1/ My Golden Rule for GTM, from @CanvasVC GTM Council. "When hiring your first salesperson, hire two. You'll avoid getting a false positive or negative."-Tony Small, who has built sales teams from 0 four times over, including @zillow. https://t.co/qsTU035uhy Early-stage GTM💎💎🧵

Venture is cyclical and so the headlines read, “Venture Capital Is Dead” every seven to 10 years. This time, it just took 15. I believe this is the most exciting time to be investing in venture capital in over a decade—since the last downturn 🔗 @Fortune

Canvas Ventures' Mike Ghaffary & How To Win LPs With The Federal Register In D.F.A. or Please Do, #13: https://t.co/o8nrR16Eyt

We’re excited to confirm Standard Fleet is a third party app for Tesla vehicles. To get started: go to our site and login with a Tesla account. We will never see your password and you can revoke our access at any time. Good scoop by @Teslarati broke this news today.

Only 2% of startups led by all female founder teams receive VC funding. That number hasn't changed in 10 yrs! It's time to act, not just discuss. I talked with @Jacksonfordyce @theventurenews about what I do to help lift up talented women entrepreneurs. 🎧

@Zendesk @YAlexandrovski @observablehq @CrowdAIinc 8/ "It's better to be customer-obsessed and competitor aware. Focus on selling the unique qualities of your product vs trying to be a fast follower." - Jeremy Bass fmr VP Sales @unit. As #1 rev hire @breadfinancial, Jeremy grew a sales org from pre-revenue -> $450M acquisition.

@Zendesk 7/ "For AEs, storytelling is powerful. If you can cast the conversation as a struggle with SaaS software and frame the problem viscerally, buyers will remember." - @YAlexandrovski, VP Sales @observablehq. While @CrowdAIinc Yuri achieved 2x growth and cut sales cycles to 2.5 mos.

@Zendesk 6/ "With those first sales hires, I'm looking for high grit, low ego. The kind of people you want to spend an inordinate amount of time with." - Mark Musselman. Mark took Sumo Logic from pre-revenue to $30M ARR and secured the largest individual deal at BladeLogic, valued at $10M

5/ "Always get back to what your customers are actually experiencing with your products & make it a recurring discipline. Chances are it is not what you've laid out on a deck." - Sary Brunner. As VP of Customer Success @Zendesk, Sary grew the CS team from four to 200.

4/ "Have 1 primary metric in mind for any given experiment. More than that and you'll have a lot of reds and greens and not be able to tell left from right." -Jack Hart, Sr Dr of Biz Ops and Strategy @Yelp. With Jack's help, marketing-driven revenue at Yelp has 3xed since 2019

3/ "Brand is present in your business whether or not you are ever spending a dime on marketing." A Golden Rule for GTM from @AndrewSpeyer, of @Airbnb @HelloLanding. Over his tenure at Landing, business scaled from 3-20 markets and revenue grew 6x.

2/"Potential acquirers make the best partners. . .they see a synergy between what they sell and what you sell."-Jamie Young Perlman @Dropbox. Jamie set up a partnership between @Box & @IBM that drove $200M TCV. Subscribe for more tips here: https://t.co/T7RAJtJNYk

Watch this space for the top GTM tips for early-stage founders from the Canvas GTM Council members every day this week, starting later today. . .Ever wonder how and when to hire your first salesperson? Learn from the person who built out Zillow's sales team from the jump to 500.

Welcome @allanng @AndreaMCollins @SpeyerAW @ashblackmon @coleyholnback @jeremy2277 @MarkMuss808 @NFairbairn @YAlexandrovski 🚀🥳

Please welcome the 2023 GTM Council. 🎉 Learn more about the Canvas GTM Council and ✉️ subscribe to the Canvas newsletter ✉️ to get advice on everything from choosing ROI-positive marketing channels to scaling a sales team (beyond the founder!). 👉

We’ve built an elite team of sales and marketing professionals, the Go-to-Market Council, to coach and guide our portfolio companies. We’re thrilled to announce our latest cohort of GTM superstars.

At Canvas, we have found that the #1 factor that differentiates good outcomes from fund-returning outcomes is the strength and scalability of a company's GTM strategy. That’s why we’re always looking to meet the folks responsible for skyrocketing startups into household names 🚀

There are a lot of places to put AI to work. I just don't think fintech is the most exciting right now. Thanks to @technology for hearing me out on that and why we focus on businesses where AI is truly transformative, like @casetext with its AI legal asst.

Bloomberg @technology interviews @VCRebecca, co-founder of @CanvasVC, who discusses how Casetext has used AI to create CoCounsel, a "transformative tool" for lawyers. Watch the video to learn more about Casetext's progression:

"You can tack AI onto almost everything and it can be helpful. At @CanvasVC we want to see not just what's helpful, but what's truly transformative." 📺 @VCRebecca on Bloomberg @technology, talking @casetext and general trends in venture. 📺 https://t.co/T6qU1sb2Nz