Max Altschuler

Big day! Super excited to announce GTMfund Fund II, a $54m fund continuing our focus on the very best early-stage B2B SaaS founders. Fund II is our first institutional fund and was oversubscribed from a target of $50m to $54m. We did this during one of the toughest fundraising environments - while many emerging funds are shutting down or raising a fraction of what they set out to raise. A testament to our team, our LPs, and the success of our current portfolio. Since the beginning, our thesis has been simple: for the best founders in the world, capital is a commodity. They get to choose who is on their cap table and what partners they work with. Our singular focus at GTMfund is delivering a value proposition that gives us access to the top .1% of deals. As software becomes easier to build, faster, and with fewer resources, go-to-market remains one of the last few moats. The founders want our help. The other VCs in the deal want us there to help. Everyone wins. And when we invest, we're able to leverage the robust Infrastructure we've built around our active network of GTM leaders to fully support our portfolio companies. This raise marks a pivotal moment for our firm. We're just getting started. It all starts with our incredible team - Scott Barker, Paul Irving, Sophie Buonassisi, Vaibhavi Nesarikar (and a new addition to be announced next week.) A huge thank you to the founders we’re privileged to work with every day. A huge thank you to our Limited Partners who have placed their trust in us and are a massive part of the journey. None of this is possible without your support! Sharing today's TechCrunch coverage of GTMfund’s Fund II announcement and story in the comments below. techcrunch.com/2025/02/04/how…

Episode 6 of the @GTMnow_ VC Series is live! I sat down with @bqueener (Partner at @bonfire_vc) who joined Salesforce early, a co-founder of SmartRecruiters, and is one of the sharpest seed-stage investors I know, to talk about what three decades of building and investing taught him about what actually wins in a world where anyone can build anything. Before the conversation with Brett, @PaulGTM and I also talk through what we're seeing across founders, funds, and go-to-market teams right now. A few takeaways that are particularly worth sitting with: 1. The GTM playbook most of us learned is already gone. The entire motion from SDR to CSM was designed around one problem: the product didn't do the job, so humans had to explain it. When the product actually does the job, that whole layer of explanation collapses. You're showing product earlier, deploying before you close, and tracking outcomes from day one. The people who built careers on translating software into value have to find a new edge. 2. Your right to win becomes table stakes every 30 days. In SaaS, you could build a wedge, raise a Seed round, hit $1M ARR, and spend 18 months turning that into a go-to-market machine. That’s a thing of the past. The rate of change in what your product does (and what your competitors can ship) means the messaging, positioning, and value prop have to move in lock step. 3. The founder profile that wins now looks inherently different. Brett looks for founders who are building, not managing people who build. You need to be actually in the tools, shipping, and learning what the product can do firsthand. If you're not building, how can you expect to have a clear enough point of view on what you're selling or how to sell it? 4. Face-to-face matters more in the AI era. Buyers right now are more nervous than ever. They're betting their careers on products that are evolving fast and vendors who might look completely different in 6 months. They're buying whether they trust you to build what they'll need tomorrow. That trust is still built in person. It’s no surprise that events are creating 75%+ of the pipeline for Brett's early-stage portfolio companies. 5. Vertical software is the most defensible bet in AI right now. In vertical markets, customers hand you everything: their workflow, their edge cases, their entire context. That data is the moat. And to make matters even better, the non-technical buyer is now one of the most attractive customers in the market because AI finally makes their job meaningfully easier without requiring them to learn anything. Big thank you to our series partner, @AngelList, who have been instrumental in helping GTMfund scale since the early days.

At Outreach we accidentally ran what might be the world's best sales experiment. We had 50-70 SMB/Mid-Market reps. Half were remote, half were in Seattle. The in-person reps won. It wasn’t even close. You can’t replicate the energy of being in the room over Zoom. — Big thank you to our series partner, @AngelList, who have been instrumental in helping GTMfund scale the early days.

Before each podcast episode as part of our VC series, @PaulGTM and I have some fun chatting through our (many) opinions on what we’re seeing across the broader landscape. Here’s what we covered - available in full here on X. - Build vs. buy and why "software is dead" is the wrong framing. - Why nobody is going to vibe code DocuSign out of existence. - How the middle layer of SaaS is getting squeezed as value shifts to the action layer and the data layer. - What moats still matter for founders today (hint: speed and resources no longer cut it). - Buyer hesitation and why nobody can commit to more than a 12-month contract right now. - The $50T+ knowledge economy that the "SaaS is dead" crowd keeps ignoring. -What is the "mojo metric"?!

@GTMnow_ Apple: spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/cMXz80Mfd1b Spotify: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/116… YouTube: youtu.be/40xpYG9wh7U

Episode 5 of the @GTMnow_ VC Series is live! I sat down with the legend, Bill Binch (Operating Partner at Battery Ventures), to talk about what 116 quarters on quota teaches you about running a sales org, the “mojo” metric, how to transition from operator to operating partner, and much more. Before the conversation with Bill, @PaulGTM and I also talk through what we're seeing across founders, funds, and go-to-market teams, right now. A few takeaways from the conversation that are particularly valuable for founders and sales leaders to note: 1. Every forecast conversation should anchor to quota, not forecast. Bill requires reps to start with three numbers in order: my quota is, my forecast is, my closed won is. Most reps default to leading with forecast, which lets the conversation drift from the actual target. When you anchor to quota first, the gaps become immediately visible, and you know exactly how much urgency is required. Sales leaders get paid on quota, not forecast. Language used should reflect that. 2. Most companies don't track whether they've actually deployed enough quota to hit plan (and that’s a massive mistake). Three metrics, tracked monthly: company plan, planned quota deployed, and actual quota deployed. Bill gets called all the time by leaders in Battery’s portfolio saying "we don't have enough pipeline." The first place he looks? Quota deployment, because more often than not the real problem is they're running at 70% of planned capacity but expecting 100% of plan. That math is never going to work, and reveals that hiring is your problem, not quota. 3. Pipeline health is a daily exercise. The "mojo metric" tracks six daily inputs: three that add to pipeline (new deals, expansions, pull forwards) and three that subtract (killed, shrunk, pushed). Net them out every night. Three straight days of net negative and you're sounding the alarms. Foolproof way to catch slow leaks overnight instead of once the quarter is already gone. 4. The transition from CRO to operating partner is more of an identity shift than people expect. After 29 years with a clear scorecard, Bill moved into a role where outcomes might be 5-10 years out. Measuring impact is entirely different in venture. Be prepared to solve a completely different set of problems requiring a lot more context switching than when success metrics were pre-defined. 5. The path from operator to operating partner starts years before you're ready. If you're working for a venture or PE-backed company, build relationships with those teams now. Show up at industry events, chat with the team. It's a sales pipeline nurture, just for your career. Big thank you to our series partner, @AngelList, who have been instrumental in helping GTMfund scale since the early days.

@eoghan Well done!

This is great. Similarly story. We couldn’t break into a massive account. Held a briefing with the rep. The main POC went to Penn State but we couldn’t find out anything else about her. Scrolled down her twitter for 5 years and it was all corporate content, until…1 tweet referencing the Steelers. Sent her some James Conner swag and got a meeting with the whole team. Cost a little more than the toy car but was well worth it. Genuine human connection is extremely valuable and not going out of style.

Story time: How a $10 toy Porsche saved a $10M TCV customer for Gainsight. People often ask me about how to retain B2B customers. The short answer is there is no one magic answer - it's really hard! And it's getting tougher. But I think we often underestimate the importance of the human connection in all of this. In 2017, we were ~$30M of ARR. Because our category was new, every new sale was a fight against inertia. And that battle didn't stop with the contract. In the summer of that year, our champion at one of our highest-profile clients, a $200K ARR customer, texted us. Something to the effect of "the new C-level doesn't know what Gainsight is and wants to rip it out." I didn't blame him - most executives had no clue who we were! The champion gave us a list of like a 100 features we needed to fix to keep the customer. He said the executive would churn us otherwise. It didn't add up to us. How would a bunch of random reporting features cause this new boss to change his mind about us? So I started hunting for connections. The exec came from outside of tech, so our shared links were thin. Eventually, I cold emailed him - asking for 15 minutes of his time. I vividly remember where I was when I got him on the phone - walking on Florence Street in downtown Palo Alto. He was super nice but understandably busy. I'm sure talking to a niche vendor was low on his list of priorities. I told him what we did and he politely listened. And then the call ended respectfully. I didn't get good vibes. But I did pickup one piece of useful information. In the chit chat upfront, he shared that he loved racing cars. So I sent him a toy sports car off of Amazon. YOLO right? He reached out a week later and said he wanted a detailed briefing on us. We understood his vision and evolved the deployment to his strategy. He brought in more leaders from the company. And eventually, he expanded from $200K to $3M/year for a > 3 year term. We became friends and he's truly one of the warmest execs that I've met. He joined our advisory board. He spoke at countless events. And he'd say to this day that the little cheap plastic automobile was the accelerator for the customer relationship. Many Gainsters from that era remember the story to this day. Listening to your clients and showing them that you care about them as a human never gets old.

@alexisohanian Yes, @Lstreetjournal has been working on this for a few months and making great progress.

I’m desperately trying to start and fund Trade School 2.0 please DM me if you’re that cracked founder

The folks at @upfrontvc really know how to do a conference right

Historic photo. American greatness.

Before every podcast episode under the VC series on @GTMnow_, @PaulGTM and I talk through what we’re seeing across founders, funds, and go-to-market teams right now. Here’s what we covered - available in full here on X. - Ownership compression in competitive rounds. - Smaller funds deploying broadly to manage uncertainty and access. - Check sizes scaling over time as conviction and fund visibility increase. - Renewed focus on fund math and realistic return profiles. - Market reset after 2022–2023, with more scrutiny on pricing, ownership, and entry multiples. - The “SaaS is dead” narrative and the broader shift toward AI-driven categories. - Increased investor skepticism around AI positioning vs true AI-native products. - Oversubscribed early-stage rounds limit allocation even for high-conviction investors. - Performance increasingly outweighs model purity in how funds are evaluated over time.

@jaltma Wow congrats!!!

I’m really excited to share that I’m joining Benchmark. The past two years as a full time investor have been the most rewarding of my career. I really love venture capital, which is not something I ever imagined I’d say when I was kid, but here we are. I love new ideas and being part of a team with a mission. I love getting to be there for people who are struggling towards goals they really care about. I love learning from people who are better CEOs than I ever was. I love the texture of the work, the competition, and the way the job lets you invest in relationships. I love it so much that I’ve even turned into a little venture nerd with a podcast who goes around harassing great investors and founders, trying to learn as much as I can as fast as possible. I’ve certainly learned what I care most about, and what kind of investor I want to be. What I’ve realized is that I love investing at the Series A, when there’s enough going on that an investor can be useful but not so much that you can’t have an impact. I think there are many amazing ways to practice venture, it’s just the way that most speaks to me. And as I came to realize that, I started to think about how to best set myself up to do that craft as well as possible. It became clear to me there is nowhere better for this than Benchmark; the way they’re structured, their principles, their overall approach to investing, and their track record all create an environment that I believe will let me do my best work as an investor and help founders the most I possibly can. As I’ve gotten to know the team at Benchmark I’ve come to admire so much about each of them. Peter is truly playing his own game. A lot of what he says sounds like poetry at first, but as the ideas roll around in your head for a while you realize how much depth they have. I first heard about Eric many years ago from my friend Saji at Benchling while I was building Lattice, who described him as the most amazing board member and attributed him with a lot of the company’s success. That’s the kind of partner I want to be one day. Chetan is brilliant and truly thinks for himself; I’ve realized over time what a courageous guy he is. And then there’s my friend Ev, whose skills complement mine and who I just love to be around. I can’t wait to have him as a partner in crime. When given the chance to work with this group I just knew I had to go. One of my motivating north stars with Alt Capital was to build a firm and be a partner that I most would have wanted as an entrepreneur. Although I haven’t gotten everywhere I want to be yet, I’m proud of the work so far. And now I’m excited to build on that work at Benchmark, where I hope to increase my rate of learning and get armed with the power of a partnership so I can help founders reach their dreams even more. Thank you to the companies who’ve let me invest with them at Alt Cap. I’m keeping all my board seats and supporting everyone just the same as before. Thank you to the LPs who’ve backed me as well. I am so excited about the portfolio we have and am grateful I can stick with all those companies. And finally thank you to my teammates, Bala, Vivek, and Nate. Bala took a bet on me and started investing with me before it was remotely obvious, and we’ve been able to grow so much figuring it out together as investors. I credit Nate with helping Alt start feeling like a firm. He joined us from First Round over a year ago and made everything run smoothly. And while Vivek joined just a little while ago, even in the short time we’ve worked together he’s had a meaningful impact on how we think and invest. They’re all joining Benchmark with me. So pumped for this chapter.

Of course that's your contention. You're a first-time SaaS bear. You just got finished listening to some podcast, Dario on Dwarkesh, probably. Now you think it’s the end of white collar work and seat-based pricing is screwed. You're gonna be convinced of that til tomorrow when you get to “Something Big is Happening”. Then you’ll install ClawdBot on a Mac Mini, vibe code a dashboard on top of a postgres database and say we’re all just a couple ralph loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That’s gonna last until next week when you discover context graphs, and then you're gonna be talking about how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI marketing graphics. “Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because ultimately the application layer is just ….” The application layer is just business logic on top a CRUD database. You got that from Satya’s appearance on the BG2 pod, December 2024, right? Yeah, I saw that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or...is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a SaaS ticker. You watch some podcast and then pawn it off as your own idea just to impress some VCs and embarrass some anon who’s long SaaS? See the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple years you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One: don't do that. And two: you dropped thirty grand on Mac Minis and LLM API calls to come to the same conclusion you could’ve got for free by following a handful of VC accounts.

@jessegenet @openclaw Interested!

Pulse check. How much effort should I put into sharing how I’m using @openclaw to homeschool my kids? Is this content anyone wants!?

Gutsy move and the right call. So many more legacy SaaS companies need to do this and just won’t.

The Rapid Growth of SpaceX, Starlink, Starshield & Armada: “I am very grateful that SpaceX is an American company.” "Data centers in space is coming, & it makes sense" “5 years ago they hadn’t even launched Starlink—now it’s in 150 countries & it’s continuing to grow every week.” “It’s an unfair advantage that we have with Starshield.” “If the world can get access to SpaceX, I think that’s a good thing.” Dan Wright (@danwrightSF), CEO of @armada_ai Elon (@elonmusk) builds long-term advantage, then unleashes it at massive scale: SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla, Neuralink, xAI.. . . . "We started the company working with SpaceX & they’ve continued to be a great partner for us. What that means is that as @SpaceX rolls out throughout the world—& most people don’t know 5 years ago they hadn’t even launched @Starlink —it’s in 150 countries & it’s continuing to grow every week. We are the first mover when it comes to the infrastructure, & that partnership works really well because we complement the connectivity with the infrastructure & the AI. We always are at the edge. It’s funny, I get messages from our team all the time & it’s like the most crazy places you can imagine. And the edge is gonna continue to get redefined. I get calls literally—I was on the call with somebody and they’re like, “Hey, can we get one of these in Antarctica?” I’m like, “Well yeah, Starlink’s live in Antarctica. No reason why we can’t do that.” Obviously data center in space is the new hotness. Everybody’s talking about it." "Yeah, what’s the deal with that—so are you gonna get these in space?" :They are modular. I mean the edge is continuing—this is actually a debate that we have in terms of how soon it’s going to happen—but it’s definitely going to happen. Data centers in space is coming, and it makes sense, right? If you think about what SpaceX is talking about with Starship going to the moon—you’re going to need compute, especially as you start to think about Optimus robots building bases on the moon, later Mars. You’re going to need large amounts of compute. Not to mention a lot of the things that we do here on Earth, you’re gonna want to do there in space. And it’s a lot more efficient to do it, especially in hostile environments, if you can automate more of that—things like mining, for example. And so you’re gonna see data centers in space, and I’m sure we’re definitely gonna be a part of it. "What do you think about SpaceX’s rumored IPO for 2026?" "I mean, I think SpaceX is an incredible company and they have a ton of value. So I don’t have any insider information here—but I would say, hey, if the world can get access to SpaceX, I think that’s a good thing. Starlink is really amazing in the sense that it just continues to get better so fast. They’re rolling out in new countries every week in major markets. Just as a real recent example, just this last week they launched in South Korea—big market and an important ally for the US, so that’s a big deal. They’re also expanding the types of services that are available. It started as a consumer product, then they brought it to enterprise. Initially that was used more as a backup, and now it’s being used more as a primary—and that is because the service keeps getting better and better as more satellites go up into the sky. Each generation of satellite is also better, not to mention the terminals on the ground. There’s now multiple types of terminals, including the more recent minis that people really like—“Hey, I can put it in a backpack if I go on a hike or if I’m traveling. I can put it on the ski rack of my car.” Perfect internet all the time. All that does for us is it gives us more use cases that we can unlock. Now that you have connectivity on the oil rig, or on a farm, or a ranch—wherever you are—we can apply the AI to those situations on the ground without latency, and then send the metadata back to some other location that they want it. Part of the full-stack approach. And also with Starshield—that’s a huge advantage when you think about some of the conflicts that are going on. People talk to me a lot about this race with China and the geopolitical conflicts around the world. I am very grateful that SpaceX is an American company. I feel like it’s an unfair advantage that we have with Starshield available to the DoD. We want to be the first mover with the infrastructure and the AI to help solve problems at the edge, and the work we’re doing with the Navy is a good example of that."

@MollySOShea @shaunmmaguire Nice one Molly!

BREAKING: How Elon Builds Trillion-Dollar Companies Shaun Maguire (@shaunmmaguire), Partner at Sequoia: "I first invested in 2019.. cumulative invested probably $1.2 billion, & across all the different funds, that position's worth about $12 billion today.. in the $800 billion valuation. And so hopefully, in the IPO it's worth a lot more." Shaun & @sequoia have backed 5 of Elon's companies: SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, & X. This interview is a behind-the-scenes look inside Elon’s operating system — from one of the most technically fluent investors in Silicon Valley. This was so much fun, I hope you enjoy! Highlights: (00:00) Shaun Maguire, Partner at Sequoia Capital (01:10) SpaceX Upcoming IPO & data centers in space (05:00) The math behind space-based data centers (07:05) Breaking down Starlink from first principles (12:10) Economics of Starlink vs legacy telecom (14:41) Starlink + self-driving cars (16:29) Starship, direct-to-cell, & the next decade roadmap (19:38) SpaceX investment size and returns so far (20:25) Why is Elon still underrated? (21:33) How SpaceX went from contrarian to consensus (25:39) Why does Elon keep a tight investor circle? (27:06) Why does the market still underestimate xAI? (29:47) AI capex, liquidity cycles, & why spending is rational (32:11) Staying private vs going public: what makes more sense (35:47) Mission-driven cultures vs post-liquidity slowdown (37:53) Preparing founders psychologically for liquidity events (40:33) Why this may be the healthiest wealth creation cycle

Too many people talk about venture as strategy, spreadsheets, and logos. This episode is about the real job: people, trust, and doing the work when nobody is watching. Episode 3 of the GTMnow VC series is live. I sat down with Mark Goldberg (Managing Partner & Co-Founder at Chemistry) to talk about spinning out of a mega-fund, building a firm from scratch, and what conviction actually looks like at the earliest stages. Before the conversation with Mark, Paul Irving and I cover what we’re seeing firsthand across founders, funds, and go-to-market teams. My takeaways: 1. Early-stage venture rewards conviction over consensus, and punishes hesitation. Mark was clear that his biggest misses over the years weren’t bad investments; they were the deals he didn’t do. Chemistry is explicitly designed to avoid that trap. Individual partners can lead with conviction instead of optimizing for group agreement, because consensus tends to flatten outlier thinking. At the earliest stages, the cost of being wrong is survivable; the cost of being late isn’t. 2. When you leave a mega-fund, the logo stays behind, but your reputation doesn’t. Spinning out of Index Ventures meant starting fresh without brand gravity, but Mark’s experience shows what actually travels with you: founder trust, long-term relationships, and how you behave when things are hard. LPs may underwrite resumes, but founders underwrite character. If people don’t call you when it’s messy, you never really had an edge. 3. Events still work, but only if they’re actually worth a founder’s time. Chemistry ran roughly 70 events in under a year. These weren’t your usual happy hours. I’m talking about chess tournaments, surfing days – intimate gatherings built around shared interests. The insight here is simple: founders are busy and selective. If you’re going to ask for their time, it better be memorable, human, and genuinely enjoyable. Distribution without depth doesn’t compound. 4. The hardest investing lesson is learning when to shut up. Mark’s most painful experiences came from co-founder breakups that nearly killed companies. Over time, he learned that founders don’t always want advice. Often, they just need someone to listen. Being an effective investor means knowing when to guide and when to create space. Empathy, not answers, is frequently the highest-leverage move. 5. Venture doesn’t scale well, and pretending it does breaks culture. Chemistry is intentionally small, focused, and built like a SWAT team. No bureaucracy, no internal noise, no unnecessary layers. Mark’s view is that early-stage advantage comes from attention, speed, and presence (not headcount). The job is to find exceptional people early and show up fully. Everything else is a distraction. Thank you to our VC series partner AngelList, who have been instrumental in helping GTMfund scale and evolve since day one. Watch the full episode on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.