1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Warren Weiss, Managing Partner at WestWave Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: All these areas that we are talking about are talent war scenarios. They are highly-specialized areas. There’s not an abundance of people who have great expertise. That’s another driver for these acquisition scenarios. The larger companies are also trying to hire talent. One of the ways they hire talent is by acquiring smaller companies. That also creates a conducive environment for these smaller exits. 

Warren Weiss: The whole workforce has been massively disrupted by the pandemic. It’s brought to light new issues about how people want to work and where they can work from. The distributed nature in which you engage, hire, onboard, and train has become much more strategic. We have made a couple of investments in the HR-related space.

While sometimes it’s difficult to sell because HR executives have a lot of business problems but not a lot of power. But they’re being more and more empowered to keep these talented workers in the company. The amount of activity at the board to ensure that we’re engaged with employees in the most efficient way is more than I have ever seen before.

Sramana Mitra: Agreed. I’m hearing it from everybody. This talent war is just insane. There’re just so many companies out there. Everybody needs a finite pool of talent. The output of new sufficiently-trained people is not at that level. 

Warren Weiss: The workforce of the future has to be thought about in terms of humans and robots. We just funded an insurance company that just does insurance on robots and drones. There are so many of them being used. There’s a great fear among factory workers that robots will replace them completely. Exactly the opposite is happening. They’re allowed to do the mundane tasks, but it’s hard to hire and keep people for where they get hurt all the time. Everyone’s trying to hire people. The workforce of the future has to consider those other options. 

Sramana Mitra: Facilitating all that, there are startup opportunities that are growing. The other one that I think you would resonate with is what we experienced with Fullcast.io. The team came out of Salesforce’s sales ops organization. They were very knowledgeable about sales ops. That’s where they built their whole system around. It was not AI. It was not machine learning. It was really deep domain knowledge in managing sales operations.

This team exists in many other functional areas and many other vertical domains where there is domain knowledge that can be automated. I imagine you are seeing this in many other industry sectors.

Warren Weiss: We are. The Fullcast team is quite interesting. They understand the complexities of multi-channel and global sales planning and territory management. It’s amazing how long it takes a large company to reassign to new territories. The second piece I would say is that sales operations and marketing operations are tied in with this area that’s growing fast called revenue operations because they’re integral to understand both the revenue opportunity and the cost to service that revenue.

SaaS metrics are so focused on trying to understand the CAC ratios and what it really takes to find, deliver, and sell to a customer. Those areas, you would think would have enough automation by now, are just large white spaces.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Warren Weiss, Managing Partner at WestWave Capital
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