Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures: The Product Market Fit Podcast

Scribe makes it easy to share how you do your work by creating automated documentation. Scribe raised a Series B recently and has grown to millions of users with enterprise customers like Gong, LinkedIn, and Shopify.

In this episode, Scribe’s co-founder and CEO, Jennifer Smith chats with Sandhya Hegde about Scribe’s early days.

Join us as we discuss:

00:00 Preview — capturing institutional knowledge

1:46 The insight for starting scribe

5:40 Building the Founding Team

8:10 Product Launch and Early Adopters

12:40 Launching the GA Product

15:08 Analyzing User Feedback and Customer Profiles

16:42 Early go-to-market strategy

20:18 The evolution of Scribe’s GTM strategy

22:50 Leveraging AI

Eightfold AI is a talent management platform used by hundreds of large organizations like Vodafone and Activision Blizzard. It helps them leverage data to find great people with the skills they need, both internally and externally. Last valued at $2.1 billion, Eightfold was launched in 2016.

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Ashutosh Garg, co-founder and CEO of Eightfold AI.

Join us as we discuss:

00:00 Why Ashustosh wanted to build a talent platform

1:47 Ashutosh Garg's early career at Google

5:09 The founding insight for Eightfold AI

7:38 Why Ashustosh decided to focus on HR tech

9:42 Challenges of selling to large enterprises

17:11 Advantages of being an "outsider" in HR tech

19:32 Ashutosh's learnings as a repeat founder

22:58 The impact of recent macro shifts on the labor market

24:50 The impact of GenAI on Eightfold's roadmap

30:16 The future of work

35:11 Advice for first-time founders

Monte Carlo is an end-to-end data observability platform that monitors pipelines for missing or inaccurate data. Last valued at $1.6B, Monte Carlo has over 150 customers, including data teams at companies such as CNN, JetBlue, Hubspot, PepsiCo, and Toast. 

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Barr Moses, co-founder and CEO of Monte Carlo. 

Join us as we discuss:

00:00 Preview —Early feedback from a potential customer

1:37 Why Barr and Lior decided to focus on data observability

6:28 Profile of Monte Carlo’s early adopters

12:27 Common pain points among early adopters

16:05 How Monte Carlo narrowed in on their ICP

21: 33 Early product feedback and surprises

26:27 Monte Carlo’s current go-to-market strategy

31:22 How AI will impact the data ecosystem

35:57 Advice for founder building data platforms

Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine that answers user questions. Founded in 2022 and valued at over $1B, Perplexity recently crossed 10M monthly active users and is growing fast.

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Denis Yarats, co-founder and CTO of Perplexity.

Join us as we discuss:

00:00 Reactions to Perplexity’s prototype in 2022

1:33 How Arvind and Denis started working together

4:04 Building a text-to-SQL tool initially

6:34 Launch of ChatGPT and pivot to general search

9:46 Focusing on user data, and not on the foundation model

14:43 Perplexity’s early adopters

16:42 Early customer feedback

18:44 Perplexity’s core technical competencies

22:44 Subscription pricing and future gross margins

25:12 Perplexity’s hardware partnerships 

29:49 Future product vision 

32:50 Advice for founders in the AI space

Everlaw is a legal tech company started in 2011 that helps law firms and corporations run what’s called “e-discovery”— essentially a process of investigating often massive piles of documents to find the key pieces of evidence, the smoking gun, and then to construct a narrative from it. Last valued at over $2B, Everlaw has over 1,000 customers over the world.  

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with AJ Shankar, CEO and founder of Everlaw.

Join us as we discuss: 

00:00: The vision for Everlaw 

0:36 Introduction to Everlaw

1:45 AJ Shankar's Journey to Starting Everlaw

4:43 The Vision and Early Years of Everlaw

6:41 Challenges in Fundraising and Building the Early Team

9:56 Understanding Customer Needs and Building Authenticity

11:38 Product Development and Technical Skills

16:22 Impact of Everlaw on the Legal Industry

20:36 Fundraising Challenges and Success

23:59 Adoption of Generative AI and its Implications

29:30 The Future of Everlaw and the Legal Industry

35:51 AJ Shankar's Evolution as a Founder and CEO

Deepgram is a voice AI company that has built an incredible reputation in the market for the quality of its speech recognition. Last valued at over $250M, Deepgram has over 500 customers, including NASA, Spotify, and Twilio. 

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Scott Stephenson, CEO and co-founder of Deepgram.

Join us as we discuss: 

00:00 Preview: Fully contextualized speech-to-speech is the future

01:07 Scott's background in particle physics and starting Deepgram

7:18 Scott's first years as a founder

13:17 How the Deepgram team gathered early customer feedback

17:38 Early use cases and product feedback

22:58 How conversational AI will impact the customer support industry

26:54 Specialized hardware in the AI Industry

30:34 How additional hardware specialization will impact Deepgram

32:14 Deepgram's product vision

36:46 Advice for Founders starting an AI company

Material Security is an email security company that protects an organization's users and data particularly across Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Last valued at $1.1B, Material has over 100 enterprise customers, including Doordash, Lyft, and Fox. 

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde and Wei Lien Dang chat with Abhishek Agrawal, CEO and co-founder of Material Security.

Join us as we discuss: 

00:00 Preview: Seeking validation for a B2B product

1:36 Founding Material Security

5:31 Identifying the Gap in Existing Solutions

10:00 Validating the Thesis 

12:41 Product Vision and Initial MVP

19:56 Go-to-Market Strategy for the First Million in ARR

25:40 Product Vision and Impact of AI

31:50 Advice for Founders Starting Companies in 2024

Hightouch is a composable customer data platform. It helps companies collect and sync user data into ad platforms, CRMs, email tools etc. Last valued at over $600M, Hightouch has over 600 customers, including the NBA, Spotify, Plaid, Calendly, and more.

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Kashish Gupta, co-CEO and co-founder of Hightouch. 

Join us as we discuss: 

00:00 Switching personas to find product-market fit

1:44 Evolution of the Data Integration Space

2:42 The Concept of Reverse ETL

5:41 The Origin Story of Hightouch

8:01 Exploring Different Business Ideas

12:06 Early Design Partners and Product Strategy

14:46 Transition from Founder Selling to Hiring Sales Team

16:48 Go-to-Market Motion and Marketing Strategy

18:39 Hightouch's Product Vision and Future Direction

22:55 Challenges in the Market and Building User Certainty

27:01 Co-CEO Arrangement and Founder Team Dynamic

31:04 Advice for Aspiring Founders in 2024

Notion is a productivity platform that blends all your workplace apps into a single platform, including team projects, wikis, and docs. Last valued at $10bn, Notion’s customers include teams at Amazon, Nike, Uber, Figma, Deel, and more!

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Akshay Kothari, co-founder and COO of Notion.

Join us as we discuss: 

00:00 Preview: Building Notion 1.0

03:32 How Akshay met Ivan Zhao and invested in Notion

5:21 Lessons from the Pulse Journey

8:09 Building Notion’s first templates

12:43 Why Akshay joined Notion full-time

16:26 Akshay’s first few months at Notion

21:59 Evolution of Notion’s GTM strategy and Enterprise vs SMB

26:13 Akshay’s GTM learnings and challenges 

34:37 Launching AI Features in Notion

38:44 Customer Feedback and Future of Notion AI

Domino Data Lab was founded in 2013 and was one of the early innovators in the space known as MLOps. It delivers a unified platform for enterprises to build, deploy, and manage machine learning workloads and provides access to data, tools, compute, models across any environment. Domino enables ML and data teams to collaborate, ensure governance, and reduce costs at scale.

In this episode, Wei Lien Dang chats with Chris Yang, co-founder and CTO of Domino Data.

Join us as we discuss: 

00:00 Introduction to Domino Data Lab

02:04 The Origin Story of Domino Data Lab

06:58 Balancing Authenticity and Customer Feedback

10:52  Open Communication and Collaboration Among Co-founders

14:24 The Importance of Engaging with Users

16:19  Building the First Feature: Enabling Compute Workloads in the Cloud

22:42 Discovering Unexpected Use Cases and Features

33:20 The Importance of Choosing a Target Market

35:44 The Evolution of MLOps and the Current AI Wave 

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Julianna Lamb, co-founder and CTO of Stytch. Stytch is a comprehensive tool for identity management. Its auth and fraud prevention capabilities improve both security and user experience. Last valued at $1.0B, the company now works with over 1000 customers.

Join us as we discuss: 

00:00 Preview: early product surprises for the Stytch team

01:53 Introduction to Stytch and identity management

05:15 The founding insight for Stytch

10:27 Validating the idea and Minimum Viable Product

12:27 Choosing a customer segment and MVP

14:33 Surprises and patterns in early customers

17:57 Lessons from Plaid and building a flexible solution

19:46 Approach to developer marketing

22:20 Approach to developer awareness and hiring

26:32 Starting a company in an unusual environment

30:53 Impact of AI on authentication and fraud prevention

34:25 Advice for developers starting a company

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Andy Byrne, co-founder and CEO of Clari. Clari was started in 2012 and last valued at $2.6B. Its revenue platform has been helping enterprise sales teams create visibility and predictability within their organization for over a decade. It helps over 1,500 companies including Cisco and Databricks improve their entire revenue process.

Join us as we discuss:

00:00 Preview: Gen AI’s impact on revenue ops

1:40 Origin Story and pain points

3:27 Early challenges and customer feedback

6:00 Surprises and feedback from design partners

10:01 Building for multiple stakeholders

13:16 Go-to-Market strategy

14:56 Identifying adjacent opportunities

18:00 Clari’s AI strategy

20:52 The future of sales and revenue

26:44 The evolution of CRM providers

28:34 Crowded sales tech landscape

32:59 Advice for new founders in GTM Tech

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde and Wei Lien Dang chat about everything that happened in the world of AI Startups in 2023.

2023 was very much an Act 2 for Generative AI as GPT became a household name. We had a long Act 1 during Covid ending with some incredible launches in the second half of 2022 including Stable Diffusion and of course ChatGPT. We take a closer look at what the pivotal moments have been this year and more importantly what they mean for the startups ecosystem.

Join us as we discuss: 00:00 Preview: Strategy to defeat incumbent software companies

3:39 January 2023 — ChatGPT's Success and Consumer Adoption

7:16 February 2023 — Controversies and Legal Issues

12:09 March 2023 — GPT-4 Launch and Multimodal AI

16:04 April and May 2023 — Large infrastructure providers’ AI strategy

20:04 June 2023 — GPU Shortage and Infrastructure Challenges

22:41 July and August 2023 — Fine-Tuning and New Modalities

29:46 September 2023 — Governance and Safety Concerns

32:06 October 2023 — Revenue Generation and Open Source

33:18 November 2023 — OpenAI Leadership Changes

37:17 December 2023 — Google's Gemini and Future Predictions

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor.

Wei Lien Dang is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures and leads investments in infrastructure software, security, and developer tool. Wei was a co-founder of StackRox, a cloud-native security company prior to its acquisition by Red Hat.

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from Unusual Ventures:

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Shishir Mehrotra, CEO and co-founder of Coda.

Coda is a collaborative workspace that brings together teams and tools to create organized workflows in docs. Started in 2014, Coda serves over 80% of the Fortune 100. Last valued at $1.4B,  Coda is used by over 25,000 teams including ones at Figma, The New York Times, Square, Doordash, and Toast. 

00:00 Preview: Coming up with product insights

01:38 Shishir’s experience at YouTube

03:32 YoutTube Shorts versus Tiktok

06:03 Product-market fit is not a binary

08:04 The founding insight behind Coda

11:16 Positioning Coda against incumbent products

18:05 Coda’s alpha launch

24:36 PMF scores versus disappointment scores

29:53 Shishir’s approach to product rituals

38:05 The launch of Coda 4.0

43:50 Advice for new founders in enterprise productivity

MosaicML is the developer of open source infrastructure for training LLMs. The company was acquired by Databricks for $1.3 billion in July 2023. and has gone from 0 to over $30M in revenue this year in just 6 months.

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde and Wei Lien Dang chat with Naveen Rao, co-founder of MosaicML and now the head of Generative AI at Databricks

Join us as we discuss:

00:00 Preview: Future of foundation model companies

2:16 How Naveen’s previous experiences led to MosaicML

7:29 The core insight behind the founding of MosaicML

9:52 MosaicML’s approach to building an end-to-end platform

12:09 Why MosaicML focused on open models and LLMs

14:25 Why most foundation model companies will fail

15:52 How MosaicML found early adopters

18:14 Early use cases for MosaicML’s product

21:27 Impact of early feedback on MosaicML’s product roadmap

25:21 Why Naveen decided to move ahead with the Databricks acquisition

31:44 How Naveen sees the AI ecosystem evolving

34:08 Regulation of AI and the importance of open source

41:15 Advice for founding building AI infrastructure

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor.

Wei Lien Dang is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures and leads investments in infrastructure software, security, and developer tool.  Wei was a co-founder of StackRox, a cloud-native security company prior to its acquisition by Red Hat.

Naveen Rao is the co-founder of MosaicML (now a Databricks company) and currently the head of Generative AI at Databricks

Full episode transcript here: www.unusual.vc/post/sprigs-product-market-fit-journey

Sprig is an AI-powered product feedback platform; it helps teams run in-product surveys and session replays with AI native analysis to help them build better products. Last valued at $330M, Sprig has hundreds of the largest and fastest growing tech companies as customers, including Notion, Figma, PayPal, Webflow, and Dropbox.

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Ryan Glasgow, the founder and CEO of Sprig. 

Join us as we discuss:

01:13 Sprig’s origin story

05:26 Evolution of user feedback platforms

09:26 Building Sprig’s early team

12:37 Validating Sprig’s product hypothesis

15:37 Building relationships with early design partners

19:15 Iterating to MVP

23:19 Ryan’s approach to founder selling

29:11 Sprig’s early AI strategy

33:36 Sprig AI strategy post-ChatGPT

35:37 Ryan’s evolution as CEO

Solo is an open-source developer platform designed to connect applications with service meshes across any software infrastructure. Their core promise to their customer is to help them migrate from 10/20 year old legacy monolithic applications to new cloud native architectures with APIs and microservices. 

Last valued at $1Bn, Solo has hundreds of enterprise customers including enterprises like TMobile, American Express, SAP, Sumo Logic, and more.

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Idit Levine, the founder and CEO of Solo. 

Join us as we discuss:

1:13 Solo’s origin story

6:04 Early fundraising challenges

13:45 The technical insight that led to Solo

15:00 Studying the market to refine Solo’s product vision

16:49 API Gateway as a stepping stone for service mesh

21:58 Early customer acquisition efforts

24:33 Idit’s conviction in the API Gateway approach

25:26 How Solo found its first paying customers

29:25 Idit’s approach to founder selling 

31:17 Idit’s evolution as CEO

36:50 Solo’s approach to open source community-building

40:50 Advice for founders building open source projects

Full episode transcript: https://www.unusual.vc/post/writers-product-market-fit-journey

Started in 2020, Writer is an enterprise-grade generative AI platform for larger, security-conscious companies. Writer has over 150 customers, including teams at UnitedHealthcare, Uber and Accenture. Last valued at over $500M, Writer makes it easy for enterprises to build internal apps that generate a variety of content from sales enablement to blog posts. 

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde joins Writer’s co-founder and CEO May Habib to discuss the company’s path to product-market fit.

Join us as we discuss:

1: 30 The origin story behind the founding of Writer

5:11 The early product vision for Writer

10:02 The transformation of the enterprise AI buyer

14:49 Security and compliance in AI models

17:27 Writer’s approach to addressing hallucinations 

21:35 Why May and the Writer team had deep conviction in Enterprise AI

24:43 The next big horizon for Gen AI and Writer

27:50 May Habib’s journey as a CEO

29:18 Building a culture of curiosity at Writer

Open source AI models have become key drivers of innovation and collaboration. An increasing number of developers and end users are leveraging open source technologies. There is immense potential in the long-term impact of open source AI. 

In this episode, we are releasing a conversation on the future of open source AI between Wei Lien Dang (Unusual Ventures), and Reynold Xin (Databricks) and Vipul Ved Prakash (Together).

Join us as we discuss:
3:16: The rise of open source LLMs and foundation models

7:23  Building open source AI platforms to serve customers

10:35 Why Together and Databricks decided to build with open source

13:33 LLMs and the need for standardization

21:09 The role of academia in AI research and innovation

26:57 Innovations in training data

30:55 Making the decision to choose open source models

36:52 Growing Accessibility of Machine Learning with LLMs

40:31 How the open source ecosystem will evolve in the future

Started in 2017, Deliverr is an E-commerce fulfillment company that integrates with marketplaces such as Shopify and Walmart. The company offers a two-day shipping service to small merchants selling on these online marketplaces helping them compete with Amazon Prime. Co-founded by Harish Abbott and Michael Krakaris, the company was acquired by Shopify for US$ 2.1 bn in May 2022.

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde joins Michael Krakaris and Sarah Leary (GP at Unusual) to discuss Deliverr’s path to product-market fit.

Join us as we discuss:

01:00 The insight that led to Deliverr’s founding

04:20 Why E-commerce fulfillment needed to be democratized

08:18 The value of understanding customers to achieve product-market fit

15:11 Early product-market fit signals for Deliverr

20:15 Pivoting Deliverr's business model to drive revenue

26:23 How Deliverr built and scaled its sales team

29:33 Deliverr’s breakthrough with Walmart

33:06 Deliverr's expansion: From Walmart partnership to multichannel integration

35:11 Managing E-commerce during the pandemic

40:36 Overcoming crisis through innovation

44:12 E-commerce tech post-pandemic

Forward is an AI-based healthcare unicorn that combines private doctors with technology to enable data-driven, insurance-free primary care. Forward is now present in 14 cities in the US. In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Adrian Aoun, the founder and CEO of Forward about building a transparent and incentive-driven healthcare system.

Join us as we discuss:

01:47: Forward’s origin story and why Adrian saw the need to reimagine healthcare

04:44: Build an incentive-driven healthcare system

10:05: Approach to building an “MVP”/early clinics 

13:51: How Forward thinks about its product roadmap and innovating in healthcare

17:11: How Adrian and his team iterated on early user feedback 

20:39: Forward’s approach to productizing healthcare 

24:29: The future of AI in healthcare

27:55 How Adrian approached building the early team at Forward

30:51: Advice for founders who are building products with AI

Sysdig is a cloud native application protection platform that helps stop cloud and container security attacks. In this episode, Sysdig’s founder and CTO, Loris Degioanni chats with Wei Lien Dang about why he founded Sysdig and how he leveraged the power of open source for growth and industry disruption.

Join us as we discuss:

(1:39) How Loris leveraged market and tech stack changes to build Sysdig

(7:46) Sysdig's journey as an early pioneer in containerization technology

(12:16) Sysdig’s pivot from monitoring to cybersecurity

(17:48) The power of open source in building Sysdig

(21:48) The nuances and commitment necessary for a successful open source project:

(28:33) Finding product-market fit in an open source context

(30:42) The role of an open-source project as a brand, marketing tool, and source of lead generation

(31:45) Balancing community involvement and establishing a solid business model

(33:34) Commercializing an open source project

(37:32) Advice for founders building open source companies

Gretel is a synthetic data platform that allows developers to generate artificial data sets with the same characteristics as real data so they can test AI models without compromising sensitive customer information or privacy. Gretel has a community of over 75,000 developers working with accurate, synthetic data. 

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde and Weil Lien Dang chat with Ali Golshan, CEO and co-founder of Gretel about the company’s path to product-market fit. 

Join us as we discuss:

(1:48) Ali’s background in US Intelligence and how it shaped his approach as a founder

(3:17) The founding insight that led to the creation of Gretel

(6:35) Ali and his co-founders’ “why now” for building a privacy engineering product

(8:15) Why Gretel decided to focus on developers 

(10:47) How Ali and his co-founders narrowed in on early use cases

(15:55) The industries where Gretel found early adopters

(20:20) How Gretel anticipated and adapted to increasingly popular AI models 

(27:24) Why Gretel decided to create a multimodal platform for synthetic data

(29:18) The reasoning behind building Gretel GPT

(31:48) How Gretel’s co-founders work together to adapt to the changing tech landscape

(38:05) What Ali sees as the key drivers for adoption within traditional enterprise companies

(40:19) Why they built their ICP around the developer cloud stack

(45:45) Advice for early-stage founders currently building in AI

Instabase is an enterprise-focused application platform that allows businesses to automate document processing from unstructured data sources such as bank statements, pay stubs, and tax documents. They use a number of tools including generative AI to summarize and analyze data instantly. Over 50 large enterprises, mostly Fortune 100, use Instabase today.

Recently valued at $2B, the company was founded by Anant Bhardwaj in 2015. In this episode, he chats with Sandhya Hegde about Instabase’s path to product-market fit. 

Join us as we discuss:

-Anant’s founding insight for starting Instabase

-How Anant dropped out of MIT to start the company

-The first set of use cases for the platform

-How Instabase landed Standard Chartered as its first enterprise customer

-How Instabase experimented its way toward product-market fit

-Early go-to-market mistakes as he scaled the company

-Identifying early champions for landing key sales

-Enterprise customers’ responses to Instabase’s technology

-Scaling sales and hiring a sales leader after raising a Series B

-The benefits and challenges from raising their Series B at a high valuation

-Advice for early-stage founders working in AI

In this episode, we are debuting “Bright and Early” — an Unusual Ventures interview series with early hires at iconic tech companies. You will often hear successful founders share how crucial their first few hires are. These early employees help define the company's culture. They need to be both doers and leaders who can prioritize ruthlessly. They often have an outsized impact on the company and wear multiple hats as the company grows. Finding them and empowering them to be successful is hard. 

In this episode, co-hosted by Chris Marty and Rachel Star from Unusual Ventures, we hear from Naveen Gavini, employee #10 at Pinterest who joined the company 11 years ago as a mobile engineer and went on a career-defining journey to become their head of product. 

This conversation covers

(2:06) Why Naveen wanted to join Pinterest and how he got connected to the team

(4:38) What his interview process looked like

(7:07) The key drivers that motivated him to accept the offer

(9:37) Naveen’s first year as an engineer at Pinterest

(12:41) How Naveen brought the team together to build Pinterest’s mobile app

(15:09) How he thought about managing his career path within the company

(18:06) His approach to team-building

(21:04) Pinterest’s interdisciplinary culture of “knitting”

(24:15) Interviewing early hires, specifically for culture fit

Weights & Biases is a developer-focused MLOps platform last valued at over $1 billion. Their platform helps developers streamline their ML workflow from end to end. Weights & Biases currently has over 700 customers using their product to manage their ML models. 

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Lukas Biewald, the CEO and co-founder of Weights & Biases about the company’s path to product-market fit.

Join us as we discuss:

(2:09) Lukas’s inspiration for starting the company

(8:02) Early design partners for Weights & Biases

(13:32) Early use cases for the Weights & Biases platform

(16:13) The founders’ early strategies for finding users and getting feedback

(22:47) Finding product-market fit by focusing on a specific user persona (ML practitioner)

(29:14) Growth tactics to increase awareness and expand their user base

(34:13) Positive surprises in user feedback, and how it informed the company’s product roadmap

(40:14) Lukas’s approach to leadership and building a strong, connected culture

(43:16) Advice for aspiring founders building AI-native products

6sense is an AI-powered ABM platform that is focused on arming revenue teams with the right information to engage with the right accounts. It aggregates buying signals like website visits, email opens, and product review hits. It then leverages machine learning to help revenue teams automate their workflows. 

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with 6Sense’s CEO Jason Zintak about their path to product-market fit.

Join us as we discuss:

(1:26) Jason’s background and he made the decision to join 6sense

(5:32) How early customer conversations informed the 6Sense product strategy

(8:15) 6sense’s early GTM strategy that got them to $5M ARR

(9:11) Jason’s first 90 days at 6sense as a new CEO

(10:56) 6sense’s early product-market fit signals

(16:12) How the advent of generative AI has impacted the product

(18:22) How 6Sense is thinking about building self-serve experiences

(24:06) How the recessionary macro-environment impacts the company’s GTM strategy 

Hex is a data platform that allows teams to streamline their entire workflow using collaborative notebooks, BI, and docs. Hex offers data scientists the ability to work together to deliver their insights and empowers both business users and data analysts to quickly find the answers they need to do their jobs. Today, the company has over 500 enterprise customers. 

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Hex’s co-founder and CEO Barry McCardel about their path to product-market fit. 

Join us as we discuss:

• (1:51) How Barry and his co-founders came up with the idea for Hex 
• (5:37) Why Hex’s co-founders saw the need for a collaborative data platform
• (7:42) How the early team picked a beachhead around sharing and communicating work
• (12:01) How “commitment engineering” became key to validating Hex’s early assumptions
• (16:03) How the team identified early users and personas
• (20:41) How early users informed Hex’s product roadmap
• (28:34) Hex’s approach to early team-building
• (32:33) How Hex sees its user profile evolving, and its impact on their product roadmap
• (38:39) Hex’s AI strategy to empower people to do creative work with data
• (43:29) Advice to founders thinking about building data startups

The space of enterprise search and knowledge management is on the cusp of being dramatically transformed by AI-native tools that can find, analyze and synthesize information instantly for knowledge workers. An emerging leader in this category is Glean. Valued at $1B and serving over a hundred enterprise customers today, Glean leverages an enterprise-grade knowledge graph and LLMs (large language models) to help companies find and use their institutional knowledge across hundreds of internal tools and SaaS applications.  

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde (GP at Unusual Ventures) interviews Glean CEO and co-founder Arvind Jain on their path to product-market fit. Join us as we cover:

• (1:49) The technological shifts Arvind has observed throughout his career
• (5:11) How Modern AI is forcing us to rethink how we build products
• (8:00) Arvind’s inspiration for starting Glean
• (17:10) How Glean pinpointed their early “desperate” customer and built their MVP
• (20:14) The difference between consumer search and enterprise search
• (24:45) How Glean uses LLMs within its core product
• (30:40) The impact of AI on knowledge management systems 
• (34:41) How Glean’s solves for “hallucination” by constraining their model with the right knowledge
• (38:41) How Glean is scaling its go-to-market strategy using an enterprise sales model
• (40:51) Advice for founders about navigating the shift to AI

Vercel is an open-source platform that helps front-end developers build and ship dynamic web applications leveraging Jamstack (https://jamstack.org/). Last valued at $2.5B, Vercel was founded in 2015 by CEO Guillermo Rauch and now serves over 30,000 companies. 

In this episode, guest host Wei Lien Dang (General Partner at Unusual Ventures) interviews Vercel CEO and Founder Guillermo Rauch about their path to product-market fit.

Join us as we cover:

• (1:24) How Guillermo came up with idea for creating Vercel
• (7:31) How Guillermo identified the opportunity for dynamic front-end development by analyzing gaps within the existing technology and infrastructure
• (12:43) Why he decided to pursue the open source path for Vercel
• (17:16) How Vercel drove adoption and built an early enthusiastic user base 
• (24:25) The use cases and aha! moments for early adopters using Vercel
• (30:18) How Vercel built a go-to-market strategy aimed at developers
• (33:31) Vercel’s content marketing strategy for developers which includes details about how their technology works
• (34:56) Guillermo’s perspective on the current open source ecosystem and market
• (36:45) How to build a commercially viable business using open source technologies

Amplitude is the world’s #1 product analytics platform, currently trading at $1.6B. Launched in 2014, Amplitude started out as a mobile analytics tool, and eventually expanded to include all digital analytics, experimentation and personalization. The company now serves over 1900 customers.

In this episode, CTO Curtis Liu shares the story of how Amplitude was created after he and his co-founder, Spenser Skates, decided to pivot when their initial product idea didn’t find traction. They explored several options before landing on mobile analytics. Curtis walks us through their early prototyping and discovery process, as well as his approach to company-building as a technical leader and founder.

Join us as we discuss:

1:06: How Curtis and Spenser arrived at their first startup idea, Sonalight

4: 01: How they came to the conclusion that they need to pivot

6: 15: How they explored different options before landing on mobile analytics

9: 17: Their prototyping process which included doing interviews and creating mockups

15: 44: What Curtis’s learning process looked like as he was building Amplitude

22: 23: Curtis’s approach to doing research through both self-directed exploration and reaching out to experts

25: 15: How he approached his role as a founder and technical leader

36: 12: Amplitude’s core values and how the founders thought about creating a positive culture

38: 01: How Amplitude is expanding it’s product suite to support different types of datasets

41: 10: Curtis’s advice to new founders who are trying to find problems to solve

In this highlights episode, host Sandhya Hegde shares her framework for the three modes of product-led growth and how some iconic companies pursuing PLG found product-market fit: Snyk, Webflow and Nextdoor.

Join us as we discuss:

3.02: The three modes of PLG—fast-working (Snyk),  paradigm-shifting (Webflow), and habit-forming (Nextdoor)

6: 30: How Snyk challenged the way security products were traditionally adopted by focusing on developers

14: 47: How Nextdoor executed early interviews with users to build their first prototype

19: 05: How Webflow built for its initial beachhead persona and differentiated itself from other existing website builders

23:13: How Snyk added specific capabilities to their product to enable CISO buyers to embrace their dev-first solutions

27: 51: How Nextdoor recruited founding members who would become evangelists for the platform within their neighborhoods

31: 41: How Webflow engaged with customer feedback to build a first-of-its kind visual CMS

37: 33: How Webflow’s CTO led growth engineering to build organic and viral awareness for their product

41: 18: Lessons from how Nextdoor leveraged and cultivated community, and how to build successful communities organically

45: 30: How the Snyk team was oriented around growth and evolved with their product offerings

Harness is an emerging leader in the CICD (continuous development) space. Last valued at $3.7B in a 2022 fundraise, this is Jyoti Bansal’s second enterprise software unicorn. His first startup Appdynamics was acquired by Cisco the night before their IPO in 2017.

In this episode, Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal and Unusual founder John Vrionis take us back 15 years to when Appdynamics first got started. They walk us through their learnings around customer discovery and the journey from having a unique product insight to finding product market fit. With stories from the early days of Harness, we cover:

• (1:45) How Jyoti arrived at his original insight for Harness
• (3:27) John and Jyoti on the Unusual Method — a rigorous playbook that they co-teach at Unusual Ventures to help founders find product-market fit
• (6:33) Why cold outreach - and not friendly conversations - is the best way to validate early assumptions
• (12:11) How Jyoti looked for early adopters outside Silicon Valley during the customer discovery phase
• (14:08) Why doing your own cold outreach as a founder is an irreplaceable activity
• (19:40) How to articulate the business value of your solution so prospects have a reason to buy
• (23:28) Iterating on your messaging and ICP If you are not seeing similar patterns around the pain
• (24:42) How Jyoti constructs messaging and defines the “minimum sellable product”
• (29:15) The surprises Jyoti encountered during customer discovery for Harness
• (31:55) Why and how exactly founders should focus on efficiency during an economic downturn

LaunchDarkly is a pioneer in the feature management space. Founded in 2014, while the agile and cloud movements were still relatively nascent, LaunchDarkly was ahead of its time. They have now scaled to a $3 billion company, serving over 4,000 customers.

In this episode, LaunchDarkly Co-Founder and CEO Edith Harbaugh takes us back to her initial insight as an engineering manager and product leader at TripIt, deeply versed in the value of systematic feature flagging, and keenly aware of how underutilized it was by many other dev teams. She shares the conviction required to build a product that most buyers in Silicon Valley weren’t yet looking for, and how she engaged her network to gain initial design partners for the product that would come to define the feature management space.

Join us as we discuss:

Honing a founder insight and being early vs late to an emerging sector

Hypothesis testing and building with design partners

Community-building and marketing a movement

Fundraising when VCs are skeptical of a new sector

About Unusual Ventures — Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building infrastructure software and application-level companies. Unusual was founded in 2018 with the mission to reinvent the venture capital engagement model by serving entrepreneurs with an unprecedented level of hands-on services. Described as a partner versus a top-down stakeholder by its portfolio companies, Unusual is laser-focused on serving exceptional founders and teams building innovative products. With offices in Menlo Park, San Francisco, and Boston, Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, Harness, and Vivun.

About Sandhya Hegde — Sandhya is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in enterprise SaaS companies. Previously an early employee and executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor.

In this episode, Jasper Co-Founder Dave Rogenmoser shares his story of persistence, pivots, and market validation as he and his co-founders went from building a digital marketing agency to a hypergrowth AI unicorn. Join us as we discuss:

• External and internal signals that it’s time to pivot
• Validating startup ideas and how to let the user shape product decisions
• Product-led GTM and getting users to buy a product before it exists
• Building AI products and how to partner with foundation AI companies

About Unusual Ventures — Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building infrastructure software and application-level companies. Unusual was founded in 2018 with the mission to reinvent the venture capital engagement model by serving entrepreneurs with an unprecedented level of hands-on services. Described as a partner versus a top-down stakeholder by its portfolio companies, Unusual is laser-focused on serving exceptional founders and teams building innovative products. With offices in Menlo Park, San Francisco, and Boston, Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, Harness, and Vivun.

Before Webflow, creating a website required both a designer and a coder. Now, designers can build websites without code or sacrificing their artistic vision.

SOC2 certification is a daunting process for startup founders but increasingly necessary to land customers. Our guest today was among the first to understand how startup founders thought about security and compliance and set out to create the automated compliance category.

The SQL database that sits under most applications in the world is old technology that was not built with the Cloud in mind. Now we live in a Cloud-Native world and it's important for developers to have a database that offers the same guarantees as legacy SQL database technology while also taking advantage of life in the cloud.

Early revenue can sometimes fool you into thinking that you have product-market fit. Startups begin to focus on growth without having solved the core problem their customers are playing them to address.

Successful startups need to solve a problem, but there is a big difference between a founder knowing a problem exists in the abstract and a founder experiencing the pain points firsthand and developing ways to solve it.

Since the rise of COVID-19, every company has adopted remote work, and our guest's mission is to create a more equal world by making it possible for talented professionals to work from any country they choose to.

While some startups experiment and pivot their way into product-market fit, others have founders with a unique insight that needs persistence. After a rough  6 year start as a company between 2012-2018, Arctic Wolf hit a tipping point driven by market awareness. In the past 4 years, the growth rate of the business has been phenomenal. Founder Brian NeSmith joins us to discuss his conviction to keep going and how he kept his talented team together even when results weren't what they expected.

StackRox is a security startup born in 2015. After many initial setbacks, StackRox went on to become a leader in container security, riding the Kubernetes wave and helping cloud-native companies secure their software. Wei Lien Dang joins us today to discuss how StackRox found product-market fit.  

Henry Ward joins us to talk about how his team of fewer than 20 employees scaled their startup, then known as eShares, to product-market fit and eventually became a household name in equity management software.

Henry Ward is the Co-Founder and CEO of Carta. This $7.4B business has created a new category of software in equity management by helping companies and investors manage their cap tables, valuations, investments, and equity plans. Henry gives us insight into the early stages of Carta: the initial products that Carta built, gaining validation through investor networks, closing their first 100 customers, and how they found product-market fit on their way to acquiring 28,000 customers.

Join us as we discuss:

• How Carta built products designed to get distribution
• The early go-to-market lessons that Carta learned about when to focus on sales vs when to start marketing
• Why Carta didn’t start with a self-serve experience
• How Carta changed its pricing model at scale without upsetting customers        

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