Business Ops is the New Sales/ Marketing Ops.

“What were our sales last month?” Simple question, right? But do usually get a simple answer? Not likely. Liz Cain of OpenView Venture Partners calls out the current lack of alignment with various internal Ops teams, and details why consolidation of sales and marketing ops is crucial to your bottom line.

From the Investors

Stephen Hays of Deep Space Ventures hopes to point investors in the right direction by sharing his resources and processes for learning, networking, and getting into deals in “I Raised A Venture Capital/Angel Fund, So Now What?”

Yannick Roux of EC1 Capital digs into the data on Series A rounds coming out of European accelerators in "European Accelerators as Series A Engines"

Clément Vouillon of Point Nine Capital explores in depth the challenges that the SaaS industry is facing with the growing dominance of Systems of Record and the explosion of workflow apps in “SaaS: From Scarcity to Overabundance”

Mariya Yao of TOPBOTS interviews seasoned VCs and shares the eight ways they make artificial intelligence investment decisions in "How the Best AI Investors Separate Hype from Reality"

From the Operators

Jordan Gonen expands on how he managed to go from knowing nothing about startups building a deep network of awesome people, work on things he cares about, and developed real, hard skills in “How to Hack Networking”

Josh Pigford of Baremetrics declares the he’s finished subscribing to and following the traditional startup mentality as he builds a company in “Getting Out of the Startup Rat Race”

Rik Lomas of SuperHi recognizes startups are emotional roller coasters that one minute make you feel like you’re changing the world and the next minute, that everything is falling apart in “How to Start a Startup Without Ruining Your Life”

Justin Vincent of Nugget describes his four year journey of ups and downs that pushed him through self-limiting beliefs and cognitive bias in “Building a Solo SaaS App Offers a Profound Sense of Personal Achievement”

Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist

As required reading for Mattermark employees, I recommend you check out the new third edition of Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson of Foundry Group. It provides entrepreneurs and startup owners with a definitive reference for understanding venture capital funding.