Redpoint

Rippling founder Parker Conrad has spent the last eight years building Rippling into a $13.5B company. In his second appearance on the podcast, Parker and I discuss key lessons he's learned throughout his career, highlighting the differences in how he ran Zenefits compared to Rippling today. Additionally, Parker shared his candid views on the challenges of having investors as board members and why he believes much of VC "value add" is overrated. → Focus on what you hate fixing Many people advise focusing on what you enjoy and excel at while delegating tasks you dislike. However, Parker believes this approach is completely wrong. He suggests finding what you really hate doing in the company and leaning into it. The things you're avoiding are likely the biggest risks to the business, and they are probably the things only you can fix. → Go broad, not narrow Parker Conrad challenges the conventional wisdom of starting with a small, narrow product and expanding later. Instead, he believes in building a broader product suite from the outset (a compound startup), which better meets customer needs and is more competitive when selling. Although this approach requires more time and a larger team, the few immense advantages of creating comprehensive software outweigh the benefits of narrower, focused products. If done right, broad focus can lead to becoming THE dominant company capable of doing everything in the space. → Learning from failure vs success  You learn a lot by just doing any job, but Parker Conrad believes you learn more from success than failure because companies can fail for many reasons, making it hard to know what went wrong. Success, on the other hand, requires getting many things right, offering clearer insights. There’s more value in working at successful companies, as it adds credibility to your experience, whereas holding a high title at a failed company can actually hurt your reputation. More insights in the full episode: https://lnkd.in/dimqNBFA

So excited to partner with Every on their $22.5M Series A. Hear directly from the Founder & CEO Rajeev Behera about what they're building as well as why we're so excited to be working together. Redpoint

Excited to announce Every.io's $22.5M Series A led by Redpoint. Barry Peterson and I started Every.io because I found it extremely frustrating to setup and manage 5+ point solutions to run my back office at my last startup, Reflektive. With Every, a founder has everything they need to run their company in one place - including banking, expense management, payroll, benefits, accounting and taxes. We now have 150+ customers, and founders are realizing there is no reason to setup five systems when they can save countless hours setting up one system. With our funds, we are going to be incorporating startups for free, on us. Now founders can incorporate for free, and setup their entire back office with the click of a button. Thank you to all our customers, and Alex Bard from Redpoint for believing in our crazy vision.

We're super excited to announce that we’re leading a $22.5M Series A in Every. Thrilled to be supporting Every’s mission to simplify the back-office journey for founders at the earliest stage. Read more about it: https://lnkd.in/e8nxxHrb

At the inaugural Mistral AI Summit (presented by Redpoint) Mistral AI launches a multi-modal model: Pixtral. Pixtral can discern handwritten notes, pictures, math formulae, and complex diagrams. An amazing milestone!

Happening now at the Mistral AI Summit: "Building the Future of the Internet with Mistral Models" A panel featuring:  - Harrison Chase (Co-Founder & CEO, LangChain)  - Guillermo Rauch (CEO, Vercel)  - Jerry Liu (Co-Founder/CEO, LlamaIndex)  - Margaret J. (Head of Product, Mistral AI)

On the latest Vital Signs, I had a great conversation with Kristina Saffran, Co-Founder and CEO of Equip. Equip delivers at-home, virtual eating disorder treatment for both adolescents and adults with impressive outcomes, such as a 70% reduction in symptoms after one year. They’ve raised over $100M and our conversation hit on Kristina’s journey to founding Equip, getting payers on board and evidence-based treatments for eating disorders. Some highlights: ⚡ Virtual care for eating disorders From the start, Kristina knew Equip was going to deliver 100% virtual care. Because she experienced firsthand how difficult it is to find a multidisciplinary care team, she optimized for easier access. She discusses how a virtual model allows patients to access treatment when they specifically need it, such as a message with a peer mentor or a quick session with a dietitian. Additionally, it allows patients to continue with their lives — school, work, hobbies – rather than being dependent on treatment. A virtual platform also makes it easier to include a patient’s support system in their care, making it more effective. ⚡ Bundled payments & long-term ROI Equip charges a bundle for their 1-year treatment program, which includes unlimited sessions and messaging. Kristina explains this is core to their business because they don’t want to overwhelm patients with treatment they don’t need. The company has been entering into value-based care agreements. One challenge is that for patients who have never had eating disorder treatment, insurers are paying upfront for a savings return that might only manifest years down the road, but patients often don’t stick with plans for that long. Kristina believes there should be more work toward incentivizing interventions with longer-term payouts. ⚡ Scaling innovative care models Kristina notes that startups have a unique ability to scale models that have worked on sub-scale more homogenous populations to larger real-world heterogeneous groups. This was a fantastic episode - check it out below: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3MKOIxe Apple: https://apple.co/3MGMejv

Please join us in congratulating Santiago Regan on his promotion to Director of Business Development! As part of the Founder Experience team, Santi oversees Redpoint's advisory networks, corporate partnerships, and go-to-market programs. He has played a key role in accelerating customer growth across our portfolio and continues to collaborate closely with executives to foster innovation. Congratulations to Santi on the outstanding work he’s done to support our entrepreneurs!

AI is overhyped in the short term and under-hyped in the long term. In a market flooded with bold claims and new AI tools released daily, the challenge is whether these tools can deliver measurable value. At Grammarly, our mission is to use effective communication to drive real business outcomes, and we know how successful organizations become when they leverage Grammarly this way. Our data shows that the average Grammarly user within an organization saves 19 days of work each year—almost a full month of productivity regained per employee! Thank you to Jacob Effron for hosting me on Redpoint's Unsupervised Learning podcast! Listen to the full episode where we cover the future of Grammarly, AI’s potential to upskill, and more: gram.ly/3Xad60e

Grammarly is a personalized AI assistant for writing that has over 30 Million Daily Active Users. They have been building AI productivity tooling long before the most recent GenAI wave and have raised over $400M, most recently at a valuation of $13B. Grammarly CEO Rahul Roy-Chowdhury believes AI will enable everyone to focus on more meaningful, creative interactions by automating the "drudgery" of daily tasks. He joined Unsupervised Learning to talk about how he thinks about competition and his longer term perspective on how AI will be adopted by the enterprise. This interview was packed with tactical insights on successfully building AI products. Some favorite moments: 🚨 Rahul told us about a piece of feedback that Grammarly once received from a police department – it was making their police reports sound too positive. (i.e. “The robber found himself surprisingly wealthy after leaving the bank, if only for a brief period of time.”) The team learned that ensuring high-quality AI assistance requires a multi-faceted approach, including benchmarking, safety evaluations, and extensive user testing, to avoid things like upbeat police reports, or downbeat emails when users are trying to sound warm and friendly. 🩺 Rahul noted that aligning AI solutions with measurable business goals is a must. He talked about Grammarly’s work with ModMed, where the company can actually measure improved patient outcomes based on the quality of their communications with providers. 🔌 Grammarly is an app that functions as a plugin across all sorts of different business tools, from Salesforce to Gmail to Word, and more. This gives the company a unique advantage – working with user data across many platforms and contexts. It also means Grammarly can provide a "uniform AI experience," which Rahul says is a key differentiator in a fragmented landscape of communication tools. 1️⃣9️⃣ The average user of Grammarly in an organization saves 19 days of work from using the tool. In a time where enterprises still aren’t sure about the ROI of their investments into AI software, a month’s worth of work saved is certainly compelling. Rahul believes that enterprises will increasingly look to this ROI as initial exuberance about AI wears off. Give the podcast a listen for more insights from Rahul on the future of AI-powered communication: YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gEukgAHA  Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4egMbXH Apple: https://apple.co/4dRWotI