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
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.
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.
Our recent Work-Bench Enterprise Masterclass led by David Politis, Founder of BetterCloud, delved into the "5 Effective Leadership Tactics of Highly Successful Founders.”
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Our April NY Enterprise Tech Meetup (#NYETM) featured a fireside chat with Kevin Wang, Chief Product Officer at enterprise Saas customer engagement platform Braze.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While enterprise buyers continue to be under intense scrutiny, early-stage enterprise startups have held a relentless commitment to navigating this demanding landscape.
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.
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.”
Nailing go-to-market (GTM) as a startup is hard. But nailing GTM as an enterprise startup in a down market is exceptionally harder.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Building an enterprise startup is hard. But building an enterprise startup amidst this downtown is exceptionally harder.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
The founder journey typically comprises of conquering product-market fit, go-to-market fit, and then scaling.
Closing a Seed round is a huge milestone for any startup.
Kira Colburn
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.
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
We’re excited to introduce our new event series brought to you by our NY Enterprise Tech Meetup — the Enterprise Operator Masterclass!
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.
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.
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.
At Work-Bench, we know customers are like oxygen for early-stage startups.
This month, Work-Bench, OpenView, Primary Venture Partners and Lerer Hippeau hosted the second of its four-part SaaS Growth Camp
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.
These Are the Doors You Should be Knocking On
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