It was super painful transition for Graphistry. Certainly as a founder responsible for payroll and having only so many hours in a day. Likewise, as business where people in serious gov, enterprise, etc teams are making mission bets on our team, it is both enabling & stress-relieving to know that we can prioritize listening to our customers more than what we think the next funding round's VCs need to hear. It's been night & day launching our new genAI analytics tool louie.ai: this time around, we've gotten to work entirely based on customer design partner feedback & revenue, vs next round VC funding pressure. Still major pressure given who our customers are etc, but of the positive kind.
We haven't taken further fundraising off the table. Importantly, this time around, if/when we do an A, it can now be very much on our terms, and in a way we feel won't unnecessarily jeapordize our customers & team.
As always, context matters. If a company is making $500K in month 3 because the founder is selling back to his old F500 buddies, or it's an n-th time serial founder who VCs line up to burn $100M on no questions asked, or it's yet another Cisco spin-out-and-in, sure. Likewise, we've been figuring out sustainable growth, and that changes a lot. But most pre/seed/A software startup situations nowadays aren't these.
It was super painful transition for Graphistry. Certainly as a founder responsible for payroll and having only so many hours in a day. Likewise, as business where people in serious gov, enterprise, etc teams are making mission bets on our team, it is both enabling & stress-relieving to know that we can prioritize listening to our customers more than what we think the next funding round's VCs need to hear. It's been night & day launching our new genAI analytics tool louie.ai: this time around, we've gotten to work entirely based on customer design partner feedback & revenue, vs next round VC funding pressure. Still major pressure given who our customers are etc, but of the positive kind.
We haven't taken further fundraising off the table. Importantly, this time around, if/when we do an A, it can now be very much on our terms, and in a way we feel won't unnecessarily jeapordize our customers & team.
As always, context matters. If a company is making $500K in month 3 because the founder is selling back to his old F500 buddies, or it's an n-th time serial founder who VCs line up to burn $100M on no questions asked, or it's yet another Cisco spin-out-and-in, sure. Likewise, we've been figuring out sustainable growth, and that changes a lot. But most pre/seed/A software startup situations nowadays aren't these.