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Many enterprise software startups at some point have faced the invisible wall. For months, your sales team has done everything right. They’ve met with a prospect several times, provided them with demos, free trials, documentation and references, and perhaps even signed a provisional contract.

The stars are all aligned and then, suddenly, the deal falls apart. Someone has put the kibosh on the entire project. Who is this deal-blocker and what can software companies do to identify, support and convince this person to move forward with a contract?

I call this person the Chief Objection Officer.

Most software companies spend a lot of time and effort identifying their potential buyers and champions within an organization. They build personas and do targeted marketing to these individuals and then fine-tune their products to meet their needs. These targets may be VPs of engineering, data leaders, CTOs, CISOs, CMOs or anyone else with decision-making authority. But what most software companies neglect to do during this exploratory phase is to identify the person who may block the entire deal.

This person is the anti-champion with the power to scuttle a potential partnership. Like your potential deal-makers, these deal-breakers can have any title with decision-making power. Chief Objection Officers aren’t simply potential buyers who end up deciding your product is not the right fit, but are instead blockers-in-chief who can make departmentwide or companywide decisions. Thus, it’s critical for software companies to identify the Chief Objection Officers that might block deals and, then, address their concerns.

So how do you identify the Chief Objection Officer? The trick is to figure out the main pain points that arise for companies when considering deploying your solution, and then walk backward to figure out which person these challenges impact the most. Here are some common pain points that your potential customers may face when considering your product.

Change is hard. Never underestimate the power of the status quo. Does implementing your product in one part of an organization, such as IT, force another department, such as HR, to change how they do their daily jobs?

Think about which leaders will be most reluctant to make changes; these Chief Objection Officers will likely not be your buyers, but instead the heads of departments most impacted by the implementation of your software. For example, a marketing team may love the ad targeting platform they use and thus a CMO will balk at new database software that would limit or change the way customer segment data is collected. Or field sales would object to new security infrastructure software that makes it harder for them to access the company network from their phones. The head of the department that will bear the brunt of change will often be a Chief Objection Officer.

Is someone’s job on the line?

Another common pain point when deploying a new software solution is that one or more jobs may become obsolete once it’s up and running. Perhaps your software streamlines and outsources most of a company’s accounts payable processes. Maybe your SaaS solution will replace an on-premise homegrown one that a team of developers has built and nurtured for years.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/22/winning-enterprise-sales-teams-know-how-to-persuade-the-chief-objection-officer/

Nanit’s nursery camera pairs computer vision with specially-patterned clothing to help answer the question that most new parents ask themselves roughly every 90 seconds: “Is my baby still breathing?”

This morning the company is announcing that it has raised an additional $25 million in a Series C round led by GV.

As part of the deal, GV’s Frederique Dame will join Nanit’s Board of Directors.

The company raises this Series C on the momentum of a strong year. While declining to share exactly how many cameras the company had sold to date, Nanit CEO Sarah Dorsett tells me that camera sales were up 130% in 2020 versus 2019.

Earlier this month Nanit debuted the Nanit Pro, an upgraded model ($299 vs $249 for the Nanit Plus) that increases the camera’s resolution while improving things like the built-in night light and overall usability. It also launched a line of “smart sheets” complete with a custom black-and-white pattern the camera reads to help measure and record your baby’s height between doctor visits.

Dorsett tells me the company plans to expand its lineup into a broader ecosystem of nursery items, mentioning things like changing pads and nightlights as things “that exist today, but that [Nanit] could really amplify because of the app experience.”

This Series C brings Nanit’s total raised to $75M. While round-leader GV is a new investor here, it was backed by existing investors Jerusalem Venture Partners, RRE Ventures, Upfront Ventures, and Rho Capital Partners.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/22/nanit-raises-another-25m-for-its-ai-powered-baby-monitor/

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SpaceX is now in the business of flying people to space, and if all goes to plan, it’ll be the first to provide a trip for a crew made up entirely of private space tourists later this year. Now, we know who will join billionaire and Shift4Payments founder Jason Isaacman on that trip – St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital employee, and former patient Hayley Arceneaux.

Arceneaux was already selected by Isaacman to be one of the four members of the crew for the mission aboard a SpaceX Dragon, which will include a flight to an unspecified orbit for a trip likely spanning a few days when it launches. The billionaire tipped that he “already knew” who he’d picked to represent St. Jude during a press call when the trip was originally announced earlier this year, but noted that he was saving the reveal.

Isaacman is running a months-long campaign around ‘Inspiration4,’ which is what he has named the flight. The remaining two seats will be given to winners chosen from two separate ongoing competitions: One pool includes anyone who makes a donation to St. Jude during the course of a fundraising campaign attached to the launch, and the other will be selected from entrepreneurs who build an online store on Shift4’s newly launched e-commerce platform.

As AP reports, Arceneaux is a bone cancer survivor who joined St. Jude last year as a physician assistant. She’s record a number of firsts and records when she gets to space on the upcoming flight, including becoming the youngest American ever in space at just 29, and also becoming the first to enter space with a prosthetic in place – she has an artificial knee and a rod in her thighs bone due to the bone cancer she was treated for at St. Jude when she was 10.

Isaacman is footing the entire bill for the SpaceX launch – including covering the tax obligations of the other winners selected for the St. Jude seats on the mission. He has also committed to donating $100 million to the hospital from his own funds, in addition to whatever is raised through the public donation drive that will be used to select one of the other crew members.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/22/second-crew-member-of-first-all-civilian-spacex-mission-revealed/

David Baga is going to be getting a new paycheck, which is fitting all things considered.

Even, an “on-demand pay” startup that ‘evens’ out paychecks for workers to give them financial stability and flexibility, will announce later this morning that Baga is joining the company as its new CEO effective March 1, replacing co-founder and current CEO Jon Schlossberg. Schlossberg will remain full-time at the company as executive chairman.

Baga was most recently at Lightspeed Venture Partners, the prominent VC firm which he joined in late 2019 as chief operating officer. Prior to Lightspeed, Baga was chief business officer at Lyft and chief revenue officer at RocketLawyer.

Even was founded in 2014 by Schlossberg and a coterie of other co-founders focused on a mission of disrupting the payday loan industry with better tools for workers who increasingly live paycheck-to-paycheck. Workers who get dropped from a shift, for instance, often have to scramble to meet their upcoming financial obligations, forcing them to take usurious payday loans. Even’s product was designed to give workers better visibility and more control over their paycheck, offering tools like Instapay that offers an advance on their already earned wages. Notably, Even works on a subscription model that is designed to align its incentives with its worker-users to avoid the predatory practices that plague the industry.

I last covered the company in 2018 when it raised a $40 million Series B from Keith Rabois, who was then at Khosla Ventures. Even has had significant traction, reaching 650,000 members today according to the company, and most notably, it has an extensive partnership with Walmart, which just this week announced it was raising wages for 425,000 of its in-store associates, or roughly a third of its workforce. Even said that 53% of its members use the product daily.

Schlossberg says that while the company has had significant success in building out a high-quality product, it needs to pivot to a greater focus on revenue growth. “I am a very product-minded CEO and what we needed in the zero-to-one phase,” he said, referencing the concept of reaching product-market fit. But, “I am not an enterprise-growth CEO. This opportunity and problem deserves someone who can massively increase the probability of making [Even] as ubiquitous as 401Ks.”

He said that the company began searching for a COO to add enterprise sales experience to the executive team, but came up empty-handed. “So we offered the top job to get better candidates, and it did and we found David,” he said.

For Baga, the Even story fits in with his own background. I “grew up around a lot of blue-collar, first-generation Canadians — I can relate to Even in a lot of [ways],” he said. He migrated down to the Valley during the dot-com bubble, taking on a variety of sales jobs at companies like Oracle. His first startup experience was at RocketLawyer when it was just 20 people. “RocketLawyer was about making legal services affordable to all Americans,” a mission that resonated with Baga.

From there, he said he eventually linked up with Logan Green and John Zimmer in 2012 when they were still operating Zimride, and would eventually join the rebranded company Lyft in 2015 when it was “thinking about a B2B version with large businesses.” He worked on enterprise and urban partnerships as well as Lyft Health, a rideshare product designed for non-emergency medical transportation.

Baga says that he wanted to stay at smaller orgs, and so as Lyft went public and grew to gargantuan size, he wanted to reset to a smaller company. He eventually landed at Lightspeed as the firm’s COO.

Baga demurred during our call to describe his time at Lightspeed or his reasoning for departing after a year and a half. Notably, Even is not a Lightspeed portfolio company. Instead, he connected with Schlossberg as Even was accelerating its CEO search and found that there was “strong values alignment” and that “they are addressing real pain points … but with a fair business model.”

In an email later, Baga stated that “It has been a privilege to work with Lightspeed Ventures and I will always be grateful for the opportunity to be a part of such a fantastic organization. At Lightspeed, I had a front row seat to entrepreneurs sharing their vision to change the world. They inspired me to heed the call to build again.”

Taking the reins on March 1, Baga said that his top priorities are to “help the team to get to know me, to understand the customers and our prospects, and to understand the product roadmap and strategy.” Schlossberg said that Even already has “a roster of pretty marquee referenceable customers across verticals of employment” and that “now is the time to scale it.” As Baga transitions into the role, Schlossberg said that the company is likely to raise a Series C round “sometime this year.”

Precarity isn’t going away in America anytime soon, yet as the last year has shown, there are tools that can help more workers find resilience in the labor they do. Even’s hope is that a well-built machine to improve pay can be rapidly expanded to make a difference in this economy.

Updated February 22, 2021 to make clear that Instapay provides access to already-earned wages, not a pay advance on future earnings.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/22/lightspeeds-coo-david-baga-leaving-to-join-pay-advance-startup-even-as-ceo/