and jointly crafts better questions to help uncover the unknown and the undiscovered. 9️⃣ Encouraging—Supportive Communication, Positive Reinforcement, and Inspiration help celebrate small wins and key milestone achievements. It's ideal to light a fire within the relationship rather than under anyone, which seldom lasts! 🔟 Playing the Long Game—Relationship Nurturing and Post-Investment Care establishes the runway for a lasting partnership rather than simply pitching a deck and closing a deal. After the investment decision, sustaining the relationship will determine the partnership's long-term perspective. Jason M. Lemkin, Peter Bell, Cassie Young, and Ed Sim - you exemplify world-class in the relationships you build with your founders. Did I miss anything? #VCFounderRelationship #AlignedExpectations #RelationshipsMatterMoreThanEver

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Open-source models can be a strong lever for increasing gross margins at AI companies, especially those that have hefty cost structures (e.g., enterprise sales orgs that require significant customer success or implementation resources, as well forward-deployed AI services models common in healthcare and life sciences). One of many reasons to maintain a modular and flexible stack with minimal dependencies when building an AI company. More on the importance of flexibility in the AI stack: https://lnkd.in/eA2XATRk h/t Delip Rao #ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #healthcare

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At #OffsetSymposium2024, and couldn’t agree more with Corey Jaskolski that wide-spread #cloud adoption across #DOD allows startups to scale more broadly, lowers their costs, allows them to move faster, and ultimately delivers more, saving the limited taxpayer dollars we have for #nationaldefense.

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If you are working with Docker... I highly recommend looking at the Slim toolkit. https://lnkd.in/gX_Gb9Kf Why? Slim allows developers to inspect, optimize, and debug their containers using its xray, lint, build, debug, run, images, merge, registry, vulnerability (and other) commands. It simplifies and improves your developer experience building, customizing and using containers. It makes your containers better, smaller and more secure while providing advanced visibility and improved usability working with the original and minified containers. Don't change anything in your container image; minify it by up to 30x to make it secure, too! Optimizing images isn't the only thing it can do, though. It can also help you understand and author better container images. Keep doing what you are doing. No need to change anything. Use the base image you want. Use the package manager you want. Don't worry about hand-optimizing your Dockerfile. You shouldn't have to throw away your tools and your workflow to have small container images. Node.js application images: from ubuntu:14.04 - 432MB => 14MB (minified by 30.85X) from debian:jessie - 406MB => 25.1MB (minified by 16.21X) from node:alpine - 66.7MB => 34.7MB (minified by 1.92X) from node:distroless - 72.7MB => 39.7MB (minified by 1.83X) Go application images: from golang:latest - 700MB => 1.56MB (minified by 448.76X) from ubuntu:14.04 - 531MB => 1.87MB (minified by 284.10X) from golang:alpine - 258MB => 1.56MB (minified by 165.61X) from centos:7 - 615MB => 1.87MB (minified by 329.14X) Rust application images: from rust:1.31 - 2GB => 14MB (minified by 147.16X) Java application images: from ubuntu:14.04 - 743.6 MB => 100.3 MB

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Elevate your networking game with our #SiliconValley VC contact list. Access 200+ #VC firms and 1800+ professionals, along with 1500 emails to help you make valuable connections. Learn more: https://payhip.com/b/eUIyc #venturecapital #startups #funding #startupfunding #startupinvestors #privateequity #founders #entrepreneurs

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Next one up, Flagler Health! In an attempt to demystify some of the non-obvious elements we found when we first met the founders of our fastest growing portfolio companies at 186 Ventures, here is the third edition of the "idiosyncratic phenomenon". This highlight will be on Albert Katz, Leon Anijar, and Will Hu and their journey building Flagler Health to bring unprecedented AI enabled patient care to the world of musculoskeletal (MsK) providers. As the healthcare industry shifts to a value based care paradigm, there will be increased pressure on the entire industry to ensure patient outcomes improve, all the while helping providers generate more revenue / become more cost efficient. Since we co-led their March, 2024 seed round with Streamlined, the company has rolled out some of their newest remote therapeutic and chronic condition management features to many patients and providers alike, experiencing high revenue growth in such a short period of time. The company continues to face unmet customer demand as it continues to scale its expansion into 2025. https://lnkd.in/exesTcmC

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The (Healthcare) Ground Beneath Our Feet… This year it is likely that over $10 billion will be invested in the digital health sector – a robust amount, no doubt, but inconsequential when compared to the amount of capital tied up in healthcare real estate assets, which is estimated to be $1.2 trillion by Jones Lang Lasalle. Of that amount, approximately $790 billion is in the hospital sector while the remaining $490 billion is in medical office assets. It is estimated that there are 48.6k facilities with 3.4 billion square feet of healthcare real estate, 42% of which are owned by REITs and another 33% held by other private investment vehicles. Much of the digital health investment is meant to make the physical healthcare infrastructure more productive: greater operating efficiencies, greater patient throughput, more relevant personalized care models with better outcomes. As the healthcare system is being pushed to be more distributed to lower cost sites of care, accelerated now by the rapid proliferation of automation and AI capabilities, the potential impact on healthcare infrastructure assets will be profound. Thoughts on what that might look like... https://lnkd.in/eTfAdUbS #digitalhealth Flare Capital Partners

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The Forbes 2024 Cloud 100 List is live ☁ Congrats to all the honorees – the world's top 100 private cloud companies –including the 3 healthcare and life sciences companies featured this year: • Benchling - biotech R&D platform • Komodo Health - healthcare data analytics • Abridge - AI for clinical documentation For more on how AI is colliding with cloud computing, check out Bessemer Venture Partners's 2024 Cloud 100 report. Personally I'm focused on advancements in multi-modal AI, as applied to biomedical applications (Trend 3!): https://lnkd.in/euzurvQV

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DeepCast shipped a number of really cool new features recently in advance of a broad outreach push to podcast listeners. One new feature is our new Daily DeepDigest tool that sends you a concise daily email including any new episodes from the trailing 24 hours from any podcasts you Subscribe to (on DeepCast). Think daily podcast cliff notes or podcast news ticker tape, with a hint of Morning Brew various brews or PitchBook News—it's increasing information throughput when you're pressed for time. And this feature is rapidly evolving to distill other key extractions from shows you're already interested in, but also exposing you to other shows you might be unfamiliar with that also have nuggets to share—and thus increasing your aperture yet still conscious of your time. Want to go deeper on any given episode? Click the episode detail and you're off to an episode on DeepCast, where you can subsequently read a longer form distillation of that episode or go straight to the source and listen to the episode. (And podcaster friends, these pages are definitely increasing indexing and thus Google entry points to your shows!) I'm loving this feature as a user, personally. Can't wait to see what others think! #BuildingInPublic #Podcasts #AllTheWorldsInformation #HowYouWantIt

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PE - How to Use AI to Unlock Growth in Portfolio Companies All PE firms and portfolio companies should be thinking about unlocking GTM and growth via AI (i.e. not merely ChatGPT or other LLMs but actually implementing apps that are "AI Agents"). 1. What are "AI Agents"? - AI agents are autonomous systems powered by ML and natural language processing, designed to perform tasks with minimal human intervention - They can interpret data, determine the workflow & direction (i.e. make decisions), and execute actions across various functions, continuously improving through self-learning 2. Examples of using AI Agents in PE portfolio companies: - For Sales: AI agents handle lead qualification, respond to inquiries, book meetings, and provide personalized product recommendations, ensuring no opportunities are missed - For Marketing: Generate campaign briefs, segment audiences, create tailored content, and analyze performance to optimize outreach efforts - For Customer Success & Support: Provide 24/7 support, resolve customer issues autonomously, escalate complex cases to human agents with full context, and ensure consistent, brand-aligned responses 3. How PE portfolio companies benefit: - Efficiency: Automate repetitive tasks, enabling teams to focus on high-value activities - Scalability: Handle growing customer volumes without increasing headcount - Personalization: Deliver tailored experiences using real-time data insights - $ Cost Savings: Reduce operational costs by streamlining workflows 4. Business Impact for PE Portfolio Companies: - Accelerate GTM Execution: Faster lead conversion, better customer retention, and enhanced marketing ROI - Improve Metrics: Boost Customer NPS, CSAT, and efficiency - Enable Growth: Scale operations seamlessly while improving team productivity. 5. How PE Firms Must Think About Adoption - Define clear portfolio objectives to use AI agents (not just LLMs) - Ensure integration with existing CRM and data systems - Prioritize high-quality data and ongoing performance monitoring - Use AI agents to complement existing GTM teams, focusing them on automation ------------------ #pe #privateequity #investing #ai

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Hot take on a lot of early-stage digital health companies out there: You're not a tech company. Most tech-enabled care companies I've seen over the past two years are only tech-enabled in the sense that they use telehealth as their delivery mechanism for care. There are exceptions to this, of course - companies who build computer vision and applied AI tools to better the doctor-patient experience, companies who build tooling around risk scoring and stratification to enable more personalized medicine, companies who build truly novel intakes to better route patients to the appropriate care, etc. These companies have real technology chops and, if they sell it right to the market, can get credit for this from investors. But if you're truly a telehealth provider, you need to realize now that the goal post has shifted dramatically from 2021 and you're going to be valued at maturity at something like 3x EBITDA. That's profit. Not revenue. Throw a revenue multiple out the window. That's not the world we live in if you're a virtual doctor's office. Think of how that impacts venture math. If you're raising a seed round at $15M post-money (or $12M pre-money), it means you'll have to generate something like $150-200M in annual EBITDA to be a fund returner for your seed investors. Maybe even more with dilution, since telehealth businesses are not traditionally capital efficient and will likely need to raise material additional capital to reach that scale. You need to be ridiculously profitable (probably on $800M-$1B in annual revenue since you're likely going to be a 40% gross margin business). Here's the good news: you can set yourself up well (and probably be a contrarian founder relative to your peers), by talking about EBITDA growth and how you can grow into a fund-returning outcome based on realistic mature market comps. This will stand out for the investors you're pitching, even at the early stage. This is how you can beat the malaise of the tech-enabled care market. Focus on the right metrics and the right type of growth. You don't have to have all the answers (no founder does), but you need to make sure the ship is headed in the right direction. A focus on profitability for "tech-enabled care" (*ahem* telehealth) businesses is a good first step.

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I had an absolute blast with Michel Gagnon and the Stun and Awe crew - THANKS again for having me... Sneak peek of the substance below: > Micro SaaS companies can be just as safe and stable as larger businesses, offering lower valuations and less competition from institutional players. > Founder-product fit is crucial, as founders solving their own problems often create useful products with great retention. > Founder burnout can be a buying signal, indicating a solid business with a founder ready to move on. > The first 90 days post-acquisition should focus on visibility, documentation, transition, and validating diligence assumptions before pursuing growth. > Building transparently and maintaining open communication with users post-acquisition helps preserve the human element and avoid the pitfall of going silent. > Simplicity equals mastery - if it takes a complex explanation to justify an acquisition, you probably don't fully understand the business. > Establishing reasonable incremental growth goals based on baseline performance (systems over goals) is more effective than setting arbitrary targets. > Fostering a culture of care and respect enables honest feedback and allows teams to move faster through a shared commitment to truth-seeking.

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Some additional charts on the aggregate hyperscaler data from Q1. The charts below show 1) The aggregate net new ARR added on q quarterly basis. Q1 is always a seasonal low 2) The YoY growth in net new ARR in Q1. Q1 '23 was the "bottom" with AWS actually adding negative net new ARR (ie they shrunk), so the YoY comp is the "easiest" for the aggregate bucket.

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Founderville believes one of the most significant opportunities is emerging in legacy system applications. We look for manual tasks to leverage AI for efficient automation. Rather than chasing massive TAM, which will be addressed by larger VCs, we focus on smaller market domains that won't be chased as hard. Think of "boring" processes that require human intervention or manualized tasks. Those are opportunities. Keep your eyes open if you have deep domain expertise in a non-automated and fragmented industry. #entrepreneurs #venturecapital #startups #saas

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Thank you Daniel Tet, MBA for contributing your expertise! 👉 If you consider AWS Activate for your startup, you should read this first: https://lnkd.in/eabKN-VR #AWS #AWSActivate #startupgrowth #scaling #fintechstartup #cloudprovider #startupincentives

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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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