The Top 25 Y Combinator Winter 2017 Demo Day Startups (the list)
Y Combinator’s Demo Day for the Winter 2017 batch is took place last week at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
Out of the 103 known (wildly different and interesting) companies in this batch, we ranked them and found the following 25 with the highest Mattermark Growth Score.
Scroll down to see 11 open startup and VC jobs
Weekly Digest: Top 10 Featured Posts
Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures outlines some tips for founders when making the tough choice of who to let invest and questions to ask during a reference call in “How to Reference Check Your Prospective Investor”
Ash Rust of Trinity Ventures details the art of getting a meeting with early stage VCs in "Seed Fundraising - How to Get a Meeting
Michael Dempsey of Compound provides a quick way to gut check ownership and investment size for investors to think about how they will need to build their positions over time in “Why Your Startup Idea Isn't Big Enough for Some VCs”
Meshai Lakhani of Mark 2 Capital outlines his approach to investing in early stage venture capital funds, errors he made in capital allocation, and how he adapted in “The Future of Family Office Investing”
Kyle Poyar of OpenView releases the survey results of more than 1,000 SaaS leaders to better understand how they price their products in “The State of SaaS Pricing [Infographic]”
Pablo Fuentes of Proven interviews Joe Mellin, the co-founder he broke up with about splitting amicably in “How to Dissolve a Business Partnership Peacefully”
Leah Culver of Breaker reflects on her background, why she left Dropbox, and her passion for podcasts that led to starting a company in “Founder Stories: Leah Culver of Breaker”
Mathilde Collin of Front explains why as your business evolves, you’ll want to rely on data to help ensure you are building the right things, in the right amount of time and most importantly, the right way in “When “Gut Feelings” Aren’t Enough: Using Data to Plan Your Product Roadmap”
Lincoln Murphy lends a cautionary tale about one startup that signed 3 bad-fit customers - $25k/ARR each - and how their churn resulted in the loss of millions in revenue and company valuation in "The Cost of Bad Fit Customers: The $1.2M Churn and Burn to Learn Mistake”
Madhav Bhandari of Hubstaff celebrates the milestone of going from $265K to $2M Annual Recurring Revenue in just 2 years by sharing six lessons he feels contributed the most to their growth in “Thoughts on Achieving $2M Milestone in SaaS”
Insights From A YC Alum On How To Prepare For The Y Combinator Interview
When Danielle Morrill applied to Y Combinator with Referly (YC S12), she prepped with a dozen or more teams, and that hardly scratched the surface. Danielle asked them all the same questions, so she summed up how to approach the conversation, the demo, and what to avoid in the YC interview.
The Three Main Elements of Building a Repeatable Sales Process
The key to building any process is to break it down into its constituent parts. Each of these parts should be broken down into its “systematic series of actions,” then those actions should be broken down into their component actions. Continue breaking it apart and optimizing until you are at the elemental parts of the process.
Here we’ll go through the three main elements of your sales process, but this shouldn’t be where you stop. You need to continue on and on until you’ve optimized each and every step of your sales funnel.
Why SDRs Need to Care About Sand Hill Road
When someone wins the lottery, they go shopping.
If your SDRs aren’t following the news on who’s next in the funding queue or who just got a series A, then they are seriously dropping the ball.
Here’s why the news from Sand Hill Road should be at the forefront of your sales team’s mind, and how you can make sure it is.
A Product-led Approach to Sales
When approached in the right way, layering in a human sales effort into your product-led business can accelerate growth while maintaining envy-worthy unit economics.
But what should sales look like in a product-led company? The fundamentals of sales remain the same – it’s all about engaging the right people, at the right time, with relevant information.
Here's the who, when, and how of adapting to support a product-led business.
Open Startup and VC Jobs
Mattermark - Content Marketing Manager in San Francisco.
Troops - Customer Marketing, Customer Success in New York City.
Segment - Head of Workplace Operations in San Francisco.
Yard Club - Account Manager in San Francisco.
Dollar Shave Club - Vice President, Customer Strategy in Los Angeles.
Tinder - International Growth Analyst in Los Angeles.
Formlabs - Operations Support in Boston.
Kapor Center for Social Impact - Venture Capital Summer Assoc. in Oakland.
500 Startups - Public Relations Associate in San Francisco.
Workday - Director of Workday Ventures and Investments in San Francisco.
Ring Central - Director of Corporate Development in Belmont, CA.
