Andy Walner

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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It is such an honor to bookend my time at Lightspeed with the news that the 2024 Data-Driven VC Landscape report named me a top 20 thought leader and, more importantly, recognized Lightspeed as a top 20 data-driven VC firm for the second year in a row. I have been fortunate to be involved in building the data teams from the ground up at two of the top 20 data-driven firms, and it's gratifying to see former colleagues like Yuriy Groysman, Ilya Kirnos, and Chris Farmer at SignalFire also featured prominently. Special thanks to Dr. Andre Retterath for putting the report together! You can find the full report here: https://lnkd.in/gbBa2hdj The data-driven VC ecosystem has grown tremendously from just a handful of people a decade ago. While much progress has been made in leveraging data for sourcing, due diligence, portfolio support, and access, there is still much work to be done. I'm excited to see how this space continues to evolve. On a personal note, after over five and a half years at Lightspeed, I am stepping away from my role. I'm incredibly grateful to Lightspeed, especially Ravi Mhatre, Christopher Schaepe, Peter Nieh, Barry Eggers, Alex Taussig, Bradley Twohig, and Jeremy Liew for taking a chance on me years ago. It was a pleasure to work among world-class investors and operators across the globe to help founders build enduring companies. It filled me with a sense of wonder when everything aligned – when data pointed to a company's growth trajectory, and renowned Midas list investors pursued those founders. My thanks to the Lightspeed data team (Tin Kyaw, Eric Wayman, Len Frenkel, Radhika M.) and Carmen Buenrostro for making each day enjoyable, even as we navigated a pandemic while trying to bring data to venture capital. Over the next few months, I'll be spending time with family, traveling, and reconnecting with friends. I'm currently fascinated by using data-driven strategies for secondary investing and cohort-based customer acquisition financing. Please reach out if you'd like to discuss data and venture further. More to come!

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It's incredible to see how two guys, fresh out of high school, not just dreaming big but making it happen.🌟 Their platform, which generates custom APIs from natural language prompts, is a game-changer. Imagine simplifying complex tasks like connecting e-commerce platforms to databases or orchestrating IoT devices with just a few commands. 🙌 It’s a bold step towards democratizing API development and making technology more accessible. Innovation isn’t limited by age, but rather fueled by vision and determination. Can't wait to see how their platform evolves and makes API generation more accessible and efficient! 🚀 #Startups #AI #Innovation #YoungEntrepreneurs #TechRevolution https://lnkd.in/dD_jGRNn

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How can a growing startup challenge a public company like Datadog? Sounds nuts right? Not if you listen closely to the market and to customers’ pains. We went after its pricing model, and the pricing models of all the other vendors out there in the observability space. We built the groundcover platform with our goal to flip the vendor-customer power balance constantly in our minds. groundcover keeps all your observability data on your infrastructure, in your control, managed by us. By removing the need to send any of your data outside of your own cloud, we completely decoupled price from data volume, giving you total power over: 🔹  Monitoring scale and granularity 🔹  Data storage and retention 🔹  Data privacy and security We discussed this at length in a recent webinar, where we explained the logic behind our promise to slash total costs by at least 87% compared to legacy systems like Datadog. Watch the webinar and experiment with our interactive Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator. https://lnkd.in/dp_8fTuP

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📣 📣 📣 Tim Zonca and I spoke with  ✨ Barry Dauber✨, who led Sales and Business Development at MosaicML and currently leads Gen AI GTM at Databricks. Barry discusses some of the most common and quintessential topics plaguing first-time founders of early-stage startups. ⏰ When is the right time to hire a salesperson? 👨‍💼 💪 When should we get out of founder-led sales? 🤑 🌈 How do we sell the vision versus what we have now? 🎯 🤔 Should we speak to every prospective customer that wants to speak to us? 💰 🤝 How do we think of partners, and should we engage with them, and if so, how? 👩‍💼 👋 And some uber topics such as: 🌊 How are customers responding to the Gen AI wave compared to the Big Data wave of the last decade? 🛑 Key roadblocks to Gen AI adoption in the enterprise. 🌞 The future of AI-first SaaS applications compared to the previous era of SaaS applications. 🔥 Who will the primary users of AI tools be 5 years from now? Tune in to hear what Barry has to say: https://lnkd.in/gGVV9RPP #genai #enterprise #startups #data

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Let the wave begin! Pioneer Fund company Recall.ai *grew their revenue 10x* in the past year, has 300 enterprise customers, and just raised a $10M Series A led by Ridge Ventures. David Gu and Amanda Zhu dropped out of college at age 19 to start the company. They've grown it exponentially with a tiny team. They make it easy to build meeting bots that are cross-platform. They're aggregating all these different APIs into one unified API, the way Twilio did with cell phones. At first it "sounds" easy to build a meeting bot -- just integrate with the Zoom API. But in fact there's a huge long tail of things you need to build, security and privacy pitfalls, automations, transcription complexities, integrations, the calendar invites where someone is using Google Meet or Teams, staying up-to-date with the libraries, etc etc. Recall takes care of all of that. It's WAY easier to build on top of Recall.ai and focus on the features that make you unique. Congratulations to the Recall team!

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🚀 We've open-sourced TimesFM – a decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecasting 📈 Key Highlights: ✅ Large-Scale Training Data: Trained on a corpus of over 100 billion real-world time points, including Google Trends and Wikipedia pageviews. ✅ Zero-Shot Forecasting: Offers high-quality forecasts even on unseen datasets, without requiring fine-tuning or additional training. ✅ Outstanding Benchmark Performance: Achieved competitive results across a comprehensive suite of benchmarks. 🤗 Explore the model on Hugging Face and GitHub. I'm encouraged by the early feedback and look forward to seeing how #TimesFM will be used in real-world applications for forecasting and anomaly detection. 🙏 A special thanks to the talented research team behind this achievement: Abhimanyu Das Rajat Sen Yichen Zhou Weihao Kong

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