tidemark

Collective Live is coming back to San Francisco October 21-22! We started this event to bring together leaders of emerging vSaaS companies for a day of in-person discussion and learning with legendary operators, without the pressure of other investors in the room. That's what makes this day different. Last year, over 200 vSaaS CEOs from four continents spent a day working through the strategic questions that define this market: how AI reshapes control points, when to go multi-product, how PE consolidation changes your competitive landscape. The room represented $4B+ in combined ARR across 17+ industries, and the conversations are still shaping how operators run their companies months later. Year 3. Same mission. Capacity is limited, so sign up now to be the first to get notified when registration opens this Spring! If you're a Vertical SaaS CEO or founder, we hope to see you in October: ordnl.link/N17fl14

@goclio Thank you to Ronnie and everyone who joined this morning!

Third, how AI adoption is really playing out. Founders are seeing workflow-specific RFPs instead of broad AI mandates, heavy onboarding and professional services requirements, and a lot of organizational confusion: FOMO, privilege concerns, evolving AI policies. The roles of IT, legal ops, and even law firms themselves are shifting as AI reshapes who advises on what.

Every time we get founders from the same vertical together, the knowledge sharing is on another level. This morning in New York, we brought legal tech founders together with Ronnie Gurion, COO at @GoClio, over breakfast. Three threads kept coming back:

How do you change a fragmented industry like construction? At Collective Live, @ChaseGilbert , CEO of @builttechnology, shared what it really takes: start with the flow of money and build outward from the true leverage point. Built began with lenders, not contractors or owners, and spent years building a system that became the industry’s shared ledger. Today, the platform connects over 300 financial institutions and more than $300B in active real estate. Every new stakeholder was added only after the foundation was proven. Chase’s message for founders is clear. Workflows create value, but coordination is the moat. When you become the shared truth in a spreadsheet-ridden, multi-party value chain, you change how an industry moves and resolve the pain and waste that hold it back. Get the full recap from Chase Gilbert's #CollectiveLive2025 session here: tidemarkcap.com/post/building-…

Dave Yuan the case at Collective Live that private equity isn't a background influence in Vertical SaaS anymore. It's a customer segment with its own buying behaviors, incentives, and internal politics. Once PE starts consolidating a vertical, the buyer landscape shifts. Companies that treat PE as a real segment outperform those that treat it as happenstance. Dave broke down how to actually sell into PE firms, including the three personas you need to understand and the product opportunities most founders miss. He also walked through how companies like SiteMinder and Carbon turned their data into deal-sourcing intelligence that PE firms now depend on. If PE is consolidating your vertical, this playbook is worth your time. Dive into the #CollectiveLive2025 recap here: ordnl.link/0gegy7R

Only 41% of Vertical SaaS companies in our 2025 Benchmark Report are still single-product. Nearly 60% have already made the leap to multi-product. If you’ve expanded, what was the tipping point for your team? If you’re still single-product, what signals are you watching before making the move?

The Platform Journey continues! 🚀 This week, host Avanish Sahai sits down with Drew Sechrist , CEO of Connect The Dots (CTD). An early Salesforce veteran who joined when the company had zero paying customers and helped scale it to over $1 billion in ARR.  Catch the full conversation here: theplatformjourney.tidemarkcap.com/episodes/drew-…

If you're a founder or operator request access here 👉 tidemarkcap.com/vskp-chapter/w…

The next great Vertical SaaS markets aren’t hiding. They’re in the Census data. In his latest post for Tidemark, Bob Solomon analyzes all 820 six-digit NAICS industries across the 2017 → 2022 Economic Censuses to answer a simple question: 𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘺 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘦𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘵𝘰 𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘸 𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺?

4. Build for the portfolio, not just the company. PE firms want cross-portfolio visibility and standardization. If you can deliver that, you become indispensable to their value creation plan. The companies executing on this playbook are turning PE consolidation into a growth channel. Is PE consolidation happening in your vertical? How are you responding?

3. Carve out expansion. Give pricing concessions on product A, but lock in expansion rights for products B, C, and D. Protect your margin through cross-sell.

In some industries, PE-backed rollups already control up to 80% of the addressable market. The founders who've figured this out are treating PE as a full customer segment—and generating up to 30% of their new bookings from PE relationships. Here's the playbook they're using. ⬇️

Most AI strategies fail at the infrastructure layer. You've got the model. You've got the use case. But your data's a mess, your stack wasn't built for agents, and you're one bad hallucination away from a customer trust crisis. The AI Playbook we published this year is about HOW to build the foundation so AI features don't break your business. Read it in full here: ordnl.link/niAWBxz

Data gravity is eroding. Workflow gravity is shifting. Interface stickiness doesn't matter like it used to. ⬇️ So what's your moat in 2026? Our Systems of Action series answers that question across three parts. If you're planning your 2026 strategy, start here: ordnl.link/MRlQodm

Your partner ecosystem touches every part of your business. Your systems probably don't. We're looking back on Stephen Hurrell's episode of The Platform Journey, where he unpacked the infrastructure challenge most platform companies don't see coming: when you build a partner motion, your revenue operations stack has to evolve with it. Listen to the full episode here: ordnl.link/Sc0KTXf