Insights

We were thrilled to have Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, join us at this year’s Annual Meeting to give a talk about Khan Academy’s educational chatbot, Khanmigo. You can watch Sal’s TED Talk below.

Rally Venture Partner Ben Fried recently put together a Large Language Model overview and recommended reading list for those of us interested in learning more about how it works, what it’s good at (and not good at) and where the technology is going. We’ve never seen a technology move this fast, and we’re both excited about the opportunities it will bring and cautious about implementing LLMs responsibly.

Rally Managing Director Charles Beeler gets into the details on how founders should approach negotiating term sheets with investors — and what can be learned about each other in the process.

SaaS+ is the strategy of adding embedded fintech and other products on top of a SaaS platform as a secondary revenue model. It’s a company changing model that can turn a $10k Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) SaaS customer into a $100k ARR SaaS+ customer, and there are many SaaS platforms that have the ability to become a SaaS+ business.

1.  Just start. “Just stop doing what you’re currently doing and start. Because the idea is never going to be right; the first direction is definitely not going to be right. But you can’t get to the right idea if you don’t get moving.” —Justin Kaufenberg, founder, SportsEngine (Episode 75)

The Future of Work is a projection of how the way we work will continue to rapidly evolve and how both employees and employers use technology to maximize the advantages of this evolution. We’ve seen major changes over the past few years, most notably with the shift to remote work, the rise of the gig economy and the Great Resignation. The pandemic accelerated these changes, but they’re trends that started years before the pandemic began and they are here to stay. At the core, the changes are all about getting more fulfillment out of work and striking a work-life balance.

Managing the M&A process and developing relationships with stakeholders early in your company’s lifecycle are critical responsibilities of the CEO and executive team. Long-term planning will make all the difference between M&A success or being a company that really struggles with the process. In a recent masterclass for the Rally portfolio, a panel of M&A experts talked about everything from why buy-side and sell-side M&A should be part of your early-stage company’s strategic plan to how you go about building the right relationships.

I recently dug into the Backtrace story with Founders Abel Mathew and Samy Al Bahra. We covered everything from our first meeting in South Philly to Backtrace’s successful sale to Sauce Labs earlier this year. In part two of the Backtrace story, I’m taking a deep dive into four questions with Co-Founder and CEO Abel Mathew.

I first met the Backtrace co-founders at a sports bar in South Philly during the 2014 World Cup. Abel Mathew and Samy Al Bahra rented a car and drove down from New York City to meet me while I was in town for a family reunion. I doubt they had planned to pitch the company to my entire family over beers before watching the US narrowly lose to the Netherlands, but there we were.

The board of directors plays a critical role in the success of a venture-backed company. At the most basic level, particularly with an entrepreneurial board focused on rapid growth, the role of a board is to support and guide the company towards success. For our latest masterclass, we joined together with Blackbird Ventures and Cicada Innovations to talk about the best practices and principles for a startup board. We discussed what to expect from your board members, the progression of a board and much more.