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.
While every VC firm will say that they look for exceptional founders, what does this actually mean?
For us, there are a few key signals we've seen in our current portfolio company founders that helped drive our decision in leading their Seed round:
- Fast velocity: This is evidenced by the number of early, scrappy experiments run and shipped (and the lessons that have come from them). One of our founders talked about how they got their way into a highly specific and relevant user conference for free, where they landed five qualified leads.
- Disciplined, clear thinker: The data room says a *lot* about a founder. So, when a founder ships clean materials (a thoughtful memo, a clear deck, clean pipeline review), it demonstrates they have a well-run process, organization, the ability to communicate / tell a story and articulate a vision, a strong command of metrics, and more.
- GTM-oriented: Ideally, founders have talked to 100s of potential users/customers by the time we meet. We love when founders can share customer Gongs so that, 1) we can hear from customers directly on the depth of their pain points, and 2. we can understand and assess how early sales conversations are going (and how we might be able to help!).
- Creative: One of our founders shared how they used fax to get to some of their earliest customers. Our best conversations are jamming and hearing some of the creative things founders have tested to get to their earliest customers at the Seed stage, and sharing playbook pages from our portfolio and community too.
This post originally appear in Jessica Lin’s Substack #jess: Just Enterprise SaaS on June 27, 2024. If you’re an early-stage enterprise founder or operator — connect with us directly to chat about anything GTM or check out our events page to stay in the loop on all things happening in the Work-Bench community.
