Josh Melick

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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Seth Levine nailed it! The concentration problem isn't just a GP pain point... it's choking innovation. When capital pools around the same 20 funds, emerging managers and founders get shut out. Love that he's using his platform to call this out. Foundry has backed 50+ emerging managers. That's the diversification the ecosystem needs. This is exactly why Carta exists — making capital allocation visible and accessible. Capital Evolution hits at exactly the right moment. Thanks for having us Daniel Dart. Team Carta loves the community of FUTURE TITANS you have built 🚀

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I’ve been talking with founders about how painful enterprise customization still is — even in 2025. David Dworsky and Gordon Ritter just put words to what we’ve been seeing: the age of point-and-click configuration is ending, and the next category winners will make customization conversational. For early-stage founders, this is the wedge: - Own one painful workflow - Capture the data - Build toward becoming a system of record If you’re building in this space, I’d love to hear how you’re approaching it. Link to the full article on this in the comments. 

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Your roadmap will lead you to failure. Are you beholden to deadline that some exec threw on on the calendar so they could feel good about planning resources? Does your delivery schedule trump experimentation at every turn? Our latest from Innovate, Disrupt, or Die dives into the realities of roadmap-driven innovation and development and the value of building an agile roadmap that champions learning as progress instead of deadlines. Check out our five-step process for building adaptive roadmaps. Link in comments. Subscribe at InnovateDisruptOrDie•com for more.

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Agents are starting to execute work autonomously. This shift breaks many of the metrics we’ve relied on for the past decade of SaaS. When humans stop logging in, clicking buttons, and reviewing dashboards, traditional signals like DAU, feature adoption, and session duration stop telling us whether a product is valuable. In the Agent Era, the right questions look different: - Are tasks completed successfully? - How often do humans need to intervene? - What outcomes are produced, and at what cost? - How much autonomy does the customer actually trust the system with? Read more for a framework comparing SaaS Era metrics vs Agent Era metrics, focused on measuring outcomes, reliability, and economic leverage rather than interaction. How are others are thinking about measuring autonomous systems? #AI #Agents #SaaS #Metrics #Startups

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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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The VC herd is shifting course from once-safe, now-strained SaaS to Aerospace & Defense, an alluring prospect that plays by different rules. SaaS isn’t the predictable play it once was. AI is rewriting the playbook: erasing moats and shifting buyer needs, eroding the predictability that made SaaS so attractive. The secret SaaS sauce wasn’t magic, just choreography: product, fundraising, and traction timelines that neatly lined up. Easy to take for granted. The SaaS timelines are predictably in sync. → Product development moves quickly, and you have control. No physics, no hardware. → Fundraising is a well-oiled machine. Do X, and you got Y. Deep pools of investors who know the playbook. → Commercial traction is straightforward. For years, if you understood what your customer needed and built it, they bought. A&D is different. The timelines don’t cooperate. → Product is harder. In SaaS, QA is a bug report. In A&D, QA means pummeling hardware in vacuum chambers, at hypersonic speeds, on vibration tables, at extreme temperatures. → Fundraising is less predictable. Fewer seasoned investors, shifting milestones, heavy upfront capex and R&D, dependence on grants. → Commercial traction is murky: buyer cycles are political, slow, and opaque. SBIRs and STRATFIs help, but often create false positives. This doesn’t make A&D less attractive. But, it does make it different. The excitement is real: DIU’s FY 2024 appropriation was nearly $1B, and since 2016, it has awarded $5.5B in contract ceilings to commercial companies, many of them startups. The Big Beautiful Bill added $156B to DoD’s $831B FY 2025 budget, bringing total defense resources close to $1T. In A&D, timelines rarely align. Investors need a playbook that assumes gaps, delays, and unpredictable orders. Success will go to those who underwrite to that reality.

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Interesting findings courtesy of GTMnow's State of Venture in 2025. Most notably, Carta reports that graduation rates from Seed to Series A have dropped significantly: for cohorts in late 2022 and 2023, only ~6–9% of companies raised a Series A within a year, and after 2 years, fewer than 20% had graduated. This has major implications for go-to-market strategies, as it suggests that startups need to build traction earlier in the process. These trends also stress the importance of narrative, clarity, and category leadership to stand out from the competition. There are obvious challenges ahead, but if you know what's coming and you're building something meaningful, you can still find success. #Startups #GTM #VentureCapital

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I’m thrilled to officially announce our $3M seed investment in Propel People, a company we built inside the 1848 Ventures studio to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing the #construction industry today: the skilled #labor shortage. For small and medium-sized contractors, hiring isn't just a challenge. It's the number one threat to their growth, profitability, and safety. With 94% of contractors struggling to find qualified workers, it’s clear that traditional hiring methods aren't built for the trades. That’s why we built Propel People. It’s a mobile-first, AI-powered hiring platform designed for how construction actually works: in the field. By leveraging smart candidate ranking, instant #SMS-based screening, and a fully #bilingual interface, Propel helps contractors build great crews faster and more efficiently. I’m also thrilled to formally announce that industry veteran Dexter Bachelder is at the helm as CEO. Having worked with Dexter and the team over the last few months, we've already seen the impact of his leadership. His 25 years of experience scaling construction tech companies will be instrumental as Propel People enters this initial stage of growth. This investment reinforces our core thesis at 1848 Ventures: building AI-native companies that solve fundamental pain points for the #SMBs that form the backbone of our economy. A huge congratulations to Dexter and the entire Propel People team on this milestone. We are incredibly proud to partner with you to support the people who build our world. Read the full announcement below. #constructiontech #venturecapital #seedfunding #ai #skilledtrades #smb

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AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Go-to-Market (GTM) As someone who’s spent years aligning strategy, systems, and outcomes across product, engineering, and GTM teams — this article by Dave Birckhead really hits home. In his latest Full-Stack Growth post, “Why AI Requires a New Kind of GTM Role and Org Structure,” Birckhead explains why traditional functional silos — marketing ops, sales ops, customer success ops — can’t keep pace in the AI era. AI doesn’t thrive in isolation. It thrives on shared context, unified data, and connected workflows. Most enterprise AI projects fail not because the models are weak, but because the systems they live in are fragmented. The takeaway: AI value is created when organizations reimagine entire workflows that span the customer journey — using AI as connective tissue, not as point solutions. Birckhead makes a compelling case for a new leadership role: Head of GTM Systems — the orchestrator of data, tools, and AI workflows across marketing, sales, and customer success. The payoff? ✅ Faster innovation ✅ Higher ROI on AI investments ✅ Seamless customer experience ✅ Shared measurement across the funnel Just as SaaS created Marketing Ops and RevOps, the rise of AI now demands GTM Systems Leadership — a discipline that connects, aligns, and scales the way growth truly happens. 📖 Full article here: https://lnkd.in/gU2fa5Jn By Dave Birckhead, Full-Stack Growth (Oct 14, 2025) #AI #GoToMarket #ProductOperations #GTMSystems #RevOps #DigitalTransformation #Leadership #Strategy #Innovation #FutureOfWork #OperationalExcellence #ProductManagement #SalesOps #MarketingOps #CustomerSuccess #B2BLeadership

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Pendo.io isn’t your typical platform from polished presentations that get forgotten the next day. It’s more like an honest mirror for companies convinced they understand their users but are actually flying blind. No tricks or empty promises just clear data showing where users get stuck, what breaks the flow, and what truly works. What stands out is how it connects two often disconnected worlds. Product teams get lost in technical details, launching features nobody uses. Executives only see abstract numbers, far from the user’s reality. Pendo translates behavior into insights everyone can understand, bringing those groups together. But visibility alone isn’t enough. The real advantage is how fast teams can act without leaning on overloaded engineers. In markets like ours, where resources are tight, this autonomy can be the difference between progress and stagnation. Beyond technology, success depends on culture. I’ve seen projects with similar tools fail because organizations resist data-driven decisions or prefer gut feeling fine, but risky without evidence. So the question is: are we ready to face the truth, even if it’s uncomfortable? On AI, Pendo.io shows rare caution. Instead of riding the hype and launching bots blindly, they focus on whether those agents genuinely improve user experience or cause frustration. Their governance over AI interactions is crucial to avoid turning digital engagement into a gamble. For example, a fintech in Mexico and Brasil used Pendo.io to find that a digital onboarding flow was causing 40% of drop-offs. The issue wasn’t the product but confusing communication aimed at users with little financial knowledge. A simple fix boosted retention no code changes needed. Pendo strikes a balance: leverage what works while exploring improvements without big overhauls or budgets. In our region, where change often means risk, that’s a winning formula. I don’t see Pendo.io as just a tool, but a mindset shift in how we approach software and digital experience. It won’t solve everything, but it shines a light on what truly matters: what users actually do, not what we think they do. And that’s invaluable. Okta, Agorapulse, Wiley, American Cancer Society, Labcorp, Covetrus, iRobot, Verizon Connect, Essity, OpenTable, Morgan Stanley, IHS Markit, Citrix, Alarm.com, JLL, Elsevier, SiteCompli®, Zendesk, Adobe Marketo, Salesforce, Cisco.

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