Craft Ventures

Working across dozens of B2B Craft Ventures portfolio companies, it's 1000% clear that LinkedIn is a powerhouse for building trust, amplifying their brand and, driving meaningful pipeline and customer activity at various funnel stages. How do you get over the cold start problem? Here are 5 key insights for founders, marketers, and GTM leaders to maximize LinkedIn. ______________________ 1. LinkedIn thrives on trust: The bar for content is high—thoughtful, valuable, and authentic posts resonate more than flashy campaigns. 2. Founders make an impact: Founder-led sales and branding are some of the most effective ways to build credibility and drive engagement. 3. Video wins attention: From corporate humor (ClickUp’s style) to educational content, video is one of the most digestible and engaging formats on LinkedIn—shoutout to Chris Cunningham who has taken this to the next level. 4. Personal brands + ICP focus: Whether it’s a founder, or GTM executive, strong individual presences on LinkedIn can amplify messaging and connection with your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP) beyond what "traditional" demand gen. ➝ ➝ ➝ One of my favorite executives in the Craft Ventures portfolio leveraging LinkedIn is Kyle Coleman, CMO at Copy.ai—Kyle does an outstanding job of leveraging relevant, helpful and thoughtful ICP-driven content while sitting in a position of trust in his current and past roles (while also running marketing for one of the best GTM platforms centric around generative AI). 5. Integrated strategies work best: A mix of LinkedIn ads, InMails, video content, and personal thought leadership posts creates a holistic, high-impact presence. ➝ ➝ ➝ I've had the pleasure of working with Peter Fishman, Co-Founder & CEO at Mozart Data, in the Craft Ventures portfolio to use an integrated campaign style with personal posting layered on top of a core demand generation effort (with an actually good E-Book alongside InMails) to validate a GTM thesis while building positive ROI in pipeline and closed-won revenue. ________________________ Want to check out the full session with Ruby James from LinkedIn and Ron Dawson from HubSpot For Startups where talk about this? Watch it here: [Link in comments] Would love additional thoughts on what else is working on LinkedIn now—tagging in some of my other favorite folks:  Adrian Alfieri, Brian Sun, Caroline B., Devin Reed, Nigel Stevens, 😻 Maeva Cifuentes, Meg Scarborough

Looking forward to kicking off 2025 with a talk at SIGS in Switzerland! Time to figure out what happens when we combine AI with Quantum computers and drop that into the Security arena! #CISO #Skynet

🚀 Big shout out to Upwind Security on the $100M Series A! It’s been such a pleasure working with the Upwind team over the past 15 months and watching them make remarkable strides in redefining cloud security. This milestone is just the beginning of what’s to come for a team with such an ambitious vision and relentless drive ... Amiram Shachar, Lavi Ferdman, Tomer Hadassi, Liran Polak, Joshua Burgin, Max Stevens, Denise Ashur! Love working with you! Cloud security is one of the most valuable segments in cyber. A $20B+ market growing over 20%+ annually, and Upwind is transforming the space with their cutting-edge approach. Their next-gen platform, powered by an innovative eBPF sensor, delivers the runtime context and real-time protection today’s security leaders demand. Upwind is building something special, and we’re thrilled to deepen our partnership as they continue to lead the transformation of cloud security. Cheers to the new investors joining us Morgan Gerlak at TCV and Carson Fullard at Alta Park Capital, LP and special shout out to existing investors Gili Raanan at Cyberstarts, Saam Motamedi at Greylock, Gideon Hayden at Leaders Fund, Omri Casspi at Sheva, Stephen Curry, Haleli Barath at Cerca Partners. Grateful to be working with you all. Just the beginning...Up and Upwind! More info on our investment here:

Upwind Security is rethinking the architecture of cloud security platforms, placing an eBPF sensor at the core to deliver runtime context and real-time protection for organizations. It's been a pleasure supporting Amiram Shachar and Max Stevens over the last 15 months and hearing the feedback from CISO's first hand. And welcome to our new investors Morgan Gerlak from TCV and Carson Fullard from Alta Park Capital, LP 🚀

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is one of those acronyms that is thrown around all the time. The annoying part? It means 100 different things to 100 different companies based on their motion type — let’s dig in. I love supporting our portfolio here at Craft Ventures on ABM for every motion type: Product-Led Growth (PLG), Product-Led Sales (PLS) and Sales-Led Growth (SLG). The most fun component is refining all the playbooks we used at ClickUp around a mix of PLG and sales-led ABM strategies, with world-class PLS and SLG businesses. I joined Ron Dawson from HubSpot For Startups and Ruby James from LinkedIn to discuss account-based marketing (ABM) strategies for startups, from Seed-stage to Series C and beyond. Here's 8 quick takeaways (below) for all my founders, marketing / growth / GTM leaders and teams out there. ________________________ - How ABM worked at ClickUp: ABM helped organize inbound PLG leads and align them with the sales motion, showcasing the flexibility of ABM. - The simple definition of ABM (for anyone): Selecting high-value accounts and creating tailored strategies to engage and convert. - Marketing's job vs. Sales' job: Marketing creates awareness with targeted content, while sales personalizes outreach and deepens relationships. - Get S&M on the same page: Sales and marketing must agree on the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and strategy to drive effective collaboration. - Avoid this for unsuccessful ABM: Many startups struggle with unclear ICPs, insufficient foundational content, and the long-term commitment ABM requires. - Your quick checklist for successful ABM: Prioritize ICP definition, create industry-specific content, and leverage intent data to engage prospects at the right time. - What's happening in ABM for early-stage companies: ABM adoption has surged, with over 90% of Seed and Series A stage startups using it to cut through noise. - Don't forget this in ABM: ABM requires trust-building, patience for long sales cycles, and consistent messaging to keep prospects engaged over time. ________________________ Want to check out the conversation in-depth? You can watch it here: https://lnkd.in/gWpxcDEq Stay tuned for Pt. 2 next week, where we’ll dive into the effective use of LinkedIn for winning in marketing and ABM for all B2B GTM motion types.

The software we use everyday doesn't leverage the power of sight. But it will soon. Roboflow has raised an additional $40M to further grow open source and enterprise visual AI. Delivering on the promise of computer vision and visual AI is bigger than any one co. Open source packages we maintain with the community see millions of downloads. Roboflow Universe supports 500M+ user created and shared images across 150k+ models. The hosted platform has delivered 1M hours of GPU training to open source projects. We remain committed to being the starting point for those tinkering, creating, and scaling up your computer vision projects from dataset to model to deployment (and, increasingly, in reverse order). We've also seen rapid adoption from 25,000 organizations, including some of the world's largest Fortune 100 companies, operating at worldwide scale. Roboflow's solutions keep trains on the tracks, ensure your packages show up on time, and provide the building materials for your homes. 40% of global GDP (!) is wrapped up in these operationally intensive, real world businesses, and they're seeing millions in ROI partnering with Roboflow. We'd love to build with you.

🚨 Thrilled to announce our $12M Series A led by Benchmark and Sarah Tavel to accelerate Agentio’s mission to transform the future of advertising! 🚀 Since launching the Agentio ad platform last October, we’ve empowered leading performance marketing teams to scale YouTube creator ad programs as easily as other digital channels. By automating the hardest parts of working with creators—opacity, friction, decentralization, and lengthy negotiations—we’re unlocking a $600B+ paid media budget pool for authentic storytelling. This shift allows brands to invest in creators at scale for the first time, enabling them to authentically represent their stories and values. We believe creators are the future of advertising—not more banner ads, not skippable video ads, but real, meaningful, creator content that audiences love. Until now, this future hasn’t been scalable. Agentio is changing that. Our growth has been explosive, with many of the world's best advertisers and creators alike seeing tremendous value and ROAS from our platform. This journey wouldn’t be possible without our talented, world-class team and my incredible co-founder and CTO, Jonathan Meyers. To our amazing brand and creator partners, and to Benchmark , Craft Ventures, AlleyCorp, and so many others who share our vision—thank you for believing in our ambitious vision. If you’re a marketer looking to unlock a highly-performant ad channel, let’s connect! If you’re ready to help build a generational company in NYC, check out our 7 open roles—we’d love to have you on this journey: https://lnkd.in/ez2zhyrT This is just the beginning. Onward! 🚀 Congrats, team! I'm so lucky to get to set a higher bar with you, each and every day. Johanna Martens, Kevin Shieh, Abbie Sheppard, Hilary Anne Hyman, Sam Schiff, Alec S., Anna Haywood, John Schlachtenhaufen, Saumya Grover, Leona Lu, Steven Laake, Dan Tucker, Guillermo Echarte https://lnkd.in/eu8gUfb5

We're excited to back Endeavor on their mission to leverage AI to revitalize American manufacturing. More from Jeff Fluhr and Brian Murray on why we invested: https://lnkd.in/ghiQftnN

Last night William Harmer, CISSP, CISM, CIPP, Zao Chen and I had the pleasure of spending the evening with members of Craft Ventures's CISO & CXO Advisory Council for an intimate dinner filled with interesting conversations and sharing. Thank you for being there and for your engagement Chet M., Dušan Vuksanovic, Geeta Pyne, Jonathan Chan and Parag Shrivastava & Rinki Sethi.

Calculating your core #SaaS metrics have already been standardized by SaaSGrid. Today, they launched a new suite of tools to track sales pipeline metrics. Analyzing sales pipeline is vital for forecasting future growth and learning where your product and GTM process needs to improve. Check out the new blog post by David O. Sacks & Ethan Ruby: The Pipeline Metrics that Matter.