Crew Capital's Community Newsletter: Oct-23
October-23
Happy Halloween to our readers! This month, we recap the state of the venture capital landscape as of 3Q23, conversations with two CIOs, and job opportunities at our portfolio companies - as well as us! That’s right, we’re hiring for a Senior Investment Associate role (info here), so please reach out to us if you know someone who might be a fit. Now, onto the newsletter!
Macro Review
Two weeks ago, Pitchbook published their preliminary 3Q23 numbers, reflecting the third quarterly sequential decline in a row this year. Total deal value in the US was $32.7B (-12% Q/Q, -29% Y/Y), while US deal count was 2715 (-24% Q/Q, -31% Y/Y).
Digging further into the data visualized in the chart below, growth rounds exhibited the worst relative decline on a deal count basis (the orange line), down -33% Q/Q. Pre-Seed/Seed deal count was down 30% (yellow line), followed by Late-stage VC down -23% Q/Q (blue line), while Early-stage VC had the most moderate decline at down -16% Q/Q (dark blue line).
On a historical basis, deal activity in 3Q was the lowest since 3Q18, and still higher than any previous quarter before then shown in the chart.
Content from the Crew Collective
Operator Expertise: Melanie Kirkwood Ruiz is a world-class technology leader who serves as both CIO & CTO at ABM Industries, a Fortune 500 company. Crew Capital’s Dylan Reider & Sonia Damian sat down with Melanie to discuss her career trajectory, leadership philosophy, the role of diversity in innovation, the future of AI and technology trends, and working with early-stage founders as a CIO.
A short preview:
🔍 Read the entire article here!
Crew’s Roundtable: From being UiPath's 20th hire, to its first CFO, to his role today as UiPath's CIO, Mihai Faur's journey is nothing short of inspirational. Over his 7-year tenure with the company, UiPath's annual recurring revenue went from $200k to over $1.3B. Mihai has held roles at UiPath ranging from CFO to Global Controller and Chief Accounting Officer, and has worked at several European startups and accounting giants like EY.
We recently hosted Mihai for a roundtable discussion with Crew Capital portfolio companies. During this session, he shared insights on scaling finance teams, effective investor communication, the role of IT in digital transformation, and how to identify the SaaS metrics that truly matter.
A short preview:
Nurturing a common vision for sustainable growth
To ensure a company's successful growth, a shared vision between the CEO and CFO is crucial. This vision should revolve around building a finance department that embodies scalability, durability, and innovation. The key lies in simplifying and streamlining operations, particularly those impacting financial aspects like treasury, banking, and data consolidation. If a company goes out to the capital markets to raise financing, finance teams will also be responsible for compiling metrics that can be shared with investors.
🔍 Check out the highlights here!
Want more Crew content? Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn or YouTube for insights on company building from some of the best founders and operators across the software industry!
What have our start-ups been up to this month?
MaintainX, the first mobile workflow management platform, raised the bar by introducing three new AI-Powered Maintenance Operations features designed to supercharge the productivity of frontline workers.
Xentral, a cloud ERP software centralizing all business processes for SMB’s, has released some exciting new features and improvements on their platform to ensure an easier invoice payment processing, e-commerce integration, user experience and security.
BetterUp, the AI driven coaching platform, just released BetterUp Briefing, their newest release of insights to understand tomorrow’s workforce trends, today. Their team conducted a longitudinal study of tens of thousands of frontline managers across various industries to understand why some are so successful and effective, even against a shifting business landscape that is anything but stable.
Dylibso, a platform of products that helps engineer take WebAssembly to production introduced Hermit, the next-gen toolchain that turns WASI modules into universal CLI tools, simplifying build workflows and boosting Wasm's portability across platforms.
Job Openings
We're always on the lookout to connect exceptional candidates with our portfolio companies. To learn more about the opportunities, reach out to our Head of Platform, Sonia Damian at sonia@crewcapital.co. If you want to explore all available job opportunities within our portfolio companies, please visit our career page.
We're on the lookout for an exceptional Senior Investment Associate to join our team. If you’re 1-3 years into your career, are passionate about the startup ecosystem, and aspire to become an investor, we want to hear from you!
Rillavoice, the leading conversation intelligence software for outside sales is looking for Customer Success Managers and Software Engineers based in New York.
Quarter20, the collaborative platform for hardware design & documentation is looking for a Founding Front-End Engineer based in the US.
Aktos, the operating system that powers the $18B Credit Collections industry is looking for a Senior Full-Stack Engineer, ideally backend leaning. The team is split across LA, NYC, and Canada, and is open to different geographies for this role, though time zones in ET or PT are preferred.
Quote of the Month
"It’s popular to tell entrepreneurs to never give up. I believe in a different approach that I refer to as “quit smart.” Whether it’s folding a company because the market fit isn’t there or simply reprioritizing between different products or investments, you need a specific framework and metrics to decide when is the right time to move on and try something new. You want to give yourself a lot of runway, but ultimately, it’s important to have an objective way of determining how and when to change course.”
April Koh - CEO of Spring Health, in Building a Mental Health Unicorn: The Entrepreneurial Journey of April Koh