1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Basically, the company can access each enterprise on their different levels of vulnerability and then present that as an opening part of the sales cycle.

Ken Elefant: They have invented this space called Attack Servers Management. They could go into an enterprise and quickly bring up an analysis that shows the vulnerabilities.

What we try to do at Sorenson Ventures is to open up doors at customers and partners. The company did a great job. They closed several new customers. We brought in Lightspeed for Series A and then Excel for Series B. Now, we are in serious expansion mode. 

Sramana Mitra: You may have read this article that I have written recently on SaaS. We are seeing a lot of activities and heard a lot of people who have built SaaS companies. This is true especially with the data domain, analytics domain, and AI domain.

People have built stacks for technology and have gone after particular problems in different sectors but many of them are looking at a SaaS to do a broader play. It’s like the Salesforce playbook with CRM as the app and then opening up the platform to developers. I would like to hear what you are seeing in your portfolio and your deal flow on this trend. 

Ken Elefant: We have a thesis as well in this space. What we find is that enterprises like to buy products that solve a particular problem. I’ll give you an example. We are investors in a company called Support Logic. What they do is leverage machine learning and AI to make sense of all the information that is coming into the customer support group.

It sounds easy, but it is extremely hard to do. What is important to enterprises is understanding what the big problem customers are. This is targeted at B2B companies. If you can see those escalations before they erupt, you can solve churn problems immensely.

What we saw was that all the information that was coming in had other valuable information associated with it. You also get information on the features in a product that isn’t working well. That can go to your engineering group to fix but it also brings in ideas in terms of what the product should be doing from the support perspective.

It also helps the sales group understand where to upsell customers. There are a lot of potential areas of growth if you start with the right initial wedge. 

Sramana Mitra: Where is the product you are talking about built on? What is the data stack? Where is the innovation? How does it play with the ecosystem? 

Ken Elefant: Most companies have a CRM system whether it’s Salesforce or Zendesk where the support engineers are logging the information. Support Logic integrates with each one of those systems and takes signals from other systems as well. The magic is making sense of that data.

If you have a customer that has a problem in terms of how their product is interacting with their oracle database, that is an issue that should be funneled to the support engineer who is best equipped to handle that problem. You shouldn’t need to be passed to four places and have that take a week to solve as an example. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021
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