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

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...

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-f...

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 fou...

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...

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...

6sense is an AI-powered ABM platform that is focused on arming revenue teams with the right information to engage with the right accounts. It aggregates buying signals like website visits, email opens, and product review hits. It then leverages machine learning to help revenue teams automate their workflows.  In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with 6Sense’s CEO Jason Zintak about their path to p...

Hex is a data platform that allows teams to streamline their entire workflow using collaborative notebooks, BI, and docs. Hex offers data scientists the ability to work together to deliver their insights and empowers both business users and data analysts to quickly find the answers they need to do their jobs. Today, the company has over 500 enterprise customers.  In this episode, Sandhya Hegde cha...

The space of enterprise search and knowledge management is on the cusp of being dramatically transformed by AI-native tools that can find, analyze and synthesize information instantly for knowledge workers. An emerging leader in this category is Glean. Valued at $1B and serving over a hundred enterprise customers today, Glean leverages an enterprise-grade knowledge graph and LLMs (large language m...

Vercel is an open-source platform that helps front-end developers build and ship dynamic web applications leveraging Jamstack (https://jamstack.org/). Last valued at $2.5B, Vercel was founded in 2015 by CEO Guillermo Rauch and now serves over 30,000 companies.  In this episode, guest host Wei Lien Dang (General Partner at Unusual Ventures) interviews Vercel CEO and Founder Guillermo Rauch about th...

Amplitude is the world’s #1 product analytics platform, currently trading at $1.6B. Launched in 2014, Amplitude started out as a mobile analytics tool, and eventually expanded to include all digital analytics, experimentation and personalization. The company now serves over 1900 customers. In this episode, CTO Curtis Liu shares the story of how Amplitude was created after he and his co-founder, Sp...

In this highlights episode, host Sandhya Hegde shares her framework for the three modes of product-led growth and how some iconic companies pursuing PLG found product-market fit: Snyk, Webflow and Nextdoor. Join us as we discuss: 3.02 : The three modes of PLG—fast-working (Snyk),  paradigm-shifting (Webflow), and habit-forming (Nextdoor) 6: 30: How Snyk challenged the way security products were tr...

Harness is an emerging leader in the CICD (continuous development) space. Last valued at $3.7B in a 2022 fundraise, this is Jyoti Bansal’s second enterprise software unicorn. His first startup Appdynamics was acquired by Cisco the night before their IPO in 2017. In this episode, Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal and Unusual founder John Vrionis take us back 15 years to when Appdynamics first got started. T...

LaunchDarkly is a pioneer in the feature management space. Founded in 2014, while the agile and cloud movements were still relatively nascent, LaunchDarkly was ahead of its time. They have now scaled to a $3 billion company, serving over 4,000 customers. In this episode, LaunchDarkly Co-Founder and CEO Edith Harbaugh takes us back to her initial insight as an engineering manager and product leader...

Jasper is a leading AI-driven content platform with over 80,000 customers. Going from launch to unicorn status in 18 months, they have been one of the fastest companies to cross $1M in MRR with a new product. In this episode, Jasper Co-Founder Dave Rogenmoser shares his story of persistence, pivots, and market validation as he and his co-founders went from building a digital marketing agency to a...

Aurora Solar is a solar design platform that has accelerated small business growth in the solar energy industry. Through it, vendors and homeowners have instant access to crucial data about home solar projects. In this episode, Co-founder at Aurora Solar Chris Hopper shares how he went from installing solar panels to managing a $4B climate tech unicorn that has powered over 10 million solar projec...

Before Webflow, creating a website required both a designer and a coder. Now, designers can build websites without code or sacrificing their artistic vision. Listen, as Co-Founder of Webflow , Bryant Chou talks about his journey turning a simple idea of simplifying website-creation into a $4 billion dollar company. Join us as we discuss: Webflow’s organic marketing strategies Lessons learned from...

SOC2 certification is a daunting process for startup founders but increasingly necessary to land customers. Our guest today was among the first to understand how startup founders thought about security and compliance and set out to create the automated compliance category. Listen in as Christina Cacioppo , CEO and co-found er of Vanta talks about her journey to creating the leading automated secur...

The SQL database that sits under most applications in the world is old technology that was not built with the Cloud in mind. Now we live in a Cloud-Native world and it's important for developers to have a database that offers the same guarantees as legacy SQL database technology while also taking advantage of life in the cloud. Listen in as Peter Mattis Co-founder and CTO at Cockroach Labs talks a...

In today's episode, we hear from Andy Rachleff , who coined the term “product-market fit” which served as the inspiration for this podcast. Andy Rachleff is a legendary Venture Capitalist who originally coined the term "product-market fit." Andy has had an incredibly accomplished career in the tech industry, co-founding Benchmark Capital in 1995 and Wealthfront in 2008. Andy has mentored and guide...

Early revenue can sometimes fool you into thinking that you have product-market fit. Startups begin to focus on growth without having solved the core problem their customers are playing them to address. In this episode, we are joined by Lars Albright , a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, where he leads investments in vertical SaaS and fintech startups. Lars is a three-time founder of enterprise...

Successful startups need to solve a problem, but there is a big difference between a founder knowing a problem exists in the abstract and a founder experiencing the pain points firsthand and developing ways to solve it. Laura Behrens Wu is the Founder and CEO of Shippo, a shipping platform designed to give every merchant access to the best-in-class tools and technology reserved for retail giants....

Since the rise of COVID-19, every company has adopted remote work, and our guest's mission is to create a more equal world by making it possible for talented professionals to work from any country they choose to. Tony Jamous is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Oyster, a global employment unicorn that helps companies hire employees and contractors anywhere in the world. Before Oyster, T...

While some startups experiment and pivot their way into product-market fit, others have founders with a unique insight that needs persistence. After a rough  6 year start as a company between 2012-2018, Arctic Wolf hit a tipping point driven by market awareness. In the past 4 years, the growth rate of the business has been phenomenal. Founder Brian NeSmith joins us to discuss his conviction to kee...

StackRox is a security startup born in 2015. After many initial setbacks, StackRox went on to become a leader in container security, riding the Kubernetes wave and helping cloud-native companies secure their software. Wei Lien Dang joins us today to discuss how StackRox found product-market fit.   Wei Lien Dang is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures . Before joining the venture capital firm, Wei...

Henry Ward joins us to talk about how his team of fewer than 20 employees scaled their startup, then known as eShares, to product-market fit and eventually became a household name in equity management software. Henry Ward is the Co-Founder and CEO of Carta. This $7.4B business has created a new category of software in equity management by helping companies and investors manage their cap tables, va...