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Enterprise AI: Why It Matters & What Will Drive Adoption
Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a novel concept, instead, gaining prominent attention over several decades across the likes of academia, literature, and television. Famously, in his book 1984 (published in 1949), George Orwell vividly predicted a not-so-distant future that featured advanced machine learning phenomena such...
Keith Rabois’ Three Key Questions for Investors to Consider
This week the Bowery Capital team spent time discussing some key venture capital themes captured in Keith Rabois' podcast with Invest Like The Best [Ep. 115], covering topics from his investment criterion to critiques of business strategies that have been popularized like the Lean Startup. Like...
3 Lessons From Mike Maples For Aspiring VCs
After taking a look at Vinod Khosla's Lessons for Entrepreneurs, we pivoted this week to another giant in the industry with the top 3 VC lessons from Mike Maples. Mike had a great interview with the Origins podcast last year, centered around his transition from...
What the 4 P’s Mean for SaaS and How They Can Help You
Three years ago, we invited our longtime friend of Bowery and the CEO of Zuora, Tien Tzuo, to discuss his "Three Rooms" concept on the Bowery Capital Podcast. This past October we featured a review of his new book, Subscribed, which we highly recommend to any founder. One...
Vinod Khosla’s Lessons For Entrepreneurs
As the new class of Bowery Capital interns began, we took time to listen to Vinod Khosla give his top lessons for entrepreneurs on Y Combinator’s podcast. Before we dive in, a little more about Vinod. He is the founder of Khosla Ventures, a firm...
Common Red Herrings In Early Stage Companies
Red herrings. Not the prospectus and not the fish. For the uninformed, we're talking about something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important issue. You find red herrings in early stage companies all the time and they can sometimes kill your company. What...
Marketing Technology Predictions For 2019
At Bowery Capital, we spend a lot of time thinking about the marketing technology ecosystem and what the future holds for the space. With investments like MOAT, mParticle, and ActionIQ we are continuing to invest in and around this market. As we start 2019, we...
The Top 3 Yext Sales Lessons From The Company’s President
After a brief Thanksgiving break, we returned this week to Columbia Business School where Brian Distelburger, President and Co-Founder of Yext, offered his Top 3 Yext Sales Lessons. Before we jump in, a little more about Brian. Prior to co-founding Yext in 2006, he founded...
BC Startup Sales Podcast – The Key Pillars of Social Selling with Jill Rowley (Marketo)
This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Jill Rowley, Chief Growth Officer at Marketo, to discuss "The Key Pillars of Social Selling." Marketo offers automation software that helps marketers build brand value, grow revenue, and prove impact. The Adobe company focuses on scalability, reliability, and openness for...
Sunday B2B Book Review: The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge
This Sunday we bring you a book review of The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge. Written by employee #3 of Hubspot, Mark is currently a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School. As the VP of Worldwide Sales and Services from 2007 to 2013, Mark grew the...
Two Customer Success Metrics That Matter From Zero To One
Something that we care a lot about here at Bowery Capital is preparing and supporting our companies that have achieved product / market fit in their next round of financing. We find, in particular, that many of these companies have achieved outsized growth on the...
Being Cautious About Independent Board Members
Supporting our entrepreneurs in the choosing of independent board members is something that has been front of mind for us recently as many of our companies have had the capability to add new blood to their Board of Directors. Fred Wilson had a great post...
BC Startup Sales Podcast – Elements of Successful Product Marketing with Grant Halloran (OmniSci)
This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Grant Halloran, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President at OmniSci (formerly Map D), to discuss "Elements of Successful Product Marketing." OmniSci offers an advanced data analytics platform by combining the capabilities of software with GPU hardware. By bridging the...
The Top 3 Marriott Sales Lessons
After Bill Lennie gave his Top 3 Home Depot Sales Lessons last week, we returned to Columbia Business school where Brian King, the Senior Vice President of Sales at Marriott, gave his Top 3 Marriott Sales Lessons. Brian has been in the hospitality business for over twenty-five years....
Investment Opportunities Surrounding The Aging Population
We spend a lot of time at Bowery Capital thinking about the future of the business software landscape. To date, we have written a bit about some of the swapping cycles we think remain. We have also spent a fair amount of time thinking through...
Sunday B2B Book Review: Under The Radar by Robert Young
This Sunday we bring you a book review of Under The Radar by Robert Young. Written by the Founder & CEO of Red Hat, Robert Young chronicles the dramatic rise of the open-source movement and the emergence of Linux. If you don't know anything about Red Hat or the...
The Top 3 Home Depot Sales Lessons
After listening in last week on American Airlines' Top Two Sales Lessons, we returned again to Columbia Business School where Bill Lennie, Executive Vice President of Outside Sales & Service at The Home Depot gave his top three Home Depot sales lessons. Before we dive in, a little...
The Four Waves Of AI
As many folks who read our blog are well aware, we have been interested and invested in companies focused on AI for some time now. We write about the topic a fair amount and earlier this year covered some thinking about policy implications as AI...
Sunday B2B Book Review: Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella
Another Sunday here at Bowery Capital means another book review. This week we feature a book review of Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella. Nadella is a household name to everyone who reads our blog and likely needs no introduction. He became the third CEO of Microsoft...
The Top Two Airline Sales Lessons
In keeping with tradition, we returned last night to Columbia Business School to hear Johna Johnson, the Vice President of East Sales at American Airlines, offer her top two airline sales lessons. Johna has been active in the travel industry for over twenty-nine years and prior...
BC Startup Sales Podcast – Scaling Your Customer Success Org Through Hyper Growth With Alex Hesterberg (Turbonomic)
This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Alex Hesterberg, SVP and Chief Customer Officer of Turbonomic, to discuss “Scaling Your Customer Success Organization Through Hyper Growth.” Turbonomic is a software company that delivers workload automation for hybrid cloud environments. The software understands the demands of...
Sunday B2B Book Review: Subscribed by Tien Tzuo
This Sunday we feature a book review of Subscribed. Author Tien Tzuo is widely recognized as one of the thought leaders in the SaaS, founding Zuora in 2007. He built the business into a public company with 1,000+ customers, 1,000+ employees, and $100MM+ in revenue. Before Zuora,...
Maximizing Potential: Verizon Sales Lessons
Keeping in line with one of last week's posts, Startup Sales Lessons From The Beer Industry, we headed back to Columbia Business School where Ken Dixon, President of Consumer Sales & Service at Verizon, gave us his Verizon sales lessons. Before we get going, a little more...
The Sales Learning Curve For Start-Up Companies
The sales learning curve is an important concept introduced by Stanford professors Mark Leslie and Charles Holloway roughly 12 years ago. It is a concept that we have borrowed from a lot here at Bowery Capital and believe it remains one of the more underrated...
Cool SaaS Revenue Tools We Are Noticing Lately
Our Acceleration Team spends a ton of time helping seed stage companies set up the right systems, infrastructure, and processes, to help them achieve product/market fit and hopefully outsized revenue growth. A big part of this effort is the recommendation of tooling that saves companies...
Thinking About Non-Competes For Companies
For those that have been in the trenches of the talent wars going on in the technology ecosystem here in NYC we were encouraged to hear recently about the fact that WeWork had settled with the AG on their recent non-compete issues. As a result...
Sunday B2B Book Review: How To Castrate A Bull by Dave Hitz
We are back again this Sunday with our book reviews from great business software leaders. This week, we give you a book review of How To Castrate A Bull by Dave Hitz. Written by NetApp co-founder Dave Hitz, the book summarizes the nearly 20 year lifespan...
Quick Thoughts on Twilio Acquiring SendGrid
Twilio announced that it will be acquiring SendGrid, the world's first cloud-based email delivery platform, for $2B in an all-stock transaction. SendGrid has around 75,000 customers who use the platform to send roughly 45B emails per month, even handling APIs for companies like Uber and...
Sunday B2B Book Review: Behind The Cloud by Marc Benioff
We continue this Sunday with our book reviews from great business software leaders. This week, we give you a book review of Behind The Cloud by Marc Benioff. The book, published in 2009, is a compilation of Benioff's personal account on how he started Salesforce, the...
Revenue Meetings For Early Stage Founders
One of the critical paths to success for any early stage business software company is revenue generation. If you don't achieve product/market fit you are either dead or in limbo. Most business software companies begin with "founder selling" where the founder does all of the...
Why Sales Cycle Remains The Most Important Lever Of Early Stage Revenue
Early stage founders spend a lot of time on the revenue line and revenue organization once they have achieved product/market fit. We recommend focusing on the Sales Velocity Equation for a correct framework and metrics and have talked a ton on our blog about it....
Sunday B2B Book Review: Winners Dream by Bill McDermott
We continue to find insight, history, and new approaches to B2B when reading books from best in class companies and their executives or founders. Learning from the experts in the areas that are core to our investment strategy is a great way to enhance critical...
Startup Sales Lessons From The Beer Industry
Startup sales lessons are key for getting an early-stage company off the ground, and there’s no better way to learn than from the experts. Despite that, the startup tech ecosystem tends to be relatively secluded with little cross communication from experts within other industries. This...
Building Your Vertical SaaS Marketing Muscle
At Bowery Capital we spend a substantial amount of time investing in the next generation of vertical software businesses. We’ve made bets in companies like Fero Labs (manufacturing), Transfix (trucking), CredSimple (Healthcare), and MomentSnap (restaurants). We care about the themes and drivers of success in...
Strategic Planning For Early Stage Companies
As we enter the final quarter of the year one thing that starts to get on a founders mind is strategic planning for the upcoming year. You want to maintain your focus as an entrepreneur on what matters most. You want to keep your board...
Improving Late Stage Conversion Through Role Playing Exercises
Improving late stage conversion is one of the toughest things for any startup founder seeking to build off of your early sales wins. Founders are excellent at getting through the initial pitch, qualification and demo phases of their sales process map. They can pitch the...
Where Are the Greatest Swapping Opportunities In Systems of Records?
We've been seeing a fair amount of investable ideas around the next generation of software Systems Of Record and have been spending a fair amount of time thinking about where the greatest swapping opportunities in Systems Of Record are. For those that don't know what...
Quick Thoughts On Adobe Acquiring Marketo
Adobe announced yesterday it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Marketo, the market-leading cloud platform for B2B marketing engagement, for $4.75B. The company has around 5,000 customers and will become a key part of the overall Experience Cloud that Adobe sells to marketers. A...
The Future Of Professional Services In SaaS
A lot has been written about the future of professional services in SaaS and in particular how this component of a software business continues to change. Tomasz Tunguz recently wrote a fascinating piece about how the economics of professional software have changed in the SaaS...
BC Startup Sales Podcast – How AI Impacts Sales with Somrat Niyogi (Clari)
This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Somrat Niyogi, VP of Business Development at Clari, to discuss “How AI Impacts Sales.” Clari is an AI platform that equips sales teams with analytics, allowing them to focus on the right deals and optimize management of their...
Rise of the Digital Marketing Suite – 2018 Key Product Updates
If you’re interested in reading the 2018 edition of the ‘Rise Of The Digital Marketing Suite’ you can find it here. As a refresher to our digital marketing series titled ‘Rise of the Digital Marketing Suite’, we recently posted a market update for the 2018 edition....
BC Startup Sales Podcast – Tips to Build a 30-60-90 Day Plan for Sales Leaders with Matt Gahr (Chrome River)
This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Matt Gahr, Chief Sales Officer at Chrome River, to discuss “Tips to Build a 30-60-90 Day Plan for Sales Leaders.” Chrome River is a global leader in enterprise expense reporting and invoice management solutions, based out of California....
Rise of the Digital Marketing Suite – 2018 Market Update
If you’re interested in reading the 2018 edition of the ‘Rise Of The Digital Marketing Suite’ you can find it here. In Q2 2014, Bowery Capital came up with a series of articles on the 'Rise of the Digital Marketing Suite'. We divided the digital marketing...
BC Startup Sales Podcast – Team Selling Into The Enterprise with Dave Govan (Hitachi Vantara)
This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Dave Govan, a VP of Sales at Hitachi Vantara, to discuss "Team Selling Into The Enterprise." Hitachi Vantara is a $4 billion company headquartered in Santa Clara, CA and is owned by Hitachi, LTD an $80 billion conglomerate out...
Bridging The Gender Gap In Venture Capital
In April, we announced our participation in Project #MovingForward, an open-source directory that pools diversity, inclusion, and anti-harassment commitments from VCs. As part of our ongoing interest in the initiative, Bowery Capital releases an annual gender study, designed to measure and track gender diversity (or...
Zero-Rating Opportunities In B2B SaaS
We recently discussed net neutrality's impact on innovation and AT&T’s acquisition of AppNexus. Today we are going to examine zero-rating opportunities in B2B SaaS. Zero-rating allows a user of an app to freely use the content without it counting towards their data cap. For example,...
AT&T’s Acquisition Of AppNexus: What It Means For Media
While AT&T's recent acquisition of Time Warner was considered the latest blockbuster M&A deal of 2018, the company's expansion into new verticals continues. AT&T's acquisition of AppNexus, a digital advertising exchange, puts the longstanding telecommunications incumbent in competition with the likes of Facebook and Google,...
What To Make Of Increasing Startup Valuations
If you’re deep in the trenches of the startup space like we are, you’ve probably already read - or at least heard about - Fred Wilson’s recent post, The Valuation Obsession, which touches on an important question facing investors and entrepreneurs alike: what do higher...
BC Startup Sales Podcast – New Channels For Lead Engagement & Intel with Bart Lorang (FullContact)
This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Bart Lorang, Co-Founder and CEO of FullContact, to discuss "New Channels For Lead Engagement & Intel." FullContact is a Denver, Colorado based contact management company focused on making relationships better through prospect/audience insights. The company is hellbent on delivering...
Our Thoughts On The Recent Workday Acquisitions
Chalk another one up for M&A. Early last week Workday, the company that offers HR and other back-office apps for businesses, acquired Adaptive Insights, a provider of business planning and financial modelling tools, to the tune of $1.55B. Adaptive Insights has filed for their IPO on May...
Unraveling Of Net Neutrality: The Impact On Innovation
You’ve probably heard the term on NPR or read about it on Twitter: net neutrality, the principle that internet services providers (think: Verizon, Comcast, AT&T), or ISPs, should treat access to all content and applications the same despite owner or user. Well, last week marked...
Key Takeaways In The Fight For AI Supremacy
The Bowery Capital blog has been filled with discussions that examined the shifting pawns on the chessboard that is the fight for AI supremacy. As a principal investor in the machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystems, we are always keeping a close eye to...
Our Novel Framework For US AI Policy
Artificial intelligence has been a prominent feature on the Bowery Capital blog. We have covered the major nations public stance on AI and dove into the US public policy on AI. Rather than provide more highlights of countries' AI plans, we thought it best to provide...
Reflections From India’s New AI Strategy
Press releases on different countries' AI strategies are beginning to feel like a weekly occurrence. This week it is India who has released their "National Strategy for AI". We have written a collection of blog posts in the past months that cover AI Nationalism, AI...
US Policy Within AI Nationalism
Fear and competition with the Soviet Union spurred a wave of US investment in science and technology in the 1960's. In recent years the US stance on addressing new technologies has changed. As I have highlighted in my ongoing discussion on AI Nationalism, the US policy...
BC Startup Sales Podcast – Client Journey Mapping with Nicolle Paradise (ADP)
This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Nicolle Paradise, Senior Director of Client Experience at ADP and a renowned keynote speaker, to discuss “Client Journey Mapping.” Nicolle is a senior leader in the customer success industry, more specifically focused on client experience. She is a well...
Impacts Of AI Nationalism On Semiconductors
Building off of my ongoing discussion on the implications of AI Nationalism, one important topic is the relationship between AI Nationalism and a new concept which can loosely be defined as semiconductor isolationism or semiconductor nationalism. The impacts of AI nationalism on semiconductors is something...
Discussing Customer Success With Prospective Investors
We talked last week about the importance of truly understanding your marketing activation, channels, and spend very early on in the life of your business. At Bowery Capital, we place a focus through our investment process on truly understanding where a founder is going to spend...
AI Policy Frameworks We Are Seeing Today
We have talked a bunch on the Bowery Capital blog about AI Nationalism and various elements of AI including ethical challenges, AI country differences, and AI impacts on the B2B ecosystem. Issues concerning AI policy primarily revolve around the analysis of societal decision-making, with important questions...
Technology Isolation Within AI Nationalism
As the AI arms race heats up between the worlds two largest economies there are reverberating effects in the global technology industry and government technology policy. Relative to our concept on AI Nationalism that I have talked about in prior posts, we have recently seen...