Bain Capital Ventures

Takeaways on brand from one of the best, Tracy Lloyd... Last week I had the chance to interview Tracy, founder of Emotive Brand, and ask questions along with our marketing leaders community and friends of Bain Capital Ventures. Some takeaways from our conversation: 🖼 Reframe the discussion: Sometimes it is easier to have a conversation about brand without calling it brand. Founders can carry misconceptions about what brand is (just a logo, doesn't have impact on the company's performance, etc.) and by reframing it as a conversation about product or growth, you get better results. 🔍 You're too close to it: It often feels like the people inside a company who are closest to it are the best ones to rethink the brand on their own. But just like you miss typos the third time you edit something yourself and someone else instantly catches them, you're often too close to your own company to see what's important about it to the external world. Bringing in outside perspectives to help shape your company's story is key. 📈 Near-term wins: Startups live in quarters, and brands live in years. How do you show progress in the interim? Tracy suggests looking at ‘time to close’ as a metric for enterprise startups that is heavily impacted by brand. Big brand studies can be really pricey, so this is a great way to think about showing impact without breaking the bank. 📖 Narrative = Brand: I've long advocated for comms and brand to be more closely tied in organizations. Your narrative is effectively your brand's story. Asking great questions that elicit powerful stories is the first step in building a brand that lasts. Thanks to everyone who attended - more to come!

Rak Garg became Bain Capital Ventures' youngest partner at just 27 years old. Garg joined the firm as an associate and was promoted to partner in three years. Learn how he did it on Business Insider:

Thanks to Eric Zhou and Usman Hanif for featuring Prophet Security in the latest Why You Should Join edition! Prophet is helping security teams at forward-thinking organizations autonomously remediate threats and alerts in minutes, not months. Kamal Shah and Vibhav Sreekanti are thoughtfully building an all-star team at the intersection of security and AI. If you're interested in roles at Prophet, please reach out! https://lnkd.in/gq_SFp9E

How could we not run it back in #NYC for our second BCV Labs event! We started our community on the premise that if you put really great people with a variety of backgrounds and interests together... magic happens. Whether it's in our incubation hub in Palo Alto or the roof-deck at our Bain Capital Ventures office, I've never had that thesis let me down yet. Shout out to all of the founders and teams from the Portfolio that came out and shared more about what they are working on: Aleph, tandem, Archive, Column Tax, Justworks, Zenlytic, Attentive, Silna Health. The consensus seems to be that New York needs more of these so we will be back soon! I'm hearing #Brooklyn might be the move but as a native from #Harlem, that might be a tough one! #recruiting #techrecruiting #techhiring #hiring

How could we not run it back in #NYC for our second BCV Labs event! We started our community on the premise that if you put really great people with a variety of backgrounds and interests together... magic happens. Whether it's in our incubation hub in Palo Alto or the roof-deck at our Bain Capital Ventures office, I've never had that thesis let me down yet. Shout out to all of the founders and teams from the Portfolio that came out and shared more about what they are working on: Aleph, tandem, Archive, Column Tax, Justworks, Zenlytic, Attentive, Silna Health. The consensus seems to be that New York needs more of these so we will be back soon! I'm hearing #Brooklyn might be the move but as a native from #Harlem, that might be a tough one! #recruiting #techrecruiting #techhiring #hiring

Aaref Hilaly spoke with Adam S. about entrepreneurship lessons learned from his time as founder of Clearwell and now as partner at BCV. A few takeaways: ▶ To find startup talent, don’t focus only on pedigree from a few top schools. Find the best from other schools and find people with a chip on their shoulder and something to prove. They’ll be motivated to work hard and will experience tremendous growth in return. ▶ You can only find your leadership style by leading others. You can’t copy what somebody else does. Make space for people to tell you what you’re wrong about, but also know who to listen to and when. Episode link in comments

Calling all AI enthusiasts and data science professionals in SF! Don't miss out on our Sake Social event happening on July 17th with Cleanlab and Open Data Science Conference (ODSC). Join us for a night of networking, learning, and curated sake 🍶✨. We are excited to have Curtis Northcutt deliver a data curation keynote that will surely spark interesting conversations around AI. This is a great opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals, expand your knowledge, and have a great time. RSVP now to secure your spot: https://bit.ly/4ex4d8L. See you there!

We at BCV are absolutely thrilled to announce we have led the $15m Series A of MagicSchool AI. Adeel Khan is a force of nature, having been a teacher, principal and charter school founder that ended up one of the best in the state. He cares deeply about changing the education system for the better, and has dedicated his life to that mission. We were also blown away that a company at one year old was already having meaningful impact with over two million educators and 4,000 schools using the platform. I've seen the power of mission driven, product oriented companies with deep user love - and I'm excited to partner with MagicSchool on their next phase with investors like Common Sense Media Range Ventures and Adobe, and a number of fantastic angels. cc Alysaa Co

Two big announcements from Ario today! First, we closed a $16M seed (thank you Bain Capital Ventures Floodgate Moxxie Ventures and Wing Venture Capital!) Second, we just launched the open beta for our AI Assistant. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of apps out there calling themselves your “assistant.” Here’s what makes Ario different: ***Personalized*** Ario uses all of the information it knows about you (both from what you’ve told it in the past as well as data from the apps you connect) to complete each task ***Proactive*** Ario does things without you having to explicitly ask, just like a human assistant! ***Private*** When you connect your different apps to Ario, Ario only ever uses that info to serve you. That data is never sold, and it’s not used to train the company’s ML models. Ario has only been live for a couple of months, and I’ve gotten to see first-hand how hundreds of users, especially parents, have benefited. A big thank you to everyone who has supported us in getting this far, we are just getting started!! You can try out the iOS app at heyario.com

We are proud to announce we've partnered with Norm Ai to support John Nay and his team's mission of changing regulatory compliance for the better, investing in its $27M Series A. Companies' regulatory compliance teams are overburdened and noncompliance isn't an option, resulting in what John calls a "sludge problem" of inefficiency. John has spent his career at the intersection of AI and law, and he assembled a team to bring automation to this challenge. They succeeded: Norm Ai is the first regulatory AI agent-based platform, and can reduce days of work to mere minutes. “Businesses can move faster, do more and be more compliant, all at the same time," John said. To learn more about John, how Norm's platform works and what's next for the company, check out our Founder Story from Rak Garg, Matt Harris and Aaref Hilaly.