Capital Chronicles #20

Hello there! Welcome to Capital Chronicles, saving you hours every week with ~2-3 minute summarised insights from the best venture builders, investors and capital allocators out there. This week: building pipeline with Growth Unhinged, the Cloud 100 Benchmarks Report from Bessemer Venture Partners, Greylock’s Executive Recruiting Playbook and Sapphire Ventures’ July 2024 Market Memo.

As subscriber #TBD, each web link below takes you to:

• A link to the original article (read time: varies)

• Summary / insights / implications per article (read time: 2-3 minutes)

Now, read on for the latest…

🛠️ On venture building…

How to build more pipeline in 2024, from Kyle Poyar at Growth Unhinged. The article shares insights from over 350 go-to-market leaders on effective strategies for generating sales pipeline.

• Why you should read it: the article provides many concrete examples and case studies from companies like Carta, G2, Miro, and Superhuman, showcasing incredible ROI that should help enterprise-focused leaders spark an idea or two. Four main themes emerged from the work: leveraging both large and intimate events, orchestrating account-based plays across teams, getting creative with outbound tactics, and revisiting pricing and packaging for land-and-expand opportunities.

🧭 On venture investing…

The Cloud 100 Benchmarks Report 2024, from Bessemer Venture Partners in partnership with Forbes and Salesforce Ventures. The ninth edition of the definitive ranking of the world's top 100 private cloud companies.

• Why you should read it: the report offers a rare glimpse into the performance of the best-performing cloud companies, metrics and all. Total list value reached a record $820 billion, up 25% from 2023, with growth rates rebounding to 70% year-over-year from 55% in 2023. Yet private cloud multiples continue to reflect the public market reset, decreasing from 26x in 2023 to 23x, down 31% since the market high in 2021.

📖 Learning resource…

The Executive Recruiting Playbook and Reference Checklist, a series of podcasts with Greylock executive talent partner Holly Rose Faith. Holly shares the intricacies of executive recruiting for venture-backed startups.

• Why you should read it: valuable insights and practical advice on executive recruiting, which is crucial for building strong leadership and scaling a VC-backed company successfully. You will get: a structured approach to executive recruiting, ways to engage top-tier talent, tips on conducting effective interviews, guidance and questions on reference checking, advice on closing candidates and insights into the common pitfalls and overlooked aspects of the recruiting process.

📊 Market insight…

The Sapphire Ventures’ July 2024 Market Memo. A comprehensive analysis of the current state of the AI market, with a particular focus on venture capital investments and emerging technology trends.

• Why you should read it: the memo presents a nuanced view of the AI software landscape, suggesting that while there may be signs of a "trough of disillusionment" in the AI hype cycle, the underlying fundamentals and long-term potential of AI remain strong. Four market dynamics point to this slide into the “trough” for AI: shifting infrastructure narratives, stock price declines, startup leadership shakeups and product delays. But AI-focused areas continued to see strong interest, with $8.0B in investment across 675 deals in July alone.

🎲Lucky dip essential reads…

• The 10 Rules of VC Fundraising Many Founders Just Miss

• The Extinction of Venture Capital?

• Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build

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Have a great week!

Josh