B2B Software

“I think the buyers in B to B software today are much more prepared and aware of what they want and aware of what the options are. So, which is why, why the sales process becomes even more critical, right? Like you can't get them for like four meetings before t…”

“If you buy a B to B software company today, it's pre-AI, it is highly unlikely that simply optimizing and pressing the buttons will be enough... Unless you're kind of generating new revenue from AI and significantly reengineering the company... It won't be suc…”

“I think it will disrupt massive amounts of B to B in software when agents can communicate with each other.”

“It feels like you're competing against B to B software because like there's all these like AI billboards that are quite similar to each other. But I think the reality is if you want people to pay attention, it's like, no, you're competing with like what they'r…”

“Based on public information, anthropic revenues and coaching went from two hundred million to over four billion in 12 months. In B to B, that kind of growth has not happened. Ever.”

“Sometimes there's a disconnect between what the operators are doing and what the CEOs think they're doing. And if you build software for what the CEOs say they're doing, they want, it won't get adopted. It just won't get adopted. You know, you might get a cont…”

“Most B to B software purchases Are championed by one person and likely they're a manager or a director level. They're not going to be a VP. They're not gonna be a C level and they're not gonna be like an intern or someone low.”

“Basically, right now, you can look at where AI is going and see that lots of jobs are being displaced. If you have software that is serving the people that are being displaced, you're likely to not be renewed.”

“So when you adopt that tool, you're not just adopting, like, the actual software. You're adopting the idea that this is a practice that you ought to be doing in the first place.”

“Almost all ills can be, you know, filled in by really great distribution. Like, if you have a really good ground game, really good marketing, a really good ground game, and kind of jamming your product into the channel, like you're jamming your product in fron…”

“It's like, if you can get to that next layer of like, no, we have like two million dollars in payroll using this software. And like, now we're taking this big risk. If we're down for a day, it's like a big problem and we're losing money. Right. And more direct…”

“One of my core beliefs in software is you have to build software that either increases revenue Decrease costs or prevents customer churn. And then depending on the industry, a fourth one would be maintains compliance.”

“If 20, 23 was when everything rebounded. On these fast cycles, maybe the simplistic way to look at it is 20, 25 has got to be when buy, when it gets easier for a lot of folks in classic B to B. That's the belief.”

“It's like, if you build the best product, like consumers are going to kind of, your customers are going to demand getting to interoperate with it.”

“B to B software has very rarely had network effects, right? What it has had instead is more economies of scale.”

“So yeah, that's an exception, but like your B to B accounting software, you know, whatever, like, no, not that that can't be a great business. It can be, but it doesn't need the same kind of approach as Airbnb or Uber.”

“When you go B to C, you get the worst of all the worlds, and you don't get enough money to be able to do any marketing other than free marketing. It has to be viral, it has to be content slash SEO, or it has to rank in an app store, which I include as SEO. B t…”

“I'd say 80, 90% of what we do is B to B software and fintech, which is where I grew up investing in.”

“Activation is actually a common good starting place for most B to B software because usually B to B software's are not designed to really Get you to use quickly, historically.”

“If you can't survive through without making sales, like that'll give you a really good indication on whether the market is ready. Obviously it doesn't work if you're building, you know, medical technology or a lot of clean tech solutions, but in something like…”

“The question is, is the high friction for which segment? If I'm a small business still, startup, I don't have high friction. I'm a team of one engineer. And I'm a CEO. I can go do it tomorrow. Versus if you work for a large enterprise. Of a thousand plus peopl…”

“If you're a company that's like a B to B software, and you're like, oh, you get like one month free, and they're a person who has no control of the billing, they don't, it really is irrelevant to them, and that their company is going to get a month free on the…”

“And he recently had a meeting for his syndicate members. I had a friend who went and he said something like, I'm no longer going to do B to B software. Because even though it's like a surefire way to make money, it's just boring to me. And now I'm only going t…”

“We're not going to move out of that. So we have a very clear focus in what we do and we do about Seven to eight, seven to nine deals a year. We'll have a 24 to 28 company portfolio, and we do about 40% of the investments are the primary check and 60% follow-on…”

“But in B to B software in particular, access to customers is the most important thing.”

“This is where I learned all these things, right? Of like, oh, having a niche, going B to B, higher price points are better.”

“Just do one. Find the one that is so incredibly valuable to the customer and nail that. Then go find 10 to a hundred prospects, ah, that you think have that same, ah, use case fit, if you will, because it's not so much about product market fit, I think at that…”

“B to B software has not actually been very profitable a industry in China so far.”

“When Netflix increases their monthly subscription by two dollars, everyone's, you know, screaming bloody murder. And B to B is obviously less elastic.”

“I still remember, kind of, sitting in our front room telling us how much better it was to be building B to B software than consumer software for this reason, ah, where, sort of, consumer software, it's so hard to predict, sort of, What people want. They don't …”