#186 | AI-Powered Service Firms, Vertical SaaS in '24 & more
June 30th | The latest from Forerunner, Sequoia, Emergence, Bessemer, and others
SandHill.io aggregates and shares the latest investment themes, market insights, and best practices for operating and investing from 700+ VCs, analysts, and operators.
This newsletter curates a selection of posts featured on the website each week.
Investment Themes, Theses, & Outlooks
The Emergence of AI-Powered Services Firms (Alex Brussell & Brian O'Malley, Forerunner)
AI Compound Lever (Sonya Huang & Pat Grady, Sequoia)
Industry Developments & Analyses
The AI Plateau Is Real — How We Jump To The Next Breakthrough (Gordon Ritter & Wendy Lu, Emergence)
A Financing Fiasco: Making Batteries Bankable (Grace Penders & Rick Zullo, Equal Ventures)
SaaS: Have reports of my death been greatly exaggerated? (Janelle Teng, VC @ Bessemer)
Vertical Software in 2024 (Louis Coppey, Partner @ Point Nine)
The unsung hero of the energy transition: The case for bioenergy (Sebastian Heitmann, Co-Founder @ Extantia Capital)
How Digital Health is Catalyzing Change in Weight Management (7wire Ventures Team)
Software-Enabled-Hardware and Hardware-as-a-Service business models (Bilal Zuberi, GP @ Lux Capital)
Guides, Case Studies, and Best Practices for Operating
The Startup as Insurgent — Reflections of a Former Founder (Marcus Ryu, Partner @ Battery)
How to go from Seed to Series A to Series B (Manan Modi, Venture Partner @ Four Acres)
Six Elements of Pipeline: Radically Rethinking the Role of Marketing in the Pipeline Process (René Boncvanie, EIR @ Battery)
General management, functional, and hybrid models: Which org design works best for top companies? (Lenny Rachitsky)
How ClickUp blends PLG and sales-assist (Kyle Poyar, Partner @ OpenView)
Additional Reads
Building for the real world (Sam Smith-Eppsteiner & Thilo Braun, Innovation Endeavours)
How Much Revenue Must a Company Generate to IPO? (Tomasz Tunguz, MD @ Theory)
The Goldilocks Zone (Packy McCormick, GP @ Not Boring)
Unpacking Apple Intelligence (Tanay Jaipuria, Partner @ Wing VC)
Did we miss something?
We’re now pulling posts from over 700+ newsletters and blogs (full list here). Let us know if you notice something we miss and we'll include it in the next digest. Just respond to this email with the URL.