Ethan Kurzweil’s Post

Exciting news shared by Eoghan today welcoming Archana Agrawal to Intercom as President that also includes an honest and direct appraisal on the current state of Intercom GTM and the need to go back to invention mode on that side of the business as well. Looking forward to seeing what the company invents in these very important disciplines and the new energy, magic and ambition that Archana brings to the role. Welcome aboard!

Words are clearly not enough but my heart has been breaking for all of the violence, destruction and devastating impact to the Israeli people including family members of mine. It is important that we all stand with Israel and not lose hope for a brighter day for all ahead. #standwithisrael

Jeffrey Katzenberg, of Disney and Dreamworks fame, and his business partner—former Dropbox CFO Sujay Jaswa—talk about the intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, business “homeruns,” and how to recover from the swings and misses. On our very first episode of "Wish I Knew," I talk to this dynamic duo on their career highs and lows, and the biggest lessons they learned from launching and then shutting down Quibi in 2020. My favorite moment was when Jeffrey predicts someone will accomplish exactly what Quibi was attempting, and Sujay quips something memorable in reply. Listen to find out! https://lnkd.in/g4dgEACV

It's been a fun ride being part of this journey launching Steel DAO. Huge thanks to Lindsey Li for conceiving of the idea and being the driving force to make it happen, Divesh Punjabi for all of his tireless work setting this up and Carolina Küng (and the entire Bessemer community & platform team) for her amazing efforts to bring the community to life. Today we announced the new brand for the DAO - Steel DAO (slight nod to Bessemer's roots), Links - our community-as-a-scout program, and Bridge - our talent collective. Read on...

We wanted to lift the veil on a debate we've been having internally between the crypto team at Bessemer Venture Partners and our partner Adam Fisher on the promises and repercussions of future crypto success. tl;dr - we have a skeptic - a "cryptophobic" - in the partnership and through friendly and animated debate, we've come to understand each others' argument more saliently and in the process, I feel even deepened our own understanding of why we feel the way we do about the promises of crypto ahead. We're open-sourcing that debate now - for your reading pleasure. See our piece below: The antidote to crytophobia. Adam's original piece that prompted the debate is linked therein. A few have asked why put out a "mixed message" on a key investing roadmap of ours. As context, it's important to understand that at Bessemer, we don't all speak with one voice. We empower all of our individuals to pursue their own ideas, themes, and investing roadmaps. By design, this takes us in many different directions, affords us many different perspectives, and yes often leads to disagreements about the future (and sometime even the present). After all, a core firm value at Bessemer is intellectual honesty. We think it's important that we not "fake" some uniform consensus on everything we do, but instead reveal as much truth as we can muster, and let you ultimately be the judge on our thinking, and the check on the validity of our perspectives. I, for one, eagerly look forward to your feedback. Please leave any and all thoughts in the comments below or seek me out on twitter at @ethankurz. https://lnkd.in/gUTt_ZP7 #crypto #web3 #investing #startups #friendlydebate

Basis Theory is fast-tracking data compliance and security for #devs. In other words, they are (literally) making the Internet a safer place.   On behalf of all of us at Bessemer Venture Partners especially Charles Birnbaum and Sakib Dadi, congratulations to Colin Luce Brian Billingsley, and their incredible team (Brandon Weber) on the $17M!

In our latest deep dive, Janelle Teng & I discuss Bessemer Venture Partners' longstanding PLG thesis, our belief in the resiliency of the model and 10 enabling characteristics about the best approach for builders. The piece includes 10+ best practice case studies on how to harness this strategy to build an amazing, enduring business: 1. Build product as its own self-serve distribution vehicle (Netlify) 2. Deliver a eureka moment instantaneously (Canva, Shopify) 3. Focus on creating value instead of extracting value (Coiled, Wix.com, DocuSign) 4. Center the product universe on the end user (HashiCorp) 5. Establish a clear initial entry wedge (Imply) 6. Generate virality through network effects (PagerDuty) 7. Employ a transparent pricing model (Prefect, Courier) 8. Design straightforward packaging based on intuitive gates (Zapier) 9. Embed customer success levers (Auth0, Cypress.io) 10. Infuse a product-led philosophy throughout the organization (Twilio) https://lnkd.in/grz9rQGf #PLG #productledgrowth #bessemerventurepartners

Charles Birnbaum, Talia Goldberg, Jeremy Levine, Lindsey Li and I are excited to announce $250M for crypto and web3 and launching BessemerDAO, a small step to rethink portfolio services and community in a more decentralized format. With BessemerDAO, we're committed to the core tenets of providing support with a decentralized ethos, engaging with the web3 community and supporting founders with everything from talent and business development to tokenomics and sharing investment themes. We are onboarding our launch cohort into BessemerDAO now and are excited to see how this effort evolves from here. FORGE ON! cc/ Alexandra Sukin Mike Giampapa Sarah Du Aditya Nidmarti #web3 #crypto #bessemerDAO