A 'behind-the-scenes' look at the GTMfund community 👀

The GTM Newsletter

Another quarter rolls to a close.

I feel like I blinked and it’s somehow March 31st…

We all survived SKO season, tech company valuations plummeting, layoffs everywhere, an AI revolution and an almost earth-shattering bank run at SVB.

😮‍💨

It’s going to be ok - just breathe.

How to do box breathing:

1. Breathe out slowly, releasing all the air from your lungs.

2. Breathe in through your nose as you slowly count to four in your head. ...

3. Hold your breath for a count of four.

4. Exhale for another count of four.

5. Hold your breath again for a count of four.

6. Repeat for three to four rounds.

I think I’ve been “box-breathing” for a solid 3 months now.

Externally there’s a lot going on but I’m feeling incredibly grateful for a lot of really positive momentum amongst the chaos.

Every quarter or so I want to give a bit of a “behind-the-scenes” look at what we’re building at GTMfund.

Max and I have been building this in public since the beginning so we’re going to keep it going as much as we’re allowed to.

Let’s get into it.

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A ‘behind-the-scenes’ look at the GTMfund Community

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---KISS Version---

(Keep It Simple Stupid)

• 7 deals Done this quarter and 3 more that we are currently deep in diligence with. We launched 1 SPV for follow-on in a previous fund portfolio company and have another in the works.

• Continuing to invest alongside Tier 1 VCs and second-time successful founders. New relationships added each month.

• GTM podcast and GTM newsletter (that’s us!) is growing strong. We’re already at 3,600+ subscribers and 12,500+ downloads for the podcast.

• Our job board blew up in a great way last year as a lot of talent is looking for new roles. We’ve decided to upgrade our Job Board software and seeing some impressive early returns.

• Our Slack channel is buzzing all day long with revenue leaders helping our founders and knowledge sharing with each other.

---Summary Version---

Deals/Deal flow and Markups:

See the GTMfund News tab for Port Co. Fundraising announcements, Spotlights, and any other content we think is worth highlighting. 

We will be doing fewer deals this year, but with larger checks and higher ownership percentages. We are still complimentary to other funds, but taking greater advantage of the value proposition we provide.  We’ve been pacing right on schedule so far.

Many of the deals we’ve done this year are still in stealth and have not yet been announced yet but we did have a number of big announcements: iLife Series A, Closefactor Series A, Arrows announced their Seed+ round and partnership with HubSpot Ventures, Houseware announced their Seed round on the tail of winning Snowflake’s 2022 Start-Up Challenge and Tavus announced their Seed round led by Sequoia with participation from Accel, Index, GTMfund and YC Continuity. 

We also had an acquisition! Vanta, a GTMfund portfolio company, acquired Trustpage - another GTMfund portfolio company. We also played a role in the acquisition.

SPVs:

*What is a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) and Why Companies Form Them*

We oversubscribed our first SPV of the year which essentially allows our Limited Partners (investors) and Members to get more exposure into some of the hottest deals in SaaS. We have a couple more SPVs in the works that we hope to launch in the near term.

Portfolio Company and LP Program Evolution:

We ran our first Angel Investing 101 session this week, exclusive for LPs and Members. This was a popular area of feedback from 2022. For some people, GTMfund is their first foray into venture investing. For others, they’ve been angel investing, advising, or investing in funds for a while. Regardless of which bucket someone falls into, we want to provide knowledge and value to you as a member of the community.

Should Max and I do an Angel Investing 101 session publicly that anyone can attend?

The GTM Retreat is also back! We'll be gathering in Napa in September. Ever since the first Retreat in Scottsdale, we’ve been counting down until GTM Retreat II. Last year, we brought together 80+ GTM execs for a weekend of great meals, networking, and celebration. We’re excited to do it again in Napa this year.

Leading into this year, we said we would be taking a very intentional approach to the monthly GTMsessions we run for our founders. These are exclusive session for our founders that we run monthly that are led by our world-class LPs/Operators.

It will be the same amazing guests and content this year, but a curriculum-based approach that builds over time. That approach is paying early dividends. We’ve been getting especially strong feedback on our sessions this year. Special thanks to John Barrows for hosting March’s session on Negotiation.

As mentioned, we made a deeper investment in our job board this past month. You can always see the GTMfund board here if you are looking for a new role. Again, an investment that appears to be paying off. We set a GTMfund record this month with almost 1198 click-through applications to portfolio company roles. Part of that is this market, but it’s also 2.5x anything we’ve seen before. Providing an unmatched pipeline of GTM talent is part of our competitive advantage winning deals and supporting our teams.

The other pillars are firing on all cylinders too. We’re making as many intros as ever for GTM strategy support and customer connections.

Last but not least, GTMfund has its first-ever office space in my home city of Vancouver, Canada.

Myself, Paul, Sara, and Amit (not pictured below) have been working in person in Vancouver for awhile but now we finally have an office. Max even braved the cold and lack of Wi-Fi on Air Canada flights to visit the past few days.

In-person energy is BACK in 2023.

The Evolution of our Thesis/Thinking:

As we mentioned above, we ran our first angel investing and advising webinar for our LPs. We aim to make sure that a GTMfund investment is more than just a financial return for our investors (although that is priority number 1 of course).

For our GTM leader LPs, the heart and soul of our business, we are always looking for more ways to add value. We know that if we do that, they’ll be more engaged in the community and more engaged in our portfolio company’s success. That’s where it all begins. 

We’ve done a ton of placements of LPs with portfolio companies in full-time, fractional, and advisory capacities. We’ve put our LPs on display on the GTM Podcast and GTM Newsletter. We will be hosting at least 10 regional dinners and our annual LP retreat for folks to connect with each other. We’ve even invested in multiple LP companies that they have founded.

Being a GTM leader and an LP in the GTMfund rivals many other opportunities out there. For us, if we nail that experience, the flywheel really starts to hum. We are incredibly intentional about it.

It’s been amazing to see the deal flow we are able to get from our GTM leader LP base continue to grow. We have essentially 300+ scouts now! The ability to diligence companies across the spectrum, the candidates we can source, offer, and place in our portfolio companies, and the array of advice we can provide is unmatched. We’ve started allowing in a few more folks in tangential functions that understand GTM to round this out even more (a few CFOs, CTOs, CPOs).  

The inbound from other VC firms wanting to collaborate, and from new potential portfolio companies coming directly to us has been incredible. I think we are starting to be seen as a Tier 1 brand and badge of honor on the cap table and we’ve done all this in only roughly 2 years. We are seeing it with our allocations too. With the bigger fund, we are often the second biggest check behind the lead and we’ve been able to do a good job of taking what we need to make the deal work.

In our opinion, there’s never been a better time to invest. This vintage of investments should be one of the best in history. Between the number of folks that have tech experience, the amount of dry powder on the sidelines, the game-changing underlying technologies being created,  and the valuations we can get in at, we feel like we are in a really strong position for the future.

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 👀 More for your eyeballs: 

1. I love this sailboat analogy found in The Stratechery newsletter. Always a good read, do yourself a favor and subscribe.

   

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👂 More for your eardrums: 

1. The Salesforce Trailblazer Community has 19 million members and still growing. They set the bar for SaaS communities and our latest guest on The GTM podcast, Erika Kuhl built it from scratch…this is a true masterclass in community building.

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🚀 Start-ups to watch: 

Great ideas and critical to-dos no longer need to get lost in Slack. AgendaAI automatically generates an agenda for any meeting when you connect it to Slack. It analyzes everything for you and identifies the things you didn’t know you needed to know. 🙌

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🔥Hottest GTM job of the week: 

Growth Marketing Manager at Equi, more details here.

See more top GTM jobs here. 

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Let us know if you like the “behind-the-scenes” content - should we do more of it/less of it?

Either way, we’ll be back to regular scheduled go-to-market tips, tricks, strategies and stories next week.

As always, thanks for rocking with us until the end. If you’re finding this valuable, please share it out with a friend/colleague.

Have a great weekend.

Barker✌️