July 14, 2022

🍾Raise Your Glass: SingleOps 📝Blog of the Week: Elad Gil 💼Company Worth Applying To: Blair Chenault Flashtract

E7 | SingleOps, Flashtract

Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast’s most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes.

My name is Jon Birdsong and I’m with Atlanta Ventures.

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Raise Your Glass:

Shout out to Sean, Taylor, Peyton, and all the team members at SingleOps for raising $74M from FTV capital. Sean wrote a heartfelt post on the SingleOps website that we link to in the show notes. This story is so exciting for me because five or so years ago, Sean and I sat down when he just moved into his new office on the West side of Atlanta and did a long form interview. Pictures were taken and the team wasn’t that big at the time. Now fast forward years later, the progress and growth is truly inspiring. We’ll link to that interview as well for all the folks who are students of the game.

Blog Post of the Week:

We share several blog posts a week in the Atlanta Ventures slack channel on trends, market analysis, and compelling companies. The one shared this week that had several interesting insights was from Elad Gil. Elad is a sharp mind from the valley who has built and invested in several companies. His most recent blog post is titled: Startup Markets, Summer 2022 Edition. The high-level takeaway is that things have yet to truly get bad in private tech, yet if interest rates rise and money supply tightens, then things will get worse before they get better, which is a high probability. Elad then goes into what he predicts the next few quarters will look like. First are valuations: he states “we are in a “sliding knife” market and things have only partially propagated into earlier and earlier companies and that will continue from later stage rounds all the way to Seed over the next 3-9 months. Another aspect to reiterate is around metrics and speed. Companies are being analyzed on burn multiple and capital efficiency. As mentioned on Episode 3 of Five and Thrive, the Rule of 40 is a good metric to evaluate. The next segment on this post that stuck out was to expect structured or down rounds and even shared that Facebook and Stripe had down rounds which proves it does not mean it’s the end of the world. That is an interesting insight. Another segment includes layoffs which we will continue to see not just over the next 3 months but next 6-9 because more companies will be adjusting to the probable revenue deceleration. With greater layoffs comes a natural refocus on culture, customers, and the core mission. One of his last segments is M&A. Look for more of it 6-18 months from now. Several companies will be looking to sell versus “trudge along indefinitely.” And if a recession hits, look for everything to come down even more: growth rates, valuations, longer sales cycles, and more. Finally, Elad ends the post on a positive note when he states that several great companies started in poor, macro economic times: Apple and Microsoft started in the stagflation era of the 70’s, Cisco started on Black Monday, and of course all the decacorns that started right after the financial crisis of 2008 and 09. His final line: “it’s still a good time to build.” Couldn’t agree more.

Companies Worth Applying To:

Blair Chenault, CEO of Flashtract, put out on LinkedIn: “Career Catapult Opportunity” and I like that title so much I may borrow or steal it, Blair. Anyways, it’s been documented and recorded. Blair and the Flashstract team are hiring SDR’s all over the country: East coast, West coast and everywhere in between. I can’t recommend Blair and the Flashtract team enough. If you’re looking to accelerate your career in sales, join them.

Annnnd, that’s 5 minutes.

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