Crew Capital's Community Newsletter: Nov-22
November 2022
November was a volatile month for the tech world - the NASDAQ dropped 6% in the first week and a half of trading before reversing course and ending the month essentially flat, layoffs are in the news seemingly every day, and of course, there was FTX.
In our corner of the tech world - early stage startups - November saw a continuation of October’s trend of increased deal activity. This month, we highlight a new investment, a new hire, and come to you with two highly actionable pieces of startup content focused on early stage engineering and marketing.
New Investments
We have announced our investment in Roam’s $30M Series A funding round, led by our friends at IVP. Roam is building a virtual office platform in the cloud, designed to facilitate collaboration and communication among both in-office and remote teams.
Crew Updates
We're excited to announce Ashley Liu has joined Crew Capital as a Partner on our investment team! Ashley is based out of New York, where she spent the last several years as an early-stage investor, working with founders building companies in fintech, healthcare, and consumer services.
Content from the Crew Collective
Founder Insights: We had the pleasure of sitting down with Vidal Gonzalez, Co-Founder & CTO at Cerby to speak about leading engineering teams, overcoming challenges in early-stage technical hiring, effective communication, and cross-team collaboration. Vidal has spent nearly two decades in software engineering, from Product Manager and Head of Engineering to multiple CTO roles in fast-growing start-ups.
5 key takeaways from the conversation:
First hires are essential. They should be generalists who are able to change course, and they should have an ownership mindset that sets the tone for the company as a whole.
While engineering teams are expected to be rooted in the technical details, and sales teams are expected to be focused on helping to solve customer problems, startups can create better alignment across their organization by fostering customer empathy among technical teams and ensuring sales teams have a baseline technical acumen.
Not everyone is disposed to thrive in a fast-paced early-stage startup environment. Screening for this in interviews can be challenging if a candidate doesn’t have previous startup experience. In this case, hiring managers should focus on a combination of personality traits and career goals to see if an engineer has the potential to thrive at their company.
People are the most important thing. Build diverse teams made up of people who care about and have respect for each other.
Communication and feedback between engineering managers and their teams should be constructive and candid.
Read the whole interview here.
Operator Expertise: We recently sat down with Vlad Ionescu to discuss all things marketing. Vlad is a CMO, an investor, and an advisor to early-stage tech companies. He joined UiPath as the first marketing hire in 2015 before going on to become Global Head of Growth Marketing. This is the first in a two-part interview featuring a wide-ranging discussion covering effective marketing strategies for early-stage startups.
3 key takeaways from the first part of the article:
Early-stage startups should take inspiration from the early blogging era in understanding how good content can, through sharing, syndication, and networks, build brand awareness and lead to commercial prospects.
Marketing-first approaches can be a growth engine for early-stage business growth, building brand equity and reputation to drive inbound leads that sales teams can pick up on.
Early-stage start-ups need to be cost-efficient in their marketing efforts. They should prioritize ROI, and identify metrics to track progress.
What have our start-ups been up to this month?
Taktile just raised their $20M Series A financing co-led by Tiger Global Management and Index Ventures! Congrats to Maik Wehmeyer and the Taktile team! Read more about it here.
Aiven is expanding its footprint in Asia-Pacific (APAC). Here you can find out more about their expansion plans in APAC, the competitive landscape, and their opportunities from customers in the region who are building next-gen applications and technologies. Also, read more about their first steps towards driving change through social impact, growing their sustainability team, and building a DEI strategy.
SEON announced a new free version of their fraud prevention service. In 2020, $27 billion was lost to e-commerce transaction fraud, and this number is expected to grow to $52 billion by 2025. SEON’s mission is to democratize fraud prevention, and the company just took a huge leap forward with the introduction of a free version.
Spring Health launched Compass, a new electronic health record, which will support the entire Spring Health Care Team in the delivery and coordination of world-class virtual and in-person mental health care.
Chainalysis became part of the Crypto Market Integrity Coalition (CMIC), a first-of-its-kind training program delivered by the leaders in the crypto ecosystem. Also, for those interested in the state of the crypto markets following the events that happened this month with FTX, here is Chainalysis’ view on it.
Job Openings
We're always on the lookout to connect exceptional candidates with our portfolio companies.
We have several high-visibility roles currently available at a few of our companies, including:
Head of Customer Success - Seed stage, the role is based in New York.
CFO - Series D & B, the roles can be based in USA or Europe.
CMO - Series D, the role can be based in USA or Europe.
Machine Learning Leader - Seed stage, the role is based in London.
VP of Engineering - Seed stage, it can be based anywhere in Europe.
Content Marketing Manager - Series A, the role can be based anywhere in USA.
To learn more about the opportunities, reach out to our Head of Platform, Sonia Damian at sonia@crewcapital.co.