Audacious Ventures

New post: What comes in the way of great recruiting? Over the years, I’ve concluded that similar to the power law of startups and founders, there's a power law of recruiting. In every team, a few players disproportionately move the needle. If we agree that recruiting these 10x players is mission critical, then what comes in the way of getting them? TL;DR—Biggest hiring mistakes: 1. Not internalizing good is the enemy of great. 2. Lack of clarity on role/spec. 3. Weak pipeline = no real choice. 4. Generic vetting process. 5. Not enough intensity in closing top talent. Link to the full post 👇🏽

We're launching Lightfield today. It's a CRM designed for founders going zero to one—shaped in the past year by hundreds of founders who took a bet on us and now use it daily, and a waitlist of 20,000 more. When starting out, it takes countless hours of talking to customers to figure out what works. From day zero, Lightfield builds and updates itself from your unstructured conversations with customers. It becomes your customer memory: helping you execute deals, communicate without missing details, and understand patterns across your business. It's free to try. Would love to hear what you think: lightfield.app

Really enjoyed this conversation with my friend @Samirkaji on how we’re building @AudaciousHQ at a time when the VC market has gone from a niche, boutique industry to a mainstream one with hundreds of competitors + capital having become an easily available commodity for the best founders: open.spotify.com/episode/1OHRrU…

Excited to share we are expanding the @AudaciousHQ investment team in San Francisco! You will work closely with me, @nakul, @maxzang305, @wgenesen to help us identify and invest in outlier founders. Details on the role and how to apply below: audacioushq.notion.site/Audacious-Vent…

We are growing our talent team @AudaciousHQ! Come work with @TheRecruiterSam and help build exceptional engineering teams for our portfolio companies. More 👇

Exciting news @AudaciousHQ! We’ve raised $150M for Audacious II to back founders at the earliest of stages. More on us and what we’ve been up to 👇🏼

Founders: Our goal at Audacious Ventures is to be the most impactful investor in your cap table. We don't take board seats, and we think VC advice is overrated. Our ethos is simple: Move the needle in helping you build an A+ team around you, then get out of your way.

Announcing Audacious 2.0 Excited to announce @AudaciousHQ's second fund, a $150M fund dedicated to backing the most ambitious founders in the world at the earliest stages of their journey. A bit more on us in the thread below. cc @mzaveri @TheRecruiterSam

Apoorva is a force of nature! So excited for this launch by @BesteverAI. Historically, creatives generate ads and performance marketers run ads, with not enough real-time feedback coming back to optimize the creative process for the specific product and audience. Bestever unifies the ability to create an ad campaign based on existing intelligence on what works vs not, collect real time feedback as the ad runs, optimize the ad further and drive conversions ever higher. Check it out!

I am so excited to tell the world about what we've been working on for the last few months. World, say hello to @BesteverAI — GenAI tool for image & video ads. The easiest way to generate creatives for campaigns is here.

Initiating a list of B2B AI ideas that we're spending time on these days. We've invested in 4 gen AI cos at @AudaciousHQ so far: @magicaltome + 3 unannounced (healthcare, video mktg, knowledge worker copilot). Looking to do more. If you're building along these lines, pls DM us:

We often get questions from our product/technical founders on initial go-to-market (GTM) team buildout. Of course, every situation is a bit diff but here’s the typical $0-3M GTM hiring sequence we see for top down SaaS (distinguishing btwn SMB / mid-market and Enterprise):

Congrats @kushkella and the entire @VartanaInc team on this series B milestone! Vartana was one of the first seed rounds we, @AudaciousHQ, led as a new firm in 2021. Thanks for having us on your journey. techcrunch.com/2023/05/31/var…