Go-to-market has entered a new operating environment. Enter: RevOps. We dig into the next solution space for super{set}, analyzing the paradigm shift in GTM and the data challenges a new class of company must solve.
At super{set}, the problems we face as founders often inspire us to build solutions.
Our sweet spot - what we call “mac-and-cheese” - are problems that we’ve experienced and can solve through innovation with data. If there’s a solution around generating, capturing, pipelining, orchestrating, analyzing, or activating data - the tools and workflow of data+AI - then we’re the ones to build it.
Not every solution to every problem is worthy of becoming a company - beware of features masquerading as products cosplaying as companies - but many can be, reinforcing the economies of learning across super{set}.
One solution space we have been exploring for the past few months is the emerging field of RevOps, which has emerged from the go-to-market function’s new operating environment and is facing rapid change across consumer, strategic, and operational vectors. RevOps is a space filled with challenges worthy of a venture-backed company with a scalable, profitable business model and the data+AI challenges we solve. Let’s dive in.
The information age has unfolded from dial-up into an era of broadband abundance. It used to be that even the enterprise bought software in shrink-wrapped boxes. Today, we buy everything self-serve in just a few clicks. Consumption has changed accordingly: enterprise buyers behave more like the impatient consumers they are outside of work, accustomed to the perquisites of modern life like frictionless check-out, same-day shipping, and immediate access to every movie ever made. With this trend toward the consumerization of the B2B buyer, the littlest bit of resistance in process or funnel hand-offs turns them off immediately, sending them into the hands of competitors.
CRMs once were the single source of truth. No longer - today, 47% of large enterprises believe they can’t rely on their CRM data - and as markets shift, the problem becomes more acute.
In the bull market of the 2010s, as companies grappled with this secular shift in buyer habits, growth could forgive all sins as go-to-market (GTM) teams threw people and dollars at their problems. Businesses could grow without predictable, forecastable, and coordinated capabilities. The operating environment of 2023 has hardened. GTM practices must course-correct to survive by managing good data practices for a unified, optimized understanding of the business and customers:
The declining value of the CRM as the center of strategy and analytics, accelerated by this new operating environment and the five imperatives around sales coordination, marketing understanding, customer success, customer-oriented product development, and customer experience, is causing a unique role to emerge: Revenue Operations or “RevOps.”
RevOps ties together the GTM functions of sales, marketing, product, and customer success. Practitioners support these roles across both tactical execution and strategy. They help run systems and processes, analyze data, build enablement materials, and develop the strategy that glues GTM teams together.
RevOps is rapidly growing, becoming the #1 fastest-growing job title in January 2023, according to LinkedIn. Yet, the few tools and resources available to this function today make them widely ill-equipped to properly manage the scope of the GTM operations. RevOps will continue to accelerate, disrupting GTM functions for the better, but they can only meet their charter with a new approach.
In the introduction, we outlined the secular shift toward abundance that characterizes the information age. With this shift, the value of data is limited only by people’s capacity to make sense of that data and the human foibles that hinder data processing, like poor interpersonal communication. The RevOps role is a product of changing consumer behavior, evolving vendor businesses, and the proliferation of tools creating a data management problem. Three forces are behind this: consumer change, strategic change, and operational change.
The consumerization of B2B SaaS, often encouraged by product-led growth tactics, has empowered users as purchase decision-makers. The myriad of unique and special snowflake consumers can’t and won’t cram into the classic sales funnel, so companies need technology to personalize the buyer journey automatically. The acceleration of these digital transactions has created new data sources and insights that the GTM space has never had available before.
When a hundred flowers bloom, monetization and retention of the existing customer base become far more critical than cramming the top of the funnel. Net Recurring Revenue (NRR) has become more critical than Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).
Accordingly, vendors have adopted new metrics, like product usage, support escalations, and champion engagement, to determine which existing users top up-sell and cross-sell. Analytics is a post hoc user experience exercise and an ongoing process critical for growth and operating margin.
In an earlier era, the CRM was a single source of truth for go-to-market teams, and the CRM was largely manual data entry. Today, tools like Gong, Drift, Clearbit, Heap, and G2 automate data generation.
Similar to consumer change, these tools save the tedium of data entry for sales team members while increasing the number of data points. In other words, there’s not only an increase in the amount of GTM data created through sales automation and enrichment tools but also more tools that need to consume this data, such as AI lead routing, content generation, deal scoring, and website personalization.
It’s a vicious cycle, ironically increasing the value of a complete and single source of truth for go-to-market data that crosses traditional silos.
There is an enormous opportunity to free GTM leaders from bad self-reported data, dashboard fatigue that only highlights problems when their too late, and revenue leakage caused by siloed people, processes, and technology. Finally, the GTM organization can experience data and intelligence transformation with accurate, proprietary information that provides insights and execution for optimal revenue growth.
We described RevOps as covering four areas: 1.) managing GTM systems and processes, 2.) providing enablement, 3.) mining analytics for insights, and 4.) strategizing the big picture across GTM teams. These are all crucial tasks rapidly facing consumer, strategic, and operational change - but they miss the bigger picture. At its core, the root cause of the problem for RevOps is not a mere operations challenge but a data challenge to properly manage the operations. RevOps must be the guardian of the company’s GTM data asset, leveraging that proprietary asset to improve the business, driving alignment and harmony across GTM functions: in other words, programmatically act across the revenue bowtie.
From our experience across super{set} companies and our view of RevOps as a data challenge, first and foremost, we see five solvable data challenges:
The RevOps role is quickly maturing and reaching a critical mass. Organizations want their revenue operations function to drive data and technology as a core driver of revenue growth and efficiency. Yet today, it’s unrealistic to expect that vision with the current resources available to manage the GTM operations.
Given their embeddedness within GTM cross-functional teams, solving the challenges of individual RevOps practitioners and teams has leverage for the success of entire companies. The market is shifting: we know from first-hand experience across multiple super{set} companies that the inefficiencies of GTM in the 2010s won’t cut it for companies seeking to survive in the new environment of the 2020s. Now’s the time to solve the RevOps data problem.
Special thanks to Nick Kessler and Lindsey Meyl for all your help with this piece.
Transcript
In the first episode of The Closed Session, meet Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya, serial entrepreneurs and podcast hosts.
read moreIn the second episode of The Closed Session, Tom and Vivek discuss the framework for starting your own company from scratch, and the three dimensions that should be taken into account.
read moreYou’ve decided to launch a business, but before you hurtle blindly into the breach, you need a bulletproof plan and a perfect pitch deck to persuade your co-founders, investors, partners, and employees to follow you into the unknown.
read moreIn this episode of The Closed Session, Tom and Vivek talk about dilution, methods, mindset, benchmarks and best practices for raising investment capital for a new tech startup.
read moreNow that you've written the business plan and raised money, it's time to recruit your early team. In this episode, Tom and Vivek cover the do's and dont's of building a high-output team - who to hire, how to build chemistry and throughput, how to think about talent when your company is a toddler versus when it's an adolescent.
read moreWelcome to Season 2 of The Closed Session! In this first episode of 2020, Tom and Vivek talk about the five companies super{set} launched in 2019 and the lessons they’re learning as they go.
read more
Tom and Vivek talk about inclusion and reflect on their personal experiences as brown guys in tech. Inclusion feels like a moral imperative, but does it really make for stronger, better companies? Are there unintended consequences of acting on good intentions to 'fix' an inclusion problem at a company? Why is tech so lacking in diversity, and what can we do to get it right?
read moreWe are living in a time of extraordinary concern about the negative consequences of online platforms and social media. We worry about the damage interactive technologies cause to society; about the impact to our mental health; and about the way that these platforms and their practices play to our most destructive impulses. Too often, the experiences we have online serve only to polarize, divide, and amplify the worst of human nature.
read more
This post was written by Habu software engineer, Martín Vargas-Vega, as part of our new #PassTheMic series.
read moreThis post was written by Ketch Developer Advocate, Ryan Overton, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreThis post was written by Ketch Data Privacy & Compliance Specialist, Jocelyn Brunson, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreThis post was written by Ketch Sales Director, Sheridan Rice, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read more
The super{set} studio model for early-stage venture It is still early days for the startup studio model. We know this because at super{set} we still get questions from experienced operators and investors. One investor that we’ve known for years recently asked us: “you have a fund — aren’t you just a venture capital firm with a different label?”
read more
This post was written by MarkovML Co-Founder, Lindsey Meyl, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreWhere do the ideas come from? How do we build companies from scratch at super{set}?
read more
Coming up with new company ideas is easy: we take the day off, go to the park, and let the thoughts arrive like butterflies. Maybe we grab a coconut from that guy for a little buzz. While this describes a pleasant day in San Francisco, it couldn’t be further from the truth of what we do at super{set}. If only we could pull great ideas out of thin air. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way.
read more
The wheel. Electricity. The automobile. These are technologies that had a disproportionate impact on the merits of their first practical use-case; but beyond that, because they enabled so much in terms of subsequent innovation, economic historians call them “general-purpose technologies” or GPTs...
read more
In our last post, we discussed how data is the new general-purpose technology and that is why at super{set} we form data-driven companies from scratch. But new technologies are a promise, not a sudden phase change.
read moreWhen a VC decides to invest in a company, they write up a document called the “Investment Memo” to convince their partners that the decision is sound. This document is a thorough analysis of the startup...
read moreThis post was written by Ketch Solutions Engineer, Sahiti Surapaneni, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreWhat does it mean to be a super{set} co-founder and who do we look for? Why is the Head of Product the first co-founder we bring on board?
read more
Considered by some to be “America’s Second Independence Day,” Juneteenth has only recently entered the national zeitgeist. Celebrated on the third Saturday in June, it became a federal holiday just last year under President Joe Biden. Many companies are left wondering how to acknowledge the holiday. We sat down with Eskalera’s co-founder Dr. Tolonda Tolbert to get her take.
read more
Has someone looking to make a key hire ever told you that they are after “coachability”? Take a look at the Google ngram for “coachability” — off like a rocket ship since the Dot Com bubble, and it’s not even a real word! Coaching is everywhere in Silicon Valley...
read more
At super{set}, we stand side-by-side and pick up the shovel with our co-founders. Our first outside co-founder at a super{set} company is usually a Head of Product. Let’s unpack each portion of that title....
read more
Pankaj Rajan, co-founder at MarkovML, describes his Big Tech and startup experience and his journey to starting a company at super{set}.
read more
The decision to start a company – or to join an early stage one – is an act of the gut. On good days, I see it as a quasi-spiritual commitment. On bad days, I see it as sheer irrationality. Whichever it is, you’ll be happier if you acknowledge and calmly accept the lunacy of it all...
read moreTom and Vivek describe how building the best product is like planning the perfect heist: just like Danny Ocean, spend the time upfront to blueprint and stage, get into the casino with the insertion product, then drill into the safe and make your escape with the perfect product roadmap.
read more
Tom and Vivek discuss what the very first customers of a startup must look and act like, the staging and sequencing of setting up a sales operation with a feedback loop to product, and end with special guest Matt Kilmartin, CEO of Habu and former Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) of Krux, for his advice on effective entrepreneurial selling.
read more
Reflections after a summer as an engineering intern at super{set}
read more
Gal Vered of Checksum explains his rationale for leaving Google to co-found a super{set} company.
read more
The era of easy money - or at least, easy returns for VCs - is over. Tom Chavez is calling for VCs to show up in-person at August board meetings, get off the sidelines, and start adding real value and hands-on support for founders.
read more
Tom and Vivek describe what the ideal CEO looks like in the early stage, why great product people aren’t necessarily going to make great CEOs, and what the division of labor looks like between the CEO and the rest of the early team. They then bring on special guest Dane E. Holmes from super{set} company Eskalera to hear about his decision to join a super{set} company and his lessons for early-stage leadership.
read more
o11y - What is it? Why is it important? What are the tools you need? More importantly - how can you adopt an observability mindset? Habu Software Architect Siddharth Sharma reports from his session at super{summit} 2022.
read more
Othmane Rifki, Principal Applied Scientist at super{set} company Spectrum Labs, reports from the session he led at super{summit} 2022: "When Inference Meets Engineering." Using super{set} companies as examples, Othmane reveals the 3 ways that data science can benefit from engineering workflows to deliver business value.
read more
Head of Infrastructure at Ketch, and Kapstan Advisor, Anton Winter explains a few of the infrastructure and DevOps headaches he encounters every day.
read moreTom and Vivek jump on the pod for a special bonus episode to call BULLSHIT on VCs, CEOs, the “categorical shit,” and more. So strap yourselves in because the takes are HOT.
read more
The Move Accelerates the Rapidly Growing Startup Studio’s Mission to Lead the Next Generation of AI and Data-Driven Market Innovation and Success
read more
Announcing Jon Suarez-Davis (jsd) as super{set}’s Chief Commercial Officer: jsd tells us in his own words why he's joining super{set}
read moreTom and Vivek describe the lessons learned from fundraising at Rapt in 1999 - the height of the first internet bubble - through their experience at Krux - amid the most recent tech bubble. After sharing war stories, they describe how super{set} melds funding with hands-on entrepreneurship to set the soil conditions for long-term success.
read more
Tom and Vivek have come full circle: in this episode they’re talking about closed session board meetings in The {Closed} Session. They discuss their experience in board meetings - even some tense ones - as serial founders and how they approach board meetings today as both co-founders and seed investors of the companies coming out of the super{set} startup studio.
read more
Arthur Patterson, founder of venture capital firm Accel, sits down for a fireside chat with super{set} founding partner Tom Chavez as part of our biweekly super{set} Community Call. Arthur and Tom cover venture investing, company-building, and even some personal stories from their history together.
read moreArthur Patterson, the founder of venture capital firm Accel, sits down for a fireside chat with super{set} founding partner Tom Chavez as part of our biweekly super{set} Community Call.
read more
This month we pass the mic to Sagar Gaur, Software Engineer at super{set} MLOps company MarkovML, who shares with us his tips for working within a global startup with teams in San Francisco and Bengaluru, India
read more
Arthur Patterson, legendary VC and founder of Accel Partners, sits down with Tom Chavez to discuss insights into company building. Tom and Vivek review the tape on the latest episode of The {Closed} Session.
read more
Chris Fellowes, super{set} interned turned full time employee at super{set} portfolio company Kapstan, gives his 7 recommendations for how to turn an internship into a job at a startup.
read more
Kicking off the fourth season of the {Closed} Session podcast with a great topic and guest: Frida Polli, CEO and co-founder of pymetrics, which was recently acquired by Harver, joins us to talk about the critical role that technology and specifically AI and neuroscience can play in eliminating bias in hiring and beyond.
read more
Obsessive intensity. Pack animal nature. Homegrown hero vibes. Unyielding grit. A chip on the shoulder. That's who we look for to join exceptional teams.
read moreGo-to-market has entered a new operating environment. Enter: RevOps. We dig into the next solution space for super{set}, analyzing the paradigm shift in GTM and the data challenges a new class of company must solve.
read more.jpg)
We are delighted to share our new episode of the {Closed} Session podcast with guest Alyssa Hutnik. Alyssa looms large in the privacy world, and she’s been thinking deeply about the intersections of data, technology and the law for nearly two decades. She’s also the Chief Privacy and Data Security Architect at Ketch, a super{set} company, as well as a lawyer. Hope you enjoy the episode!
read more
super{set} startup studio portfolio company’s seed funding round was led by Forerunner Ventures with participation from Ulu Ventures Raise will enable boombox.io to accelerate product development on the way to becoming the winning creator platform for musicians globally
read more
On the heels of boombox.io's $7M seed fundraise led by Forerunner, Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya sit down with boombox co-founders India Lossman and Max Mathieu for a special episode straight from super{summit} 2023 in New Orleans!
read moreOthmane Rifki, Principal Applied Scientist at super{set} company Spectrum Labs, reports from the session he led at super{summit} 2022: "When Inference Meets Engineering." Using super{set} companies as examples, Othmane reveals the 3 ways that data science can benefit from engineering workflows to deliver business value.
read moreThis post was written by Ketch Developer Advocate, Ryan Overton, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreReflections after a summer as an engineering intern at super{set}
read moreThis post was written by Ketch Data Privacy & Compliance Specialist, Jocelyn Brunson, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreo11y - What is it? Why is it important? What are the tools you need? More importantly - how can you adopt an observability mindset? Habu Software Architect Siddharth Sharma reports from his session at super{summit} 2022.
read moreIn our last post, we discussed how data is the new general-purpose technology and that is why at super{set} we form data-driven companies from scratch. But new technologies are a promise, not a sudden phase change.
read moreThis post was written by Ketch Sales Director, Sheridan Rice, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreArthur Patterson, founder of venture capital firm Accel, sits down for a fireside chat with super{set} founding partner Tom Chavez as part of our biweekly super{set} Community Call. Arthur and Tom cover venture investing, company-building, and even some personal stories from their history together.
read moreWe are living in a time of extraordinary concern about the negative consequences of online platforms and social media. We worry about the damage interactive technologies cause to society; about the impact to our mental health; and about the way that these platforms and their practices play to our most destructive impulses. Too often, the experiences we have online serve only to polarize, divide, and amplify the worst of human nature.
read moresuper{set} startup studio portfolio company’s seed funding round was led by Forerunner Ventures with participation from Ulu Ventures Raise will enable boombox.io to accelerate product development on the way to becoming the winning creator platform for musicians globally
read moreThis post was written by MarkovML Co-Founder, Lindsey Meyl, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreThe decision to start a company – or to join an early stage one – is an act of the gut. On good days, I see it as a quasi-spiritual commitment. On bad days, I see it as sheer irrationality. Whichever it is, you’ll be happier if you acknowledge and calmly accept the lunacy of it all...
read morePankaj Rajan, co-founder at MarkovML, describes his Big Tech and startup experience and his journey to starting a company at super{set}.
read moreComing up with new company ideas is easy: we take the day off, go to the park, and let the thoughts arrive like butterflies. Maybe we grab a coconut from that guy for a little buzz. While this describes a pleasant day in San Francisco, it couldn’t be further from the truth of what we do at super{set}. If only we could pull great ideas out of thin air. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way.
read moreAnnouncing Jon Suarez-Davis (jsd) as super{set}’s Chief Commercial Officer: jsd tells us in his own words why he's joining super{set}
read moreAt super{set}, we stand side-by-side and pick up the shovel with our co-founders. Our first outside co-founder at a super{set} company is usually a Head of Product. Let’s unpack each portion of that title....
read moreThis month we pass the mic to Sagar Gaur, Software Engineer at super{set} MLOps company MarkovML, who shares with us his tips for working within a global startup with teams in San Francisco and Bengaluru, India
read moreConsidered by some to be “America’s Second Independence Day,” Juneteenth has only recently entered the national zeitgeist. Celebrated on the third Saturday in June, it became a federal holiday just last year under President Joe Biden. Many companies are left wondering how to acknowledge the holiday. We sat down with Eskalera’s co-founder Dr. Tolonda Tolbert to get her take.
read moreThe Move Accelerates the Rapidly Growing Startup Studio’s Mission to Lead the Next Generation of AI and Data-Driven Market Innovation and Success
read moreThe wheel. Electricity. The automobile. These are technologies that had a disproportionate impact on the merits of their first practical use-case; but beyond that, because they enabled so much in terms of subsequent innovation, economic historians call them “general-purpose technologies” or GPTs...
read moreGo-to-market has entered a new operating environment. Enter: RevOps. We dig into the next solution space for super{set}, analyzing the paradigm shift in GTM and the data challenges a new class of company must solve.
read moreWhen a VC decides to invest in a company, they write up a document called the “Investment Memo” to convince their partners that the decision is sound. This document is a thorough analysis of the startup...
read moreHas someone looking to make a key hire ever told you that they are after “coachability”? Take a look at the Google ngram for “coachability” — off like a rocket ship since the Dot Com bubble, and it’s not even a real word! Coaching is everywhere in Silicon Valley...
read moreHead of Infrastructure at Ketch, and Kapstan Advisor, Anton Winter explains a few of the infrastructure and DevOps headaches he encounters every day.
read moreThis post was written by Ketch Solutions Engineer, Sahiti Surapaneni, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreObsessive intensity. Pack animal nature. Homegrown hero vibes. Unyielding grit. A chip on the shoulder. That's who we look for to join exceptional teams.
read moreChris Fellowes, super{set} interned turned full time employee at super{set} portfolio company Kapstan, gives his 7 recommendations for how to turn an internship into a job at a startup.
read moreThe era of easy money - or at least, easy returns for VCs - is over. Tom Chavez is calling for VCs to show up in-person at August board meetings, get off the sidelines, and start adding real value and hands-on support for founders.
read moreThe super{set} studio model for early-stage venture It is still early days for the startup studio model. We know this because at super{set} we still get questions from experienced operators and investors. One investor that we’ve known for years recently asked us: “you have a fund — aren’t you just a venture capital firm with a different label?”
read moreGal Vered of Checksum explains his rationale for leaving Google to co-found a super{set} company.
read moreThis post was written by Habu software engineer, Martín Vargas-Vega, as part of our new #PassTheMic series.
read more
