Natalie Sandman
@NatSandman
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GP @sparkcapital ✨ @durableteam @comulate @getunleash @zealapi @withshepherd @poggio_labs @spreadsheetcom @medallion @noyoHQ @latticehq Somewhat SaaS-y
San Francisco, CA
Joined March 2009
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Last Seen Profiles
Pinned Tweet
sharing some thoughts on AI and software
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The world does not need another podcast of VC bros talking to each other
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3K
@Zoom_us
crossed $75B in market cap this week
People often talk about how Zoom won the market bc of it’s simple pricing and high quality, easy to use product
What’s often missing from the discussion is advancements in the underlying tech that enabled this
/thread
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2K
90% of startup job postings I see today are pages built on
@NotionHQ
Notion’s slowly eating the internet one page at a time
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1K
Slack converts 38% of its users to paid customers
Survey Monkey converts 3%
Dropbox converts 2%
Talk about high value to cost ratio for Slack users
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Excited to announce our new $2.1B funds and my next chapter as a general partner
@sparkcapital
!
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15
686
Sitting in a coffeeshop and the guy next to me is doing what he calls “live co-working”...
- Group of 7 people on a
@zoom
- All working on different things, not working at the same company
- Take a five minute every hour to chat + discuss roadblocks
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Crazy to think that Microsoft agreed to acquire Intuit for $1.5B in 1994
The deal was blocked by the DOJ and today Intuit's market cap is $89B
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Some personal news 🎉 Incredibly excited to share that I’m joining
@sparkcapital
! SO excited to continue investing in early stage companies changing the way we work with the amazing team at Spark!
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10
475
My favorite part about planning women in products dinners:
1. Check LinkedIn and don’t find any woman on a company’s product team
2. Reach out to male product leaders asking if they have any woman on their team that want to join
One small step towards awareness...
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31
463
Irrational fear: Uber driver driving away before I can get my suitcase out of the trunk
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429
Crazy to think that Microsoft agreed to acquire Intuit for $1.5B in 1994
The deal was blocked by the DOJ and today Intuit's market cap is $89B
9
35
415
A year ago i broke my leg in a bad ski accident and didn’t think I’d run again. Yesterday I ran 6 mi.
Your daily reminder that the body + mind are pretty incredible!
14
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331
One of my favorite things about coming home for the holidays is morning walks with dad
This morning’s walk turned into a history lesson on Adobe…
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It’s crazy how much you can learn about a company’s strategy from their job descriptions
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Feeling energized this week 🔥
- 1 women-led co files S-1
@pagerduty
- 2 women-led/founded co reach 🦄 status
@glossier
@RenttheRunway
- Pep talk from CEO who sold her co to a F100
- 4 mtgs w/ female founders
- Dinner w/ awesome PMs from
@Affirm
@cartainc
@RobinhoodApp
@stripe
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13. But what enabled specifically Zoom to “just work”?
Unlike most companies at the time, Zoom chose to build their own version of H.264 SVC (scalable video coding) and invested heavily in intelligently routing video
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19. So the next time you click the “join” button and it “just works”, I hope you'll remember that video conferencing tech has come a long way and sometimes “simple can be harder than complex”
And that
@ericsyuan
and his team did one hell of a job executing
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Zoom’s DAUs:
10M in December 2019
200M in March 2020
That’s some serious adoption as
@zoom_us
becomes a de facto for working, studying, and socializing from home
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Also, FWIW I skip over a lot of the nitty gritty details of Zoom’s tech and the historical market dynamics (they're fascinating)
DM or comment here if you want to chat about these
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Nothing like a founder mistaking you for an associate to fire you up!
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OH from a YC founder:
“It’s pivot season, you know, like midterm session but pivoting”
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16. So while Bluejeans went after large enterprises, Zoom chipped away at SMBs w/ its magic product experience and product-led growth
Players like Cisco and MSFT didn’t go after Zoom bc they had bigger fish to fry -- classic innovator's dilemma
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Crazy to think that Microsoft agreed to acquire Intuit for $1.5B in 1994
The deal was blocked by the DOJ and today Intuit's market cap is $89B
9
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415
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Thrilled to announce our new set of funds! I can’t think of a more exciting time to back ambitious founders or better partners to do it with.
Grateful for the founders and LPs who partner with us and couldn't be more optimistic for what lies ahead!
The Spark Capital team is thrilled to share that we have raised $2.3 billion in aggregate commitments for our new early-stage and venture-growth funds: Spark Capital VIII & Spark Growth V.
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1. If you’re a Zoom user, you probably think “I press a button and HD voice/video just works”
And if it’s a call between 5 people “everyone presses a button and it just works”
It’s that simple, right? Well, as Steve Jobs once said “simple can be harder than complex”
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I'm excited to announce our Series A investment in
@NoyoHQ
! We're thrilled to join
@ShannonCGoggin
,
@dennisblee
, and the Noyo team on their journey building modern infrastructure for health insurance
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Nothing like being mistaken as an assistant to fire you up on a Monday morning!
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14. If you’re in a low bandwidth area, this enables audio and video to step down to match available bandwidth… it “just works”
If you’re connecting from your laptop or mobile phone or a conference room, it automatically adjusts to the device…. again, it “just works”
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15. This “just works” product experience was magical
You could quickly set up a call, join it, add people, share your screen
And this, combined with Zoom’s simple pricing (free for 40 min or $10/mo) led people to download the product and use it religiously
1
7
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Just got a stellar cold email from a founder:
- clear articulation of the problem + their value prop
- clear metrics + customer stats
- clear call to action
- deck + additional resources to dive deeper
Note to founders: if cold emailing, make it easy for VCs to say yes!
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11. Why did so few cos survive? Because real-time video tech is hard
It’s easy to do audio. It’s easy to do video.
But to keep them in sync, while continuing to add 1,2,3...N meeting participants is hard
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Tip for founders pitching investors via zoom: stop and count 1-2-3 at the end of each slide
The pause may feel uncomfortable but it gives your audience time to process and ask Qs
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12. You have network issues, laptop issue, users w/ old cameras, bad wifi, they're commuting in cars, driving in tunnels
Sometimes it’s better to stream P2P, other times via servers, there are edge cases (lots of them) that need optimizing
And yet users expect it to “just work”
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18. Zoom won the market bc of it’s simple pricing and high quality, easy to use product
But this was enabled by advancements that Zoom drove in the underlying video tech
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Dad: “always take risks and optimize for learning”
Also Dad:
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1/ Excited to share our Seed investment in
@spreadsheetcom
! We're thrilled to partner with Matt, Murali, and the entire team on their journey building an all-in-one spreadsheet
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6. 3/ Using the tech was a total headache
Employees needed to make reservations with IT team for every mtg
Employee: "Hey, I need to do a five-person video call Wednesday at 11 AM"
IT: “Actually, David, you can’t do that because we don’t have enough capacity on our infra”
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1/ Excited to announce our Series A investment in Durable! We're thrilled to join
@jamesclift
and the team at
@Durableteam
on their journey building an AI-powered platform that makes it radically easier to start and grow a service business.
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17. One blog covering Zoom’s launch even called them “neither consumer enough nor enterprise enough – and that tends to be the Death Valley for video companies.”
Let’s just say, I think it worked out OK... $$$
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1/ Excited to share our Series A investment in
@zealapi
! We're thrilled to partner with
@KirtiShenoy
,
@PranabKrishnan
, and the entire Zeal team on their journey building an API platform for embedded payroll products
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Congrats to
@derek_t_lo
and the
@medallion
team on their $30M Series B led by
@sequoia
!
We're in the early inning of digital health and Medallion's building core infrastructure to power this. Excited for what's ahead of this amazing team!
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“Managers” just autocorrected to “man angers”
I think my autocorrect may be onto something
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Spent my first
@focusmate
virtual co-working session... writing a blog post on remote work?? 🤷♀️
If you're working on anything in this space, I'd love to chat with you!
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9. Startups saw an opp to build cheaper, easier video conferencing that was
1/ Software-based - video encoding/decoding didn’t rely on expens hardware
2/ Cloud-based - you didn’t need to install hardware in your data center
While this may sound obvious, it was novel 10 yrs ago
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Had a first time founder (seed stage) today tell me that she wasn’t sure whether to ask one of her new investors for help.
Founders: put your VCs to work. Your first ask is one step towards building trust.
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2. So how did people do this before Zoom? Quick history lesson…
In the ‘90s, most people communicated at work using audio conferencing
The big innovation at the time was *web* conferencing like WebEx and GoToMeeting that let you share audio AND share your screen
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Writing an intro email and accidentally added a link to the person's Twitter profile instead of their LinkedIn.
I guess Twitter's the new LinkedIn.
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Question I keep coming back to when chatting with early-stage founders about bottoms-up distribution:
How are you...
a) tapping into an existing community?
b) creating your own community?
c) both.
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10. Early on, BlueJeans led the pack in this wave of next-gen video conferencing startups
Yet despite dozens of startups entering the market, there was only one other co that really survived -- Zoom
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3. If you could share your audio and screen, why not use video?
In the 2000s, better video compression, high-speed internet, and more powerful CPUs made video collab possible
Polycom, Cisco, LifeSize sold room-based video conferencing solutions
But these had a few issues
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Growing up I’d walk into our living room and my dad would be taking apart a computer and putting it back together
He taught me how to use a computer (a NeXT) and gave me my first piece of software (Adobe Illustrator)
He loved tech before it was cool. Happy father's day, Dad
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Second day back out on skis in almost two years...
Your daily reminder that the body + mind are incredible!
A year ago i broke my leg in a bad ski accident and didn’t think I’d run again. Yesterday I ran 6 mi.
Your daily reminder that the body + mind are pretty incredible!
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1/ I'm excited to announce our Series A investment and join the board
@medallion
! We're thrilled to join
@derek_t_lo
and the Medallion team on their journey building modern compliance infrastructure for healthcare
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Caught in the rain and my Uber driver sells me an umbrella... talk about selling a pain killer!
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4. 1/ They were expensive
You needed MCUs (aka hardware that required custom chips) deployed across your data centers
You needed TVs, cameras, microphones, video endpoints for conference rooms
If you were a big co with 100+ conference rooms, this could cost $MMs
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Any SaaS PMs who love collaboration / productivity software looking for their next gig?
Have a super interesting opp to be a first product hire - DMs open
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My instacart shopper just called me "honey" and i'm thoroughly creeped out
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7. The net result was that even if IT did the work, employees rarely used video conferencing and defaulted back to audio
In 2009, there were supposedly 200M video minutes used v. 1B+ audio conferencing minutes
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Will never forget this feeling from
@Zenefits
! I had to roll in my chair every time someone opened the fridge. Sales people were taking calls from every nook and cranny in the building. It was magic
The energy in an office at the end of a lease when there are way too many people per square foot is kind of distracting but kind of amazing.
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1/ Excited to share our Seed investment in
@withshepherd
! We're thrilled to partner with
@justdlevine
,
@mmahalwy
, Steve, and the entire Shepherd team on their journey building a connected insurance platform for construction
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One of Adobe’s first acquisitions was Photoshop
My dad said this didn’t feel like acquiring a big company at the time because Photoshop was developed by a small team of two brothers (Thomas and John Knoll) who sold the distribution license to Adobe in 1988
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In a world where people are constantly trying to sell you, meeting a founder for the first time and only talking about the challenges of their biz is quite refreshing
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5. 2/ Who you could communicate with was limited
Cisco devices could talk to Cisco devices, Polycoms to Polycoms, etc.
If you wanted to talk to someone outside of your network, IT had to open ports on your company’s firewalls
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Underrated: cold email from someone sharing their thoughts on a topic and asking for your point of view
Made my day!
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1/ Excited to announce our investment in Comulate! We're thrilled to join Jordan,
@michaelm244
, and the Comulate team on their journey building the revenue automation + intelligence platform for insurance.
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So my dad and I went for another walk this morning...
This time we went deeper on Macromedia/Flash + musings from Xerox PARC
(still haven’t gotten his hot take on shift to SaaS…)
One of my favorite things about coming home for the holidays is morning walks with dad
This morning’s walk turned into a history lesson on Adobe…
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1/ Some demo days are more special than others… excited for
@rajivayyangar
,
@bernatfortet
, and
@iambetaful
to share
@Tandem_HQ
today! 🎉
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Of course, our conversation was cut off by our dog getting overly excited about a squirrel and running into the street
We didn't even get to talk about the last 10 years ... what should I ask my dad about tomorrow?
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You: a developer who’s migrated from MongoDB atlas to self-hosted
Me: wanting to talk to you
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Congrats to
@justdlevine
,
@MoFromYYZ
, Steve, and the entire
@withshepherd
team on their $13.5M series A!
This team’s been on a tear the past 18 months, partnering with top brokers and launching several new products that redefine commercial insurance as a platform - not just a
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8. At the same time, people were using Skype to make personal video calls
Apple had just launched the iPhone 4 and FaceTime was taking off
If you could do easy video calls in your personal life, why couldn’t you do it at work?
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Watching a friend interview with early stage startups and it's eye opening to hear how different her experiences are across companies
Reminder that candidate experience can be a superpower early on
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Incredibly excited to welcome
@natalievais
as a General Partner on our venture team!
Her curiosity and technical expertise make her an excellent partner to founders in the infra/dev tools space and we're lucky to have her on our team.
Big news! Spark is thrilled to welcome
@natalievais
, and to congratulate newly-promoted
@Fraser
and
@claymfisher
, our three new General Partners.
We look forward to a bright future together!
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And special thanks to
@msquinn
for co-hosting a product dinner in early 2019 that led to getting to know the Spark team. The power of Twitter!!
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Thing I miss from college: the libraries - not even the books, just the ritual of going to a space to focus and think
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Just spent 15 min trying to get GoToMeeting to work.
Hard to do a call when "this meeting doesn't support mobile." Also hard when voice is cutting in/out on solid WiFi.
In other new, $ZM ’s up 5% today!
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Couldn’t be more excited to back
@LatticeHQ
! Companies are increasingly employee-centric and we’re moving into a new era in HR + workplace tech where employee experience is king. Congrats to the entire
@LatticeHQ
team on their growth!
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Very thankful to the founders who’ve partnered with me over the years and my partners at Spark for the opportunity to do what I love
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1/ I'm excited to announce our Series A investment in
@getunleash
! We're thrilled to join
@EgilCo
,
@Ivarconr
, and the Unleash team on their journey building an open-source feature management platform
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Tempted to blow off interest from VCs when you’re not raising? Sharing thoughts on why you should think twice and tips for how to respond
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Fun fact: my dad joined Adobe as a software engineer in 1985… and still works there today over 30 (!!!) yrs later
Here are a few things I learned on today’s walk…..
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Thinking about bringing these back but virtually
Any tips on fun, engaging small group virtual activities?
My favorite part about planning women in products dinners:
1. Check LinkedIn and don’t find any woman on a company’s product team
2. Reach out to male product leaders asking if they have any woman on their team that want to join
One small step towards awareness...
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One thing that made Photoshop successful in the early days was its SDK that allowed developers to write plugins for filters/visual effects (OG instagram)
Customers LOVED plugins - to the extent that they would always come back for plugins if they were considering switching SW
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