Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures: The Product Market Fit Podcast

Solo is an open-source developer platform designed to connect applications with service meshes across any software infrastructure. Their core promise to their customer is to help them migrate from 10/20 year old legacy monolithic applications to new cloud native architectures with APIs and microservices. 

Last valued at $1Bn, Solo has hundreds of enterprise customers including enterprises like TMobile, American Express, SAP, Sumo Logic, and more.

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Idit Levine, the founder and CEO of Solo. 

Join us as we discuss:

1:13 Solo’s origin story

6:04 Early fundraising challenges

13:45 The technical insight that led to Solo

15:00 Studying the market to refine Solo’s product vision

16:49 API Gateway as a stepping stone for service mesh

21:58 Early customer acquisition efforts

24:33 Idit’s conviction in the API Gateway approach

25:26 How Solo found its first paying customers

29:25 Idit’s approach to founder selling 

31:17 Idit’s evolution as CEO

36:50 Solo’s approach to open source community-building

40:50 Advice for founders building open source projects

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and 

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Idit Levine is the founder and CEO of Solo. 

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from Unusual Ventures:

Starting an open source company

Hiring for an open source company

Building open source GTM

Full episode transcript: https://www.unusual.vc/post/writers-product-market-fit-journey

Started in 2020, Writer is an enterprise-grade generative AI platform for larger, security-conscious companies. Writer has over 150 customers, including teams at UnitedHealthcare, Uber and Accenture. Last valued at over $500M, Writer makes it easy for enterprises to build internal apps that generate a variety of content from sales enablement to blog posts. 

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde joins Writer’s co-founder and CEO May Habib to discuss the company’s path to product-market fit.

Join us as we discuss:

1: 30 The origin story behind the founding of Writer

5:11 The early product vision for Writer

10:02 The transformation of the enterprise AI buyer

14:49 Security and compliance in AI models

17:27 Writer’s approach to addressing hallucinations 

21:35 Why May and the Writer team had deep conviction in Enterprise AI

24:43 The next big horizon for Gen AI and Writer

27:50 May Habib’s journey as a CEO

29:18 Building a culture of curiosity at Writer

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and 

May Habib is the CEO and co-founder of Writer, a generative AI platform for the enterprise. Before Writer, she co-founded Qordoba. 

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.
Further reading from Unusual Ventures:

Build conviction in an early stage startup

Understanding the enterprise buyer

LLMs in security

Open source AI models have become key drivers of innovation and collaboration. An increasing number of developers and end users are leveraging open source technologies. There is immense potential in the long-term impact of open source AI. 

In this episode, we are releasing a conversation on the future of open source AI between Wei Lien Dang (Unusual Ventures), and Reynold Xin (Databricks) and Vipul Ved Prakash (Together).

Join us as we discuss:
3:16: The rise of open source LLMs and foundation models

7:23  Building open source AI platforms to serve customers

10:35 Why Together and Databricks decided to build with open source

13:33 LLMs and the need for standardization

21:09 The role of academia in AI research and innovation

26:57 Innovations in training data

30:55 Making the decision to choose open source models

36:52 Growing Accessibility of Machine Learning with LLMs

40:31 How the open source ecosystem will evolve in the future

47:18 Best practices for parameterizing LLMs over time
Wei Lien Dang is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures and leads investments in infrastructure software, security, and developer tool.  Wei was a co-founder of StackRox, a cloud-native security company prior to its acquisition by Red Hat. He can be reached at [email protected] and

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Vipul Ved Prakash is the co-founder and CEO of Together. He was also the founder of Topsy and Cloudmark.

Reynold Xin is the co-founder of Databricks. Last valued at $43B, Databricks has been a juggernaut data infrastructure business built on Apache Spark analytics engine. They recently launched multiple AI products including Lakehouse AI and their own open source LLM — Dolly.

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.
Further reading from Unusual Ventures:

Why the future of AI-native infrastructure will be open

How good is your LLM? Nobody know yet

What AI builders should know about data protection and privacy

Started in 2017, Deliverr is an E-commerce fulfillment company that integrates with marketplaces such as Shopify and Walmart. The company offers a two-day shipping service to small merchants selling on these online marketplaces helping them compete with Amazon Prime. Co-founded by Harish Abbott and Michael Krakaris, the company was acquired by Shopify for US$ 2.1 bn in May 2022.

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde joins Michael Krakaris and Sarah Leary (GP at Unusual) to discuss Deliverr’s path to product-market fit.

Join us as we discuss:

01:00 The insight that led to Deliverr’s founding

04:20 Why E-commerce fulfillment needed to be democratized

08:18 The value of understanding customers to achieve product-market fit

15:11 Early product-market fit signals for Deliverr

20:15 Pivoting Deliverr's business model to drive revenue

26:23 How Deliverr built and scaled its sales team

29:33 Deliverr’s breakthrough with Walmart

33:06 Deliverr's expansion: From Walmart partnership to multichannel integration

35:11 Managing E-commerce during the pandemic

40:36 Overcoming crisis through innovation

44:12 E-commerce tech post-pandemic

Find the transcript for this episode and all past episodes at:⁠ https://www.unusual.vc/podcast⁠

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and 

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Sarah Leary is a Venture Partner at Unusual Ventures, with a focus on Unusual’s consumer practice. Prior to joining Unusual, Sarah co-founded Nextdoor, the free and private social network for neighborhoods. She can be reached at [email protected] and

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Michael Krakaris is the co-founder of Deliverr. Prior to starting Deliverr, Michael was a product marketing manager at Symphony Commerce.

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from the Startup Field Guide:

Customer Discovery

Building a sales team

Developing your founding insight

Forward is an AI-based healthcare unicorn that combines private doctors with technology to enable data-driven, insurance-free primary care. Forward is now present in 14 cities in the US. In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Adrian Aoun, the founder and CEO of Forward about building a transparent and incentive-driven healthcare system.

Join us as we discuss:

01:47: Forward’s origin story and why Adrian saw the need to reimagine healthcare

04:44: Build an incentive-driven healthcare system

10:05: Approach to building an “MVP”/early clinics 

13:51: How Forward thinks about its product roadmap and innovating in healthcare

17:11: How Adrian and his team iterated on early user feedback 

20:39: Forward’s approach to productizing healthcare 

24:29: The future of AI in healthcare

27:55 How Adrian approached building the early team at Forward

30:51: Advice for founders who are building products with AI

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and 

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Adrian Aoun is the founder and CEO of Forward. Prior to starting Forward, he founded Wavii, a natural language processing startup acquired by Google. He also worked on special projects for Larry Page at Google. 

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from the Startup Field Guide:

Starting a company

Iterating to MVP for consumer products

Sysdig is a cloud native application protection platform that helps stop cloud and container security attacks. In this episode, Sysdig’s founder and CTO, Loris Degioanni chats with Wei Lien Dang about why he founded Sysdig and how he leveraged the power of open source for growth and industry disruption.

Join us as we discuss:

(1:39) How Loris leveraged market and tech stack changes to build Sysdig

(7:46) Sysdig's journey as an early pioneer in containerization technology

(12:16) Sysdig’s pivot from monitoring to cybersecurity

(17:48) The power of open source in building Sysdig

(21:48) The nuances and commitment necessary for a successful open source project:

(28:33) Finding product-market fit in an open source context

(30:42) The role of an open-source project as a brand, marketing tool, and source of lead generation

(31:45) Balancing community involvement and establishing a solid business model

(33:34) Commercializing an open source project

(37:32) Advice for founders building open source companies

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and 

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LinkedIn

Wei Lien Dang is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures and leads investments in infrastructure software, security, and developer tools.  Wei was a co-founder of StackRox, a cloud-native security company prior to its acquisition by Red Hat. He can be reached at [email protected] and

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Loris Degioanni is the founder and CTO of Sysdig. Prior to founding Sysdig, Loris co-created Wireshark, an open source network analyzer.

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from the Startup Field Guide:

Starting an open source company

Developing open-source software customers

Building GTM for an open source company

Gretel is a synthetic data platform that allows developers to generate artificial data sets with the same characteristics as real data so they can test AI models without compromising sensitive customer information or privacy. Gretel has a community of over 75,000 developers working with accurate, synthetic data. 

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde and Weil Lien Dang chat with Ali Golshan, CEO and co-founder of Gretel about the company’s path to product-market fit. 

Join us as we discuss:

(1:48) Ali’s background in US Intelligence and how it shaped his approach as a founder

(3:17) The founding insight that led to the creation of Gretel

(6:35) Ali and his co-founders’ “why now” for building a privacy engineering product

(8:15) Why Gretel decided to focus on developers 

(10:47) How Ali and his co-founders narrowed in on early use cases

(15:55) The industries where Gretel found early adopters

(20:20) How Gretel anticipated and adapted to increasingly popular AI models 

(27:24) Why Gretel decided to create a multimodal platform for synthetic data

(29:18) The reasoning behind building Gretel GPT

(31:48) How Gretel’s co-founders work together to adapt to the changing tech landscape

(38:05) What Ali sees as the key drivers for adoption within traditional enterprise companies

(40:19) Why they built their ICP around the developer cloud stack

(45:45) Advice for early-stage founders currently building in AI

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and 

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LinkedIn

Wei Lien Dang is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures and leads investments in infrastructure software, security, and developer tool.  Wei was a co-founder of StackRox, a cloud-native security company prior to its acquisition by Red Hat. He can be reached at [email protected] and

Twitter

Linkedin

Ali Golshan is the CEO and co-founder of Gretel. Prior to Gretel, Ali was the Co-founder and CTO at StackRox (acquired by Red Hat), and previously the Founder & CTO of Cyphort (acquired by Juniper Networks).

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.
Further reading from the Startup Field Guide:

Defining your ICP

Finding early adopters

Finding co-founders

Instabase is an enterprise-focused application platform that allows businesses to automate document processing from unstructured data sources such as bank statements, pay stubs, and tax documents. They use a number of tools including generative AI to summarize and analyze data instantly. Over 50 large enterprises, mostly Fortune 100, use Instabase today.

Recently valued at $2B, the company was founded by Anant Bhardwaj in 2015. In this episode, he chats with Sandhya Hegde about Instabase’s path to product-market fit. 

Join us as we discuss:

-Anant’s founding insight for starting Instabase

-How Anant dropped out of MIT to start the company

-The first set of use cases for the platform

-How Instabase landed Standard Chartered as its first enterprise customer

-How Instabase experimented its way toward product-market fit

-Early go-to-market mistakes as he scaled the company

-Identifying early champions for landing key sales

-Enterprise customers’ responses to Instabase’s technology

-Scaling sales and hiring a sales leader after raising a Series B

-The benefits and challenges from raising their Series B at a high valuation

-Advice for early-stage founders working in AI

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and 

-Twitter - https://twitter.com/sandhya

-LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhyahegde/

Anant Bharadwaj is the CEO and founder of Instabase. Prior to starting Instabase, he was a Ph.D. student at MIT.

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from the Startup Field Guide:

In this episode, we are debuting “Bright and Early” — an Unusual Ventures interview series with early hires at iconic tech companies. You will often hear successful founders share how crucial their first few hires are. These early employees help define the company's culture. They need to be both doers and leaders who can prioritize ruthlessly. They often have an outsized impact on the company and wear multiple hats as the company grows. Finding them and empowering them to be successful is hard. 

In this episode, co-hosted by Chris Marty and Rachel Star from Unusual Ventures, we hear from Naveen Gavini, employee #10 at Pinterest who joined the company 11 years ago as a mobile engineer and went on a career-defining journey to become their head of product. 

This conversation covers

(2:06) Why Naveen wanted to join Pinterest and how he got connected to the team

(4:38) What his interview process looked like

(7:07) The key drivers that motivated him to accept the offer

(9:37) Naveen’s first year as an engineer at Pinterest

(12:41) How Naveen brought the team together to build Pinterest’s mobile app

(15:09) How he thought about managing his career path within the company

(18:06) His approach to team-building

(21:04) Pinterest’s interdisciplinary culture of “knitting”

(24:15) Interviewing early hires, specifically for culture fit

To get notified for new interviews in the Bright and Early series, subscribe to our newsletter: https://bit.ly/2VKvTTD

To stay up to date, follow us on: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/unusualventures/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Unusual_VC

Chris Marty is an Operating Partner at Unusual Ventures and partners with founders to build high-performing early teams. He can be reached at [email protected] and

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christhomasmarty/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/_chrismarty

Rachel Star is Principal at Unusual helping to build and support the firm’s consumer investments. She can be reached at [email protected] and 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-star-2948b288/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/rachel_a_star

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to help founders find product-market fit and build iconic software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Weights & Biases is a developer-focused MLOps platform last valued at over $1 billion. Their platform helps developers streamline their ML workflow from end to end. Weights & Biases currently has over 700 customers using their product to manage their ML models. 

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Lukas Biewald, the CEO and co-founder of Weights & Biases about the company’s path to product-market fit.

Join us as we discuss:

(2:09) Lukas’s inspiration for starting the company

(8:02) Early design partners for Weights & Biases

(13:32) Early use cases for the Weights & Biases platform

(16:13) The founders’ early strategies for finding users and getting feedback

(22:47) Finding product-market fit by focusing on a specific user persona (ML practitioner)

(29:14) Growth tactics to increase awareness and expand their user base

(34:13) Positive surprises in user feedback, and how it informed the company’s product roadmap

(40:14) Lukas’s approach to leadership and building a strong, connected culture

(43:16) Advice for aspiring founders building AI-native products

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and 

Twitter - https://twitter.com/sandhya

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhyahegde/

Lukas Biewald is the CEO and the co-founder of Weights & Biases. Previously, Biewald was the founder and CEO of Figure Eight Inc. (formerly CrowdFlower).

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from the Startup Field Guide:

Define your Ideal Customer Profile: https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/ideal-customer-profile-and-personas

Introduction to product-led growth:https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/introduction-to-plg

Introduction to design partners:https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/what-are-design-partners