Derek Wright’s Post

You know what's cooler than starting a new business venture with not only your closest friends, but some of the best operators in the space, who share a common vision of being good and doing good?    The answer might not surprise you here – but it's nothing. Literally nothing beats this. This seriously friggin' rules.    I'm beyond excited to announce that Samantha Williams, Adam Grabish and I are launching Fynd – a seamless extension of your business, dedicated to connecting you with the best tech and digital talent and cultivating a thriving culture without ridiculous (and unnecessary) overheads.    Over the years I've had the privilege of working with these two in varying capacities, and we've done some incredible things to date; growing grassroot startups to the point of M&As, hiring first technical hires and watching them grow sometimes into C-level positions, introducing VC/PE groups to 'hidden' startups silently doing amazing things to further build out their teams among many, many other proud achievements. And it's incredible to know this is just the beginning of many cooler things to come!    Our experience, learnings, lessons and understanding of the market and business needs, coupled with our backgrounds from startups to the big 4 consultancies makes me feel so excited about the holistic value we can bring to any company requiring solutions to empower people and power startups to scale, thrive and evolve.    We've been heads down over the past few weeks in all the SUPER riveting founder stuff – setting up business bank accounts, lawyers, insurances, accountants etc 😅but now that's all done, I'm pumped to meet faces, both friendly and new, to tell you all about who we are and what we can do!    It's been thirsty work, so Fynd me via details below for a coffee or a drink and let's chat!    📱 0407 903 686  📧 dan@fyndco.com.au    #fyndco #startup #scale #evolve #thrive #talent #recruitment #hr #fractional #IT #tech #digital 

Congratulations and great working with Eric Friedman and the team at eSkill along with Cody Halff and the team at Scaleworks. As most in the industry know, the recent M&A landscape has posed challenges, but there are now positive signs emerging as both buyers and sellers are aligning on valuations and deal structures. After a period of subdued M&A activity over the past few years, there is now a significant backlog of demand and supply, especially within the private equity sector. Behind the scenes, sellers are becoming more active, preparing for sales, developing comprehensive business plans, and engaging in vendor due diligence. While it's early in the rebound cycle and there are multiple risk factors still at play, this uptick in activity suggests that more high-quality assets are expected to enter the market in the coming six to twelve months, which is promising for both prospective buyers and sellers!

Just a few short years ago, Ed-Tech was a golden space with unicorns galore and mammoths growing faster than ever. Crazy bullish outlooks on the sector propelled investment and marketing burns. The firms hired entire armies, and for a while there, it seemed like they were unstoppable! . . Cut to today, the picture looks a lot different, doesn't it? A few things I learned when I look back... 1—Just because you got funded doesn't mean you need to increase your marketing budgets wildly. 2—Re-consider expanding headcount 10 times or even 20 times before creating that JD and rolling it out. Maybe the money would be better spent improving your product features. 3—The externality-driven tail winds (like COVID) will fizzle out. What is your real "right to win" needs to be identified and obsessed over. 4—The acquisition game is fierce, and a cap-out is inevitable. How you leverage your acquired pool of customers and delight them is what will set you apart. 5- No fancy app or sponsoring magnificent offline events can replace "Trust" in any sector. Especially in a sector like Ed-tech where futures are at stake , drilling down on "trust" is a non-negotiable. What do you think went wrong in Ed-tech and what should new-age Ed-tech startups focus on to learn from history? #edtech #startuplessons #buildingbrands

Blitzscaling should be the exception. Not the default. For many years, oversized funding rounds induced irrational exuberance and pre-mature executive hiring. Just because a startup raises a Series B doesn't mean they need a CRO. The executive search industry made A LOT of money in the ZIRP years. As the hangover set it last year, we saw which search partners had the expertise and fortitude to do the right thing. Intentional scaling has always been core to our methodology so I'm excited to share our newest playbook on sales leadership hiring. Big thanks to Liam H. Mulcahy @ Kleiner Perkins, Kyle Duffy @ Gradient Ventures, Michael Dzik @ Radian Capital for sharing their anecdotes and lived experiences as GTM operating partners. Founders & investors, please download the cheatsheet and let's build some real 🚀's and 🦄's

This Evolution of Sales Leadership is one of the most simple and direct thought-pieces we've produced to date and I'm thrilled to get it into more hands 👐 📈 🚀 https://lnkd.in/gPuVs7wp

What's the right word for this concept? When you're building a startup (or anything) there is a constant need to act like something is definitely going to happen, to get other things to happen. It's all about momentum, but everything has to work at the same time. For example, you need the lead investor to get the follow-on investors excited. Or you need the investment to finalize hires. Or you need a customer to agree to pay before the product is fully done. You need the customer to pay before you make the next payroll. I see founders constantly in these situations where they have to keep pushing toward the big vision and just have to hope that the uncontrollables do end up coming together in time for the other dominoes to fall. It's anxiety provoking, but seasoned founders seemingly become more used to it. I'm currently working on a really big project right now where I need all these different pieces to work at once. My boyfriend tells me now I know what all founders feel like (: It's stressful because I just have to keep pushing on the things I can control while I wait for the things I can't control to happen. I'd really like a good phrase or saying for this because I think it's a much needed skill for early stage founders to get familiar with!

Some takeaways from last night's Primary Venture Partners event in NYC: - New York is home to 140!! private unicorns (that's a big number, especially after the past year of valuation declines) - Private market valuations are starting to improve again - tech company layoffs are down substantively - @Ben Sun AI will bring about the most transformative productivity shift in our lifetime (keep in mind that the Internet became a thing during our lifetime and I'm sure we all thought that was profound!) - even the largest publicly held companies are seeing revenue growth accelerate due to AI - Rule of 40 was the rule but now being modified. More emphasis on growth - but, importantly, *efficient* growth. Shane Sandoval suggested focusing on Gross Dollar Efficiency - for every dollar that you put into your business, how many dollars come out (seems logical but not many founders have had to think this way... but now they do!) - Focus on ARR per employee - Cassie Young shared her pro tips on improving margins at all stages of the GTM funnel (growth/retention/unit economics/efficiency) AI is already being used in traditional film production... and it's incredible what's already possible. The pace of innovation and advancement is going to surprise a lot of people. #StateofStartups #PrimaryVentures #nyc

I chatted with VC general partners recently, and they shared something obvious but still very important for startup founders that is often missed. To succeed, you need three critical roles among the founders: Sales, Product, and Engineer. ✅ Sales is the person who gets customers and drives revenue. ✅ Product is the visionary who shapes the product and keeps it on track with customers' real needs. ✅ Engineer is the one who builds the product and makes it work. Having these three roles covered is crucial! It balances the team and covers all the bases. 💡 If you're starting something new, ensure these roles are in place. It can make all the difference. #StartupLife #Founders #Teamwork #Fintech

We’re just 1 day away from closing the applications for the 3rd MFG Programme! https://lnkd.in/eP3ApDEM Next week, we’ll be announcing the companies we’ll be working with over the coming weeks to help them raise their first media capital round. Here’s what’s different this time: 👀 With each programme, we’ve seen an increasing number of applicants. Last November, we were asked, “What is media capital or media for equity?” Now, we’re hearing, “Which media partner should I choose?” 📈 12 months ago, most applicants were at the pre-seed or seed stage. Now, 75% of the companies are Series A or beyond. In 2023, consumer startups received only 7% of all VC seed funding, leading many founders to focus on cost-cutting and extending their runway rather than advertising. 🇺🇸 We’ve noticed a growing interest in the US market: 1 in 5 companies we spoke to either has a presence in the US or plans to expand there by 2025. Stay tuned for more on this… Each programme works with 7-8 founders, with a laser focus on providing tailored media support. If this sounds like you, there are less than 48 hours left to submit your application! #mediaforgrowth

15 months into our journey, I’m excited to share that tofu closed an oversubscribed pre-seed to scale up our talent sharing marketplace. Night Capital (Kevin Carter), Ritual Capital (Chris H.), Garage Capital (Mike McCauley, Michael Litt and Devon Galloway), Wayfinder Ventures (Yuri Sagalov), and Deva Santiago (recruiting leader @ Dropbox, Weebly, Nurx, Rippling and Tailscale) helped us make this round possible. Jonathan Perez and I decided to start tofu to address the inefficiencies created from interviewing candidates at scale. By our estimate, companies spend 25 million hours a year interviewing candidates, often the same candidate. Those candidates spend almost 175 million hours a year interviewing across various roles. As you can imagine, this results in a lot of duplicative effort. tofu’s mission is to unlock this idle talent information, convert sunk interview time and costs into value, and empower companies and candidates to connect in minutes. We like to think of it as the Airbnb of recruiting. In the last 12 months since we launched our first MVP, more than 170+ companies are sharing talent on our platform. We’ve helped dozens of candidates find jobs, saved companies weeks filling roles, and spoken with 250+ talent leaders to create an experience radically different from anything else on the market. tofu wouldn’t have reached this milestone if not for some very special people who have expedited our journey from zero to one. We’re here because of folks like Suneel Mudaliar, Joel Torres, and Bryan Powell from Insight Partners. Matt Hoffman and Loren Boyce from M13. Neil Parikh (founder of Casper), Jared Hecht (Founder of GroupMe and Fundera by NerdWallet), Haftan Eckholdt (Flagship CTO), David Kaminsky (VP Engineering @ Zocdoc), and Max Schwartz-Labell. 🚀 We’re hiring our first Founding Engineer to join us on our mission to connect every company in the world. If you get excited by creating something from nothing, like building marketplaces, and want to be part of a company changing the way companies and talent come together, we want to hear from you. Please feel free to DM me on LinkedIn or apply through the link in the comments.