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William Gaybrick shared thisStripe is powering commerce inside ChatGPT. We’re extremely optimistic about its prospects. We’ve also codeveloped the Agentic Commerce Protocol with OpenAI. It’s an open standard to enable seamless AI-enabled commerce and help businesses thrive in the era of AI agents. And we’re eager to help: acp@stripe.com. agenticcommerce.dev https://lnkd.in/ek_kgNHX
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William Gaybrick shared thisWe just launched our open roles for interns and new grads. Come help us build economic infrastructure for the Internet and begin your career tackling real-world problems with global reach. More at stripe.com/jobs/university.
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William Gaybrick shared thisGreat to be in Berlin today for Stripe Tour, meeting fast-growing and ambitious businesses. Last year, over 100,000 new German businesses went live on Stripe, and, today, we work with more than half of the DAX40. Businesses here are excited by the opportunities for growth across the internet economy, especially with AI, stablecoins, and embedded finance. At the event, I was very glad to share the stage with Alexander Hoeptner of AllUnity, which is working on a Euro backed stablecoin. As we bring assets on chain and some of the regulatory fog lifts, there's infinite opportunity and possibilities in global finance. What an exciting time to be building programmable financial services : )
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William Gaybrick shared thisICYMI: lightning roundup of (some) Sessions ships ⚡️⚡️
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William Gaybrick shared thisWe’re building programmable financial services, making money as easy to manipulate with code as data is. Across 60+ launches today, some personal favorites: - Stripe Orchestration to optimize multiprocessor environments - The world’s first foundation model for payments - Multicurrency Financial Accounts with instant FX - Stablecoin Financial Accounts across 101 countries - Global issuing via stablecoin balances. And tons more.William Gaybrick shared thisToday we announced upgrades to Stripe.The latest from Stripe: our new foundation model, stablecoin products, and moreThe latest from Stripe: our new foundation model, stablecoin products, and moreStripe
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William Gaybrick shared thisStripe and Bridge are partnering with Visa to launch the *first-ever* global card issuing product. Developers can programmatically issue Visa cards connected to stablecoin wallets in dozens of countries through a single integration. Because Visa is the issuer, these cards are accepted by over 150 million businesses worldwide. More on this next week at Stripe Sessions. Hope to see you there! https://lnkd.in/gXVkEHckBridge partners with Visa to launch stablecoin card issuing productBridge partners with Visa to launch stablecoin card issuing product
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William Gaybrick shared thisOur mission is to grow the GDP of the internet. We do this by helping our customers grow *their* businesses. Today at Stripe Tour New York we announced a ton of new things in this direction: major upgrades to Stripe Billing (used by more than 300,000 businesses and counting!), dozens of updates to our revenue and finance automation suite, Instant Bank Payments with Link, 8 additional payment methods, stablecoin payments acceptance, and Billing interoperability with third party payments, to name a few. And we also announced a new partnership with NVIDIA. Read about all of the updates announced today: https://lnkd.in/egeks8UJ.
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William Gaybrick posted thisWhen asked "what should Stripe ship next?" many of you've said merchant of record. The Lemon Squeezy team has built an excellent MoR product, and we're excited to work together with them to help more of you launch to grow!
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William Gaybrick shared thisLondon is home to more businesses using Stripe than any other city in the world. Businesses in the UK are building and inventing at an incredible clip, with a notable crop of AI companies continuing down the path that DeepMind charted. To serve UK companies, Stripe is building out a comprehensive set of Software Defined Financial Services for global payments, embedded payments and financial services, and revenue management. On Tuesday at Stripe Tour London, we announced big product updates for UK businesses, including Pay By Bank and Faster Payouts. https://lnkd.in/e4AniRfZ.William Gaybrick shared this
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William Gaybrick liked thisWilliam Gaybrick liked thisStripe Commons is coming to Mexico City on March 18th. We're bringing together 200+ founders, operators, and builders for talks, firesides, product showcases, and more. Zach Abrams, 🏕️ Henri Stern, and leaders from Phantom, Morpho, Apollo Global Management, Inc., Cloudflare and more — all in one room. Excited to see you there! Space is very limited. Apply now: https://lnkd.in/gSJiDmzM
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William Gaybrick liked thisWilliam Gaybrick liked thisMore than 12 years ago, I joined Stripe to help build the best developer experience in the world. I’m excited to share that I now get to lead the team responsible for it! Stripe has always been developer-first. We're the kind of people who argue about whether the canceled enum value should be spelled with one l or two, and whether an unexpected payment partner outage should result in a 500 or a 402. We care deeply about the precision of every piece of documentation, the design of every API, the usefulness of every error message, and about building a Dashboard that “just works” for every role. But the world is changing: → Stripe is now truly multi-product, and we're moving faster today than ever before. This makes the simplicity vs. flexibility tradeoff way more interesting (and way harder!). How do we evolve our API versioning system to keep up? (Last year, we introduced botanical major versions.) And how can we keep our docs easy to get started with, but comprehensive? → Developers and non-developers are prompting their way to applications with Stripe integrations, which turn into real businesses faster than ever. What new integration patterns will emerge, and how will these integrations evolve over time? (We’re shipping foundational APIs like claimable sandboxes especially for these use cases.) → Agents are showing up as real users of our docs and Dashboard. How do we warmly (and safely!) welcome them? How will our MCP server need to evolve as we start to trust agents to do more? What are other opportunities for new interaction patterns, big or small? My team's job is to make sure that as Stripe grows more powerful, it never stops feeling like Stripe, whether you (or your robot friend) are building with our APIs, our Dashboard, our MCP server, or whatever comes next. If these problems sound fun, please reach out! I’d love to work with you.
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William Gaybrick liked thisWilliam Gaybrick liked thisOn November 2nd, I’ll be running the New York City Marathon in memory of my wife Jen who passed away last year from ovarian cancer ❤️🩹 I’m raising funds for the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition (NOCC) to support research, awareness, and better outcomes for women and families affected by ovarian cancer. If you’d like to support, you can donate here: https://lnkd.in/gMmYmD_t Ovarian cancer is often called a “silent killer” because symptoms are vague and it’s frequently diagnosed late. Too many families, like mine, are impacted by this disease — and awareness and research funding are critical to change that. This run is my way of channeling grief into action. By running through the streets of New York, I want to carry her memory forward and shine a light on a cause that needs it. Every step I take will be for her, and for all the women and families touched by this disease. Thank you for helping me make a difference. #NYCMarathon #OvarianCancerAwareness #Fundraising #InMemory #NOCC
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William Gaybrick liked thisWilliam Gaybrick liked thisI’m excited to share that I’m joining Midjourney as Chief Product Officer. When I met David earlier this year, it just clicked. His vision and values really resonated with me, and I knew I wanted to be part of what he’s building. Midjourney isn’t trying to replace people with tech, it’s about making tools that feel intuitive, personal, and help people express themselves more deeply. Tools that stretch our imagination and support a more thoughtful, creative future. Looking back, it’s wild how all the seemingly random parts of my career led to this moment. Twitch taught me what it means to build with a community at the heart of it all, something that Midjourney has in spades. Stripe sharpened my sense of how to scale fast, and made apparent just how much AI is shaping the economy and our day-to-day lives. And back at the very start, my background in electrical and systems engineering now comes full circle as Midjourney also explores hardware. This is the kind of role I didn’t even know I was working toward, but now that I’m here, it feels right. I’m incredibly excited for what’s ahead. We’re not at the end of the story, we’re in the middle of the journey.
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William Gaybrick liked thisYou may have seen Link in the wild and not realized it’s a hugely impactful Stripe productWilliam Gaybrick liked thisTwo-thirds of the Forbes AI 50—including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, xAI, Perplexity, and Suno—use Link, Stripe's consumer payments product, to power faster checkout. 58% of Lovable's payments volume on Stripe, 38% of Retell AI's, and 40% of MiniMax's now run through Link. For consumers, Link means fast checkout with your preferred methods. But here’s the best part: once you adopt Link at one business, online checkout becomes seamless at more than a million others across the Stripe network.
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William Gaybrick liked thisWilliam Gaybrick liked thisGreat to be back down under for Stripe Tour Sydney! Yesterday, we shared how Stripe is continuing to invest in the foundations that help Australian and New Zealand businesses grow. For Australia, we're continuing to invest in PayTo where the A.P.P. has just seen monthly volumes via the New Payments Platform surpass $200 billion. We've also ramped up support for BECS in New Zealand. One of our best performing new features is Adaptive Pricing: it automatically displays the localised price based on your customer's location and handles the currency conversion. That's enabled customers in over 150 countries to pay in their local currency, and checkout in one click with guaranteed exchange rates. Businesses enabling it see 8% higher international conversion and a 17.8% uplift in revenue. Read the recap: https://lnkd.in/gyt7VqNH
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Daniel Dart
Rock Yard Ventures • 10K followers
🚨NEW EPISODE: Recorded live at FUTURE TITANS 2026 - Jeff Perry of Carta sat down with the iconic Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry. Seth has been in venture for 25 years, built Foundry from scratch as an emerging manager himself, and has backed about 50 emerging manager funds through his fund of funds. He has genuinely seen every side of this table. They went deep on building Foundry, why VCs are in the influence business, not the decision business, and why the concentration problem in venture is not only bad for LPs, but also for the innovation ecosystem overall. And why Seth's new book, Capital Evolution, is so important for the future of America. 🎧 Links to listen... Apple: https://lnkd.in/ehQUQ2EM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eU4FExpg
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Harshul Sanghi
4K followers
Great conversations at our WillowTree Ventures dinner with leaders across fintech and AI. A few themes stood out strongly: enterprises are leaning into AI for real efficiency gains, product and engineering orgs still set the agenda, and the whitespace in “boring” industries is wider than most people assume. It’s clear that the next breakout companies in AI for financial services won’t come from the obvious places. Thanks to everyone who joined - excited to keep working alongside founders building in these non-obvious, high-impact wedges.
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Lakshmi Shankar
Together • 3K followers
Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs
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Peter OBrien
Digital Finance HQ • 4K followers
Every hire, product feature, and GTM experiment is a capital allocation decision, most teams just don’t call it that. I’m kicking off a 3-part series on capital allocation for founders, operators, and finance leaders with a simple question: ➡️ Will the next $1 you deploy become worth more than $1? Series overview Part 1: defines the core concept + the math Part 2: where capital goes + how to measure whether it’s working Part 3: AIMS framework for communicating allocation decisions to management teams and your board Part 1 (attached here) lays the practical foundation: 🔹 The $1 invested test and ROIIC vs. hurdle rates (scoreboard vs. decision lens) 🔹 A lightweight “investment brief” to evaluate bets (GROW / BUILD / BUY) 🔹 The small metric toolkit that translates finance into operating decisions (NPV / payback / ROIIC / incremental margin) 🔹 Early-stage proxies when DCF inputs are unknowable (burn multiple + revenue quality) 🔹 Operator “vital signs” to spot drift early (profit engine, leverage, cash conversion, optics) Series Roadmap ✔️ This series (Parts 1–3): breadth-first. shared, lightweight framework to define value creation, choose decision-grade metrics, and communicate tradeoffs clearly ✔️ Next series: depth-first. momentum drivers + operational decisions that need near real-time measurement to spot drift early and course-correct fast Read Part 1 here and Part 2 and 3 on substack. Next Series will be out next week. 💰 What’s one bet you’re funding right now, and how will you prove it’s working?
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Emery Waddell
Vocap Investment Partners • 4K followers
Pumped to double down on the overlooked software founders who have their head down delivering the future in their industries—especially those tired of choosing between bootstrapping or taking excessive VC $$ with boom or boost expectations. Onward!
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Dave Goldblatt
Vibe Capital • 2K followers
At Vibe Capital, we believe we're at a major inflection point. For the last 40 years, the highest-leverage work was in manipulating bits. That era is maturing into a utility. The new frontier is the physical world, and the race to program it has begun. In my latest Dave's Quick Hits newsletter, I map out the three fundamental stacks for rebuilding reality: 1. The Biological Path: Using AI to turn evolution into an engineering discipline, creating new materials and medicines at an incredible speed. 2. The Mechanical Path: Deploying AI-directed robots and self-replicating factories to trigger a new industrial explosion. 3. The Cybernetic Path: Building the final API to the brain, merging human cognition directly with our biological and mechanical creations. The generational alpha won't come from funding the next app, but from financing the means of physical creation. You can read the full analysis and the investment theses for each path here. https://lnkd.in/gAXNDaZF #FrontierTech #VentureCapital #Investing #DeepTech #AI #Manufacturing #Biotech #vibecap #vibecapital
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Matt Rappaport
Future Frontier Capital • 8K followers
Don't Build a Better Wheat Farm" - Why Defensibility Stakes Are Higher in Deep Tech Just published a new piece on my "Ignore the Confusion" blog, building on thoughtful insights from Eric Ver Ploeg at Tunitas Ventures about startup defensibility. Eric's core thesis: Too many startups pitch like wheat farmers - "huge TAM, slow incumbents, growing market, domain expertise" - but fail to think through long-term defensibility until it's too late. From a deep tech perspective, the stakes are even higher: ** Unlike software, deep tech founders must commit to defensibility strategies from day one - their funding depends on it ** Patent vs. trade secret decisions are often difficult to reverse and shape your entire competitive strategy ** Even "picks and shovels" providers (the tools that make industries more efficient) become commodities without proper moats The key insight that resonates: Defensibility can't be retrofitted. Whether you're building software or deep tech, your moat must be architected into the business model from the start. Thanks to Eric Ver Ploeg for sharing these insights on startup strategy and letting me build on his framework from a deep tech lens. Read the full post: https://lnkd.in/dEj_iF-Q #DeepTech #StartupStrategy #Defensibility #VentureCapital #Innovation
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Tom Lazay
Companyon Ventures • 4K followers
An emerging VC manager's fundraising lessons... the first two funds are a grind. Now, we’re on our third fund, it feels like we’re almost over the hump, but fundraising never gets easy for most of us. I want to congratulate the emerging VC firms presenting at this year’s RAISE Global conference. As former RAISE presenters, and (soon-to-graduate) emerging managers, we thought we’d share this LP Translator, a lighthearted guide to decoding what LPs really mean during the fundraising process. Fellow GPs, which ones did I miss? 👇 The LP Translator 📣 "Let’s stay in touch.” Translation: We’re not interested. “We want to see your track record develop.” Translation: Either we don't believe in your strategy, or we’re focused on managers with more buzz. “We’re not allocating to new managers right now.” Translation: We’re not allocating to you right now. "Show us your deals so we can get to know you.” Translation: We’d like free co-invests if you get something hot. “We need to see more DPI before we commit.” Translation: We don’t really understand VC, but we’re pretending to. “We’re fully allocated for this year; check in early next year.” Translation: Next year we’ll still be fully allocated (just not to you). “Call us before final close.” Translation: I’m too polite to say no at this time, so I’m kicking the can down the road. “Your fund is too small.” Translation: Okay, that one might actually be true (for some LPs). “We went through your data room and want to meet face-to-face.” Translation: We’re genuinely interested, keep going! “Can you send us your LPA for signature?” Translation: Let’s go! 🚀 -------------------------- Fundraising is a long game, longer than we ever expected. We're now seeing how LP relationships are built across several funds, not several months. If they’re investing time to learn about you and your strategy, that’s your best signal of real interest. #emergingmanager #venturecapital #LP #RAISEGLOBAL
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Paul Perrett
Firmable • 3K followers
Big milestone for Firmable. We’ve raised $14m Series A led by Airtree. Sales has moved through a few big waves: intuition-led, CRM-led, data-led. We’re now entering the next one – intelligence-led sales. The opportunity isn’t just better data. It’s turning that data into clear direction and action, without adding more work for sales teams. That’s what we’re building at Firmable: a foundation of trusted external data, layered with intelligence that helps sellers know who to focus on and when. Led by Airtree, this round supports our expansion across Asia and into the US – and accelerates the build-out of AI agents that take the admin work off sales teams so they can focus on what they do best. Proud of the team, grateful to our customers and investors. We’re just getting started. Read the exclusive in the AFR. https://lnkd.in/gr66uknb Leigh Jasper | Tara Salmon | Karthik Venkatasubramanian| Chester Thompson| Chath Widanapathirana
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Jeff Immelt
New Enterprise Associates… • 566K followers
Dayna Grayson is a leading VC who has “sat in every chair” at a young age. She founded Construct Capital with Rachel Holt, an early leader at Uber. Together, they are tackling the digitization of industry. Dayna will discuss macro trends, what it takes to be a founder, and the potential for AI. She is one of the few who have successfully blended a career of operations and investing. Check out our discussion at: https://lnkd.in/eYBUGjbW #leadershipdevelopment
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Maddi Holman
Daring Ventures • 9K followers
💡Emerging GP Fundraising Insight #8: Rolling Closes Keep You Moving Small funds can't always afford to sit still until the target is hit. Rolling closes let you start deploying earlier, build a track record, and show momentum to prospective LPs. One GP told me that for Fund I ($5M target), he took capital as it came, signed, wired, and got to work. It wasn't perfect, but it kept the lights on and the deals moving. Sometimes the "sign and wire as it comes" approach is the only way to get moving. Takeaway: Momentum is a fundraising asset and rolling closes can help you keep it. Has anyone here used rolling closes as a strategic advantage?
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Earnest Sweat
Stresswood • 17K followers
Two weeks ago on Swimming with Allocators, we sat down with David Clark, CIO at VenCap, to talk about what decades of venture data can teach allocators. One takeaway that stood out: discounts don’t matter as much as people think in venture secondaries. Because venture is such a power-law asset class, outcomes are driven by exposure to a few massive winners. Whether a stake is bought at a small discount, or even a premium, often matters far less than the quality of the underlying company and its upside. Great conversation on venture returns, manager selection, and the nuances of how allocators should think about secondary investments. 👇 Link in the comments.
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Chris Gonzales
Pro Partner Capital • 10K followers
Summary: The venture firm CRV has raised $750 million for its 20th flagship fund, which will focus on investing in early-stage startups, particularly in the consumer and devtools sectors. Key takeaways: CRV's new fund is smaller than their previous one, but still received strong demand from investors. The firm has a history of successful investments, with 80 startups eventually going public since its founding in 1970. CRV is shifting its focus away from late-stage rounds, citing lower overall returns, and towards seed and Series A investments. Counter arguments: Some may argue that CRV's decision to not raise another late-stage fund could limit its opportunities for growth in the future. The success of the new fund will ultimately depend on the performance of the startups it invests in, which can be unpredictable in the volatile tech industry. #venturecapital #fundraising #startups https://lnkd.in/g8d-N9jX
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Venkat Chary
WillowTree Ventures • 4K followers
Our WillowTree Ventures dinner brought together an incredible group of fintech and AI operators. What struck me most was the consistency across perspectives: AI is finally unlocking tangible value in workflows, personalization is becoming real, and some of the biggest opportunities sit in the corners most people overlook. Founders building for financial services and enterprise AI deserve more conversations like these. Grateful to everyone who made time, and if you’re tackling one of these “non-sexy but massive” markets, let’s talk. Here are some key takeaways - AI is still about efficiency. The most serious near-term initiatives focus on automation, workflow augmentation, and operational leverage across teams. - Tech orgs continue to control the AI agenda. Budgets and decision-making largely sit with product and engineering, who are driving both exploration and implementation. - Personalization at scale is becoming real. There was broad agreement that AI can finally enable true 1:1 experiences in products and services, not just improved segmentation. - The most interesting opportunities are in “boring” corners. Non-traditional and overlooked segments are wide open for AI. “Non-sexy is sexy” may define the next wave of category creators. - Crypto is still early in the enterprise. Despite broader excitement, real day-to-day adoption remains nascent and uneven.
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Sadhika Agarwal
Equirus • 12K followers
Thrilled to announce our investment in CtrlB! Privilege partnering with founders like Adarsh, who are deeply obsessed with the problem they’re solving - a true force of nature. CtrlB is redefining enterprise observability, building a next-gen telemetry engine that makes search up to 10x faster and 90% cheaper. In an era where enterprises generate terabytes of data every day, CtrlB is closing the gap with a fundamentally new approach to ingesting, indexing, and querying petabyte-scale data - enabling teams to gain real-time visibility without trade-offs between cost and speed. #funding #startups
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Sean Smith
Search Fund Ventures • 7K followers
I spoke with Christien Louviere of BDE Capital about his journey from a $330mm exit to becoming an independent sponsor. Christien shared excellent insights for folks looking to partner with business owners, rather than buy sellers out completely. Below are a few of the topics we covered: - Why he moved from “zero-to-one” startups to a buy-then-build strategy - How Christien's background shaped a focus on growth vs. cost-cutting - Why 20–40% rolled equity is central to his deal structures—and how it builds trust with sellers - Using scenario analysis with AI tools to evaluate management teams and uncover hidden key-person risks - How to identify when a $3–5M EBITDA company truly has a middle management layer—or is still founder-reliant For anyone investing in or buying small businesses, Christien’s approach provides a fresh lens on growth, alignment, and deal structuring. 🎥 Watch the full interview here → https://lnkd.in/ekfkaiej 🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://lnkd.in/e86Agx6V
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Hugo Fdez.-Mardomingo
Acurio Ventures • 5K followers
🦄 $150M to improve tutoring and education globally. Preply just announced a new round, putting the company on a clear trajectory to become an iconic global marketplace. In a world obsessed with fast wins and volatile growth, some companies quietly beat their goals year after year — for more than 6 years in this case (as long as we’ve at Acurio Ventures been partners). A few learnings from this journey, relevant for founders and investors: Pick a growing market with an unsolved problem. 2 out of 8 billion people globally are learning a second language. Despite many options, outcomes are still poor. Our original thesis was simple: if you build the reference platform, everyone who wants to learn will eventually come to you. Category leadership matters. When we backed Kirill Bigai and Dmytro Voloshyn back in 2019 (together with Rob Kniaz), there were dozens of similar startups. Small details showed Preply had already built a superior tutor base and a scalable growth engine. Build a product customers love. Speaking a language and teaching it are very different things. Preply transformed the learning experience by combining a motivated base of +100,000 tutors with tools that actually drive outcomes. Never stop experimenting. Few companies maintain a strong experimentation culture as they scale. Preply’s DNA reminded me of Booking.com — enabling them to execute 10x better than most marketplaces. Great companies turn every change into an opportunity. From riding the post-COVID shift to online learning, to betting early and heavily on AI as Dmytro Voloshyn has excelled at. What once sounded like sci-fi is now reality. Great companies become talent magnets A company maturity can't be addressed only by looking at the revenue, profit or product. I like to see how much better they become at attracting talent and retaining it. Proud that Acurio Ventures made this possible and the WestCap team saw things as bullish as we do and are now supporting the next phase of Preply’s journey. Huge congratulations to the entire Preply team!!
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