Marc Canabou

🌟Innovative VC Firm Overcomes Exits Drought with Secondary Sales🌟 ⛵Navigating a challenging landscape where exits are scarce, Santa Barbara Venture Partners (SBVP) has pioneered a novel approach to sustain its growth and attract investors for its second fund: secondary sales. Instead of waiting for traditional exits like IPOs or acquisitions, SBVP opted to sell shares of its portfolio companies, demonstrating its ability to generate returns for investors and stand out in a competitive market. 🎤According to Dan Engel, founder and managing partner of SBVP, these secondary transactions have been a game-changer, sparking investor interest and bolstering the firm's credibility. By leveraging its recent successes, including a lucrative stake in sports-betting company DraftKings Inc.' acquisition of digital lottery app Jackpocket, SBVP seized the opportunity to return profits to its limited partners (LPs) and pave the way for its second fund. 💡Engel highlighted the challenges faced by young VC firms in raising subsequent funds, particularly amid a downturn in exit activity and heightened investor scrutiny. With traditional exit routes becoming increasingly elusive, the pressure is on for firms to demonstrate tangible returns and establish a track record of success. ✨"For us, secondary sales have been a game-changer. They've helped us return profits to our LPs and attract investors for our second fund," said Dan Engel. 💰For SBVP, the decision to pursue secondary sales was driven by the need to provide liquidity to LPs and validate its investment thesis in the eyes of prospective investors. By strategically offloading portions of its holdings in high-performing portfolio companies like Bark Technologies and Rad AI, SBVP not only generated substantial returns but also bolstered investor confidence in its ability to deliver results. ⚠Despite the complexities and potential stigma associated with early share sales, Engel emphasized the importance of prioritizing investor returns and seizing opportunities to unlock value for stakeholders. With a focus on profitability and transparency, SBVP remains committed to its mission of delivering sustainable growth and maximizing returns for its LPs. 🔍 "Returning profits to our investors is our top priority. By strategically selling shares, we're proving our commitment to delivering results and driving value for our stakeholders," added Engel. As SBVP continues to explore secondary transactions and expand its investor base, the firm stands as a testament to innovation and resilience in the face of market challenges. 🚀 ✅ Looking to raise capital for your #fund and increase the international pool of your LP #investors?   🤝 Need warm #LP introductions?   📝 Selling #secondaries to increase liquidity?   🧐 Looking for co-investments?   ▶ G+QUANT's link for inquiries and fund decks: https://lnkd.in/gjC_EuTE #VCInnovation #SecondarySalesSuccess #InvestorReturns #ValueCreation 

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After the first deep dive discussion w/ founders I often hear a comment "I wish I had heard about this alternative [to all-in must-become-a-unicorn] way to build a startup earlier as I have wasted years in pursuing the wrong thing". Our mission is that no founder would ever need to say that again as it is such a waste. Us preaching the gospel 1:1 just doesn't scale, hence we use mass media to multiply our efforts - that's how Gorillacast came to be. The 1st episode is out, featuring yours truly. "How can you know what food you like unless you taste everything" said a chef. How can founders make informed choices about the best strategy for them to follow unless they know of all alternatives? This might not be of interest to you but pls spread the word so that the founders who should hear it can find it. I have a dream!

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#SanFrancisco VC Contact Database. Over 275 venture capital firms, more than 2,100 VC professionals (including partners and principals), and 1,600 email addresses available. https://payhip.com/b/idx8b #startup #startups #vc #venturecapital #investmentbanking #privateequity #managementconsulting #b2b #founders #entrepreneurs

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Big announcement below! 👇 Let's talk about the current state of GP-LP affairs: 🤯Emerging VC managers have absolutely exploded over the past 5 years. 📈 At the same time, more and more data has surfaced that shows that emerging VC firms tend to outperform larger, established firms. 🤔 All of this has made it intriguing but tough for LPs to know where to direct their attention. 🛍 GPs frequently meet LPs at conferences who are window shopping but not committed to the asset class or emerging managers. 🧾 And both crews get overwhelmed by transactional convos. So Sydney Paige Thomas and I created Abundance. Abundance is a private, nomination-based retreat for active LPs and top emerging GPs to form new experiences together and build lasting relationships. Why Abundance? Abundance is knowing that there is more than enough for more than one to succeed. And a single win within a community is a win for the community itself. The journey of an emerging VC manager from 1st close to final close or Fund 1 to Fund 2 is (1) communal and (2) requires an abundant mindset. LPs look for structure and confidence to feel comfortable investing in early VC firms. Yet many of the feeds we scroll and conferences we attend reinforce inherent power dynamics and transactional thinking, which allows scarcity mindset to creep in for emerging GPs. Some of the best events I’ve attended have been intentionally non-transactional, e.g. Camp Hustle, Recast Summit, and other GPs’ AGMs. The fundraising success stories we see usually involve a community (usually of other GPs & LPs) coming together to support and open doors for the emerging GP. We designed Abundance to be an immersive gathering that fosters these connections. Starting tonight, ~100 GPs and LPs are descending upon Seattle for the inaugural Abundance retreat. This has been under wraps for months and I can’t wait to see it come to life! Thanks in advance to our awesome sponsors who were the earliest believers in this vision: Sydecar, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Gunderson Dettmer, & Zelda Ventures. And shoutout to my dad Ed Illig for logo design & Halle Kaplan-Allen being the first sponsor to say yes 🤩 Presented by The Council Capital & Symphonic Capital.

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Startup Founders: here is a SUPER interesting list of emerging and first-check VC firms, many of them new or under-the-radar. Why should you care? Because... 1) emerging VCs are often easier to get in front of and, 2) since they are still building their track record, they will often hustle harder to make your startup a success. (Excellent work, Anne Gherini! :) #startups #venturecapital #entrepreneurship

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If you’re looking for a distraction from political content this week… look no further… allow me to introduce: VC podcast content :) I was so excited to finally be on Minnie Ingersoll and TenOneTen Ventures’ LA Venture Podcast. She grew this platform massively while I was on the operating side and it was such an honor to have this be my first interview since returning to VC. Minnie and I chatted poolside in her backyard in Pasadena and covered a lot of ground: - 🚀Why I think distribution and GTM is potentially a greater early moat than product in an AI-native world - 1️⃣ Is first mover advantage still a thing?! -🕵🏽‍♂️ How I think about channel vs integrated product partnership dynamics and why most of them dont work! -💰 What is (and isn’t) exciting to me and Fika Ventures in marketplaces, supply chain, commerce enablement, and more - 🧐 Why we love investing in subject matter and domain experts at Fika more than technology experts learning new domains - 🤝 What makes our partnership and team special at Fika Ventures and how we think about working with founders - 🪢 and finally, why Pejman Nozad and I have more in common than I do with most VCs! Shout outs to friends and colleagues like Tianxiang (TX) Zhuo, John Chen, Gabriella Brignardello, Route, Michael Tam, Troy Henikoff, and more in this one. And most importantly, thanks for having me, Minnie Ingersoll!

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The (Healthcare) Ground Beneath Our Feet… This year it is likely that over $10 billion will be invested in the digital health sector – a robust amount, no doubt, but inconsequential when compared to the amount of capital tied up in healthcare real estate assets, which is estimated to be $1.2 trillion by Jones Lang Lasalle. Of that amount, approximately $790 billion is in the hospital sector while the remaining $490 billion is in medical office assets. It is estimated that there are 48.6k facilities with 3.4 billion square feet of healthcare real estate, 42% of which are owned by REITs and another 33% held by other private investment vehicles. Much of the digital health investment is meant to make the physical healthcare infrastructure more productive: greater operating efficiencies, greater patient throughput, more relevant personalized care models with better outcomes. As the healthcare system is being pushed to be more distributed to lower cost sites of care, accelerated now by the rapid proliferation of automation and AI capabilities, the potential impact on healthcare infrastructure assets will be profound. Thoughts on what that might look like... https://lnkd.in/eTfAdUbS #digitalhealth Flare Capital Partners

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Orb (#uncorrelated) raised $25M to continue building their pricing and billing platform that lets companies automate a range of different billing modes e.g., usage-based, subscriptions, or a mix, marry analytics and billing, collect and meter product usage data, invoice customers, generate revenue reports, draw on product usage insights to find revenue opportunities, model out alternative pricing plans (thus enabling experimentation), orchestrate changes in real time, schedule future price changes for certain customer cohorts or contract renewals, directly embed draft invoices into product billing portals, surface past-due invoices, and recover failed payments automatically. "Orb gives companies a single source of truth that can connect every unit of product usage to revenue. We’ve found a particularly strong fit in AI, cloud infrastructure, fintech, and dev tools, and have seen most of our growth come from those verticals.” Orb’s revenue grew 5x in the past year, and the customer base tripled to include brands such as Vercel, Replit, Pinecone, and Perplexity. https://lnkd.in/gYh4y2tg

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Today, GTMfund’s is excited to announce to launch of Operator, its first incubated company. Max Altschuler (founder of GTMfund) teamed up with co-founder Adam M. (design engineer and 0-1 builder) and co-founder Mark Kosoglow (Outreach employee #1 and former SVP of Global Sales) to create Operator.ai alongside an insanely talented team Pleasant Middelhof, Jeremy Jonas, Carl Gunderson. We've entered a period called “The Great Ignore”. Spam and irrelevant, poorly-automated outbound campaigns are running rampant.   Operator gives you an easy-to-use Growth Engineer that allows you to build and enrich lists with accurate data, and run experiments and queries using AI to generate highly targeted outreach.    Check out their website to get updates, early access, and see how they are taking the world back to 2 touches meant to attract buyers into conversations that convert, instead of 20 touches meant to make sure you hit your activity number: https://www.operator.ai/

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Fin Capital’s Fintech CEO Pulse Report is out! We surveyed over 50 CEOs and C-suite leaders of private companies from our portfolio and the broader fintech industry during June and July 2024 to get a quick pulse on what’s top of mind for fintech’s leaders. Here are some key takeaways: Optimism in the Air: More than 60% of CEOs reported being bullish or highly bullish on the fintech industry for the second half of 2024. Regulatory Changes on the Horizon: CEOs identified Cryptocurrency, Open Banking, and Buy Now Pay Later as the top three sectors likely to see increased regulation by the end of 2024. CEOs Want Business Development Support: Beyond capital and fundraising, business development support emerged as the top area where CEOs seek investor assistance.For more insights, including comments from my colleagues Ren Riley, Logan Allin, Matthew D. Mann, CFA, and Stephanie Perez, check out the full report here: https://lnkd.in/euHK8-9B

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🔥 🔥 🙌 🙌 🎆 🎆 I'm *fired up* to share this. #VentureIQ by the 9point8 Collective is officially live. We've heard from investors of every size and type that it takes too long and costs too much to evaluate deal flow; this limits the scale and speed at which these capital allocators can operate. To address this problem, we've created an innovative solution which delivers high fidelity diligence information near instantaneously. From a time and cost perspective, VentureIQ immediately creates leverage to look at more deals - and creates space to focus deeply on the most meaningful opportunities. To learn more, you can reach out to me directly or visit VentureIQ.ai. I'll close with some thoughts on my team, to whom I'm so grateful. Blair Merlino, Neal Ghosh and Evan Allen don't just talk about interesting concepts, point out problems or pontificate on what could be. Instead, they identify a problem, frame and validate the solution, and do the work to bring it to reality. VentureIQ is the best example I've seen of this, to date. #VentureCapital, #FamilyOffice, #PrivateEquity #CorporateDevelopment #Startups

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I believe two of the big winners over the next 10 years in the SMB category will be PE who are rolling up the businesses and GenAI powered software that makes running these businesses significantly more turnkey and/or profitable. Thanks for having me on Jay Kapoor. If you want spicy takes fast forward to 25 min mark. If you want to get deep in market analysis buckle in for the whole thing. https://lnkd.in/d8M7Jyrx

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A PATH FOR SMALLER IPOs From Carl Chiou (quoted verbatim), an example of a smaller IPO and what it takes. Thanks Carl! ---- I’ve been busy working on a complex transaction we announced yesterday morning. Powerfleet (AIOT), a ~$500mm market cap vertical software company announced a $200mm acquisition of a privately owned competitor concurrently with a $70mm equity issuance via a PIPE as part of a larger financing package. Why is this relevant to you? Because it demonstrates the art of the possible for smaller companies that aspire to become public companies. First, investor demand absolutely exists for smaller market cap issuers as the company raised nearly 20% of its market cap to finance a transformative acquisition. While it may feel like the path to IPO for private companies requires $500mm+ of revenue, that’s simply not the reality. But… Second, success doesn’t happen overnight as many investors had already met with the company multiple times at conferences and their familiarity with the business and management team allowed them to move quickly. For private companies, that means being active and targeted in investor outreach in the 12-18 months leading up to an IPO. Third, giving up some of the pie to grow the pie can be a win-win for everyone. The equity offering priced at $3.50 versus a prior day close of $4.66, but two days post-announcement, shares are trading comfortable above $5. As much as I’ve written about optimizing IPO pricing, I’m also realistic that for smaller cap issuers, investors are going to underwrite more conservative valuations to accept the risk of less liquid, potentially higher volatility stocks. Fourth, the consolidation thesis resonates with investors as it simplifies the competitive landscape, adds revenue scale and drives improved operational and financial efficiency that improves the bottom line. I continue to believe that as much as the large strategics and private equity will play a role in clearing out the private tech pipeline, small – midsize companies will also be key participants going forward. End of day, Databricks, Stripe and other large scale, high-fliers are going to garner instant investor attention and a high multiple out of the gate when they eventually go public. But for everyone else, it’s important to know that with the right expectations, there is a clear path to an IPO. 1:10 PM · Sep 19, 

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Ross Haleliuk posted the fantastic article below. This is the world where I live day-to-day. At TechOperators, we invest mostly in early-stage cyber, but we do things a little differently, and we believe there are ways to invest successfully outside of pure Power Law math. The article argues that many security problems are too small for VC. I agree. I often try to convince bootstrapped founders not to raise venture because doing so can turn a successful, slow-growing bootstrapped company into a failed venture-backed company because, despite a large infusion of capital, it couldn't double every year. VC is not monolithic--not by stage, strategy, or style. Venture is often equated with "Tier 1 Venture". Ross argues that VC is not always great for early-stage cyber--and he is right. Bootstrapping AND VC work when incentives are aligned. Does it work for an early-stage VC with a <$200M fund to invest in several early companies at reasonable valuations, setting up the conditions for reasonable exits that pay off for both investors and founders? Yes. Does it work for $800M funds investing in seed stage at $100M+ valuations? Well, that depends! Power law says it does (for VC), but the unfortunate externality is that these rounds destroy companies and founder equity more often than not. There is a role for patient capital in this ecosystem to fuel successful companies that retain exit optionality as they scale--driving exit value for both founders and investors.

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Is President Trump’s agenda more aligned with venture and “little tech”? I posed this question and more to Bradley Tusk, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Tusk Venture Partners, on the latest episode of The Full Ratchet. We also discussed how regulatory challenges, AI, crypto, and the gig economy shape the future for startups. Listen to Episode 455 of The Full Ratchet for Bradley’s full take! Link to the full episode is in the comment section below.

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Thrilled to share our latest podcast episode featuring Peter Marton, co-founder & CEO of OpenMeter! We talked about how OpenMeter is transforming AI billing with their usage-based pricing model. Peter shares his journey from Netflix & Stripe to building this Y Combinator-backed startup, plus insights on: - The pain points of traditional billing for developers - Why open-source is key to transparency in AI monetization - How OpenMeter is empowering companies to manage AI costs effectively - ...and much more! Check out the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/ebAQFhi7 Let me know: What's your biggest challenge with adopting usage-based billing for your products or services? #startups #entrepreneurship #AI #API #monetization #OpenMeter

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Menlo's 2024 Enterprise AI Report -- hot off the press! 🔥 Enterprise AI spending is continuing to grow - up 6x now from 2023 at a staggering $13.8B. To call out a few findings 🔎 - AI's scope has broadened to every department. Enterprises note the most valuable use-cases are in code copilots, support chatbots, enterprise search / data extraction, and meeting summarization. While every department has received a chunk of the enterprise AI budget (IT, support, marketing, sales, etc.), the technical departments still command the largest share of generative AI spend. - With all this spend, enterprises need something clearly valuable and relevant. Decision-makers rank having 'easily quantifiable ROI' and 'customizability' as the top 2 factors when selecting generative AI tools. - 2024 is the year of vertical AI applications. Healthcare, legal, financial services as well as media and entertainment continue to see a number of vertical AI applications tailored to their needs. - Foundational models continue to make-up the bulk of AI investments, especially as enterprises move toward multi-modal approaches. Read more about it here: https://lnkd.in/gamn_YG6 CC Tim Tully, Derek Xiao, Joff Redfern, Claude Sonnet 3.5 😊 🚀

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We’re excited to share our latest research, the 2024 State of Generative AI in the Enterprise. Our report dives deep into how businesses are adopting and investing in AI + our predictions for what lies ahead. Some highlights: - AI spending jumped to $13.8 billion in 2024, up 6x from what we reported in 2023 - 72% of leaders expect accelerated adoption - Enterprise spending for AI-native applications surged to $4.6 billion in 2024, an almost 8x increase from the $600 million spend we reported in 2023 - Key sectors leading adoption: Healthcare (captured $500M in spending), Legal Services ($350M), Financial Services and Media gaining momentum ($100M each) Take a look at the full report 👉 https://lnkd.in/gJi-88hE We're excited about founders and products addressing the app-layer and infrastructure stack. Reach out if you're building something here or ideating!

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Join me as I share the secrets to gaining Angel Investment (being ESIC is one) and help you land your pitch and get your message across. I'm joined by experienced founders who can share their experiences and help you develop your own (survive the) Chasm Plan.

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