Playbooks

How to Elevate Your Enterprise Event Strategy

As we step into 2025, one of the most critical aspects of annual planning for enterprise software startups is mapping out a successful events strategy. With the rapid evolution of marketing trends and tools, what does a high-impact event look like in the year ahead?

Work-Bench

Dec 9, 2024

How Ramp & Figma Built World-Class Products

Our November NY Enterprise Tech Meetup (#NYETM) took a behind-the-scenes, real talk look at how Ramp and Figma have become such product powerhouse, generational companies.

Work-Bench

Nov 14, 2024

How to Create a Predictable Top-of-Funnel Engine for Growth

As Seed-stage enterprise software investors, we’ve seen time and time again early-stage teams focus all of their time and energy on moving prospects down the funnel that, when they finally come up for air, they find their top-of-funnel pipeline has dried up.

Work-Bench

Nov 13, 2024

Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs): 6 Ways for Retaining and Growing Customers

We recently hosted a talk by a VP of Client Solutions from one of our portfolio companies, highlighting the importance of Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) and best practices for leveraging them to strengthen long-term customer relationships.

Work-Bench

Nov 13, 2024

5 Effective Leadership Tactics of Highly Successful Founders with David Politis, Founder of BetterCloud

Our recent Work-Bench Enterprise Masterclass led by David Politis, Founder of BetterCloud, delved into the "5 Effective Leadership Tactics of Highly Successful Founders.”

Work-Bench

Aug 7, 2024

3 Myths About Selling Cybersecurity to Financial Services

Many early-stage cybersecurity founders aim to sell to large enterprises, specifically financial services, when defining their go-to-market given they deeply care about minimizing risk and have the deep pockets to invest in security.

Kelley Mak

Jul 31, 2024

10 Lessons From Scaling AssemblyAI with Founder & CEO Dylan Fox

We bring together 150+ operators from across Sales, Product, Marketing, Engineering, Customer Success, and more to get the lowdown on what’s been challenging and their strategies to triumph.

Work-Bench

Jul 11, 2024

10 Quick Wins to Grow Pipeline

As Seed-stage enterprise software investors, go-to-market is the #1 thing we work with our portfolio – most importantly working with companies on getting to that pivotal first million in ARR and building a repeatable growth strategy.

Work-Bench

Jul 3, 2024

Signals From Exceptional Founders

In the past six months, Work-Bench has met with hundreds of founders and pre-founders building in enterprise software, SaaS, Developer Tools and Infrastructure at the Seed stage or earlier.

Jessica Lin

Jun 27, 2024

How To Price Your Product at Seed

As Seed-stage enterprise software investors, go-to-market is the #1 thing we work with our portfolio on day in and day out. Early-stage founders often dedicate significant time to the development of their company, such as product roadmap development, achieving product-market fit, and defining sales motions.

Work-Bench

Jun 26, 2024

VC Perspectives on The Voyage Across Stages with Work-Bench, Lux Capital & Andreeseen Horowitz

Our sold out May NY Enterprise Tech Meetup (#NYETM) featured an annual fan favorite — our VC perspectives panel on “The Voyage Across Startup Stages” with a killer lineup of female investors.

Work-Bench

Jun 14, 2024

Scaling Product from 0 to IPO with Kevin Wang, CPO of Braze

Our April NY Enterprise Tech Meetup (#NYETM) featured a fireside chat with Kevin Wang, Chief Product Officer at enterprise Saas customer engagement platform Braze.

Work-Bench

May 30, 2024

Next NYC Spotlight: Determining Hex’s Flavor of PLG

Despite recent advancements in the modern data stack, data work is still fragmented across tools and stakeholders. Recognizing this gap in 2019, Hex was built as a data science and analytics collaboration platform to better serve this need.

Work-Bench

Apr 25, 2024

Pre-Product Market Fit: What It Means to Ideate & Validate an Enterprise-Ready Product

As Seed-stage investors at Work-Bench, the startups that we source, invest in, and support have not yet reached PMF - the point at which they have multiple paying customers who love their product and a consistency in growth.

Work-Bench

Apr 1, 2024

Next NYC Spotlight: A PM’s Journey UpMarket

We caught up with Sanjay Padval, Group Product Manager at Vanta, who has been a part of the team since 2021 to get his perspective on what this journey has been like building and scaling products from startups all the way to enterprise customers.

Work-Bench

Feb 20, 2024

Better Products Don't Always Win: How To Package & Distribute For a Competitive Edge

Founders often tell us they're just a few features away from outpacing their competitors. However, our “not-hot-take hot-take” is that features alone usually aren't enough to secure competitive enterprise deals.

Jessica Lin

Feb 8, 2024

How To Build a Hand of “Defensible Cards” To Set Your GTM Apart

While enterprise buyers continue to be under intense scrutiny, early-stage enterprise startups have held a relentless commitment to navigating this demanding landscape.

Jessica Lin

Dec 11, 2023

Enterprise Startup Founder Survival Guide with David Politis, Founder of BetterCloud

We first met David Politis, Founder and former CEO of BetterCloud, over 10 years ago at our NY Enterprise Meetup. Fast forward and he took the very same stage at our recent meetup to talk through his top, hard-learned lessons.

Work-Bench

Nov 28, 2023

Next NYC Spotlight: Marketing for Marketers

While many naysayers will tell you that focusing on weekly goals can bog you down in the weeds and make you lose sight of long-term goals, Ryan quickly learned that “the person who hits the weekly target, hits the quarterly target, and so on.”

Work-Bench

Nov 14, 2023

3 GTM Tactics Every Enterprise Founder Needs To Survive Today’s Market

Nailing go-to-market (GTM) as a startup is hard. But nailing GTM as an enterprise startup in a down market is exceptionally harder.

Jessica Lin

Nov 13, 2023

Next NYC Spotlight: Selling an Open-Ended Product

Retool was designed around the belief that software has been built the same way for the last two to three decades, requiring specialized training and expertise from developers.

Work-Bench

Nov 2, 2023

Mastering Open-Source GTM with Vercel, Grafana, and Apollo GraphQL

In an era where many companies use open source as a foundation to win over the developer community, nailing a go-to-market strategy that monetizes a product is important to successfully scale the business.

Work-Bench

Oct 26, 2023

Next NYC Spotlight: Building a World-Class Sales Team

In 2018, Persona entered the game to become the identity layer of the internet. While they’ve been continuously expanding their talent and improving the product, it’s been imperative for the team to refine their GTM.

Work-Bench

Oct 26, 2023

GTM Tactics You Need To Scale in Marketing, Sales, Product & Professional Services

We wanted to get into the nitty gritty GTM tactics these operators have used and proved-out on their journeys to scaling successful enterprise startups.

Work-Bench

Sep 12, 2023

1st Principles for Seed-Stage Enterprise Software Startups

Building an enterprise startup is hard. But building an enterprise startup amidst this downtown is exceptionally harder.

Jessica Lin

Sep 11, 2023

A Formula For Pitching CIOs

After just a few years on the job, most CIOs will typically have heard ~100 sales pitches. And 7x CIO Mark Settle has heard the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Work-Bench

May 9, 2023

An Enterprise Founder’s GTM Template For Seed-Stage Due Diligence

As thesis-driven, Seed-stage investors, we often diligence and invest in enterprise startups pre-revenue. This means founder’s often come to the table with no customer logos or clear-cut metrics to help us generate conviction.

Jonathan Lehr

Mar 20, 2023

How to Build a Scalable Customer Acquisition System

Marketing is often seen as a black box. With endless channels to tackle (content, events, outbound emails, and ads, to name a few), where should early-stage enterprise startups even begin?

Work-Bench

Feb 27, 2023

Leveling Up Discovery and Demo Calls

In today’s environment, it's critical to nail discovery and demo calls with prospective customers. This is often the make-it or break-it touchpoint that sets up the success of the rest of the sale process.

Work-Bench

Feb 6, 2023

Introducing the Work-Bench Enterprise Playbook Library

Over our decade helping fund, grow, and support early-stage enterprise software startups, we’ve seen the most difficult challenges and the most tactical solutions for scaling an enterprise startup.

Work-Bench

Jan 10, 2023

The Sales Playbook That Turbocharged Outreach from $0 to $200M ARR

Our November NY Enterprise Tech Meetup focused on a topic we’re particularly passionate about at Work-Bench: enterprise sales and go-to-market tactics.

Work-Bench

Nov 15, 2022

5 Experiments To Find a Winning Developer Acquisition Strategy

For this Work-Bench Masterclass, we hosted Martin Gontovnikas, General Partner and B2B Growth Advisor at HyperGrowth Partners and former SVP Marketing and Growth at Auth0.

Work-Bench

Oct 21, 2022

Living Up to the Hype: How To Enable Hypergrowth with PLG with Snyk, MongoDB, Elemental & Pace

After 2 years of virtual Meetups, we finally closed out of Zoom and got back to action at our first IRL NY Enterprise Tech Meetup since the pandemic!

Work-Bench

Sep 27, 2022

3 Acts of Growth: Lessons, Patterns & Mistakes from a 3x Entrepreneur

The founder journey typically comprises of conquering product-market fit, go-to-market fit, and then scaling.

Work-Bench

Aug 10, 2022

The Founder’s Guide to Announcing a Seed Round

Closing a Seed round is a huge milestone for any startup.

Kira Colburn

Jun 10, 2022

Security For Enterprise Startups To Scale & Sell

In this post, I set up useful guardrails that early stage (Series A or earlier) startups should consider when building their security programs that I’ve gathered from experts in the security community and elsewhere.

Kelley Mak

May 5, 2022

3 Proven Community Strategies to Grow Open Source Businesses

This post was originally published on The Data Source, my monthly newsletter covering the top innovation in data infrastructure, engineering and developer-first tooling. Subscribe here and never miss an issue!

Priyanka Somrah

Apr 19, 2022

Enterprise Tech Operator Masterclass: How to Launch a Demand Gen Campaign on a Seed Dime

We’re excited to introduce our new event series brought to you by our NY Enterprise Tech Meetup — the Enterprise Operator Masterclass!

Work-Bench

Apr 12, 2022

How To Handle VC Inbound After Raising A Seed Round

First of all, congrats! After putting in the tremendous hard work of getting your enterprise startup off the ground and gaining some traction, you’ve closed your Seed round.

Jonathan Lehr

Mar 16, 2022

10th Anniversary NY Enterprise Tech Meetup: How the CEO of Attentive Navigated a Massive Pivot to Find Product Market Fit

This month, we celebrated the 10th Anniversary of our NY Enterprise Tech Meetup! To honor our New York roots, we welcomed Brian Long, CEO and Co-Founder of one of NYC’s most exciting giants, Attentive, to our Zoom stage.

Work-Bench

Mar 1, 2022

How Should Enterprise Startups Navigate Today’s Changing Seed World?

As the late stage investing landscape becomes more and more chaotic, the battleground for VCs has largely shifted to early stage. Today, there’s more institutional capital than ever chasing Series A’s from firms like Tiger Global and Insight Partners in addition to traditional Silicon Valley VCs.

Jonathan Lehr

Feb 25, 2022

6 Tactics on How to Fuse Product & Enterprise Sales for PLG Success

At Work-Bench, we know customers are like oxygen for early-stage startups.

Work-Bench

Aug 12, 2021

The 5 Step Framework for Building a Product Led Business

This month, Work-Bench, OpenView, Primary Venture Partners and Lerer Hippeau hosted the second of its four-part SaaS Growth Camp

Work-Bench

Feb 25, 2021

How to Best Prepare an Enterprise Sales Pipeline Review for Your Investors

As enterprise investors here at Work-Bench, investing at Seed II stage, we are obsessed with all things go-to-market and working alongside our founders to refine their early GTM and sales engine.

Jessica Lin

Oct 20, 2020

Dear Enterprise Startups, Not All Customer Intros Are Equal

These Are the Doors You Should be Knocking On

Jonathan Lehr