1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tea Hea Nahm, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Storm Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What trends are you seeing in SaaS companies finding growth strategies? What are the primary customer acquisition channels that are producing really well?

Tea Hea Nahm: Whether you’re using product-led, outbound, or inbound, we just want to have one that we feel is really going to work for them.

Sramana Mitra: Are you seeing any of them coming up repeatedly? At one point, Google search was a big one. Now Google search has become very expensive. I’m hearing less of the Google search growth. I do hear a lot of inbound content marketing and capturing organic traffic.

Tea Hea Nahm: What we’ve been working with our companies on is a methodology in terms of how to unlock growth and a framework that works, which is how you go from paddling to surfing. In paddling, you burn a lot of energy. When you surf, you feel that momentum and you can push. We see a lot of founder-led growth where founders are selling. We’re looking for ways to go from that to some sort of simple and repeatable go-to-market motion. It could be leveraging search. It could be content marketing.

The challenge is how you come to this simple and repeatable playbook that works. Going back to the surfing metaphor, you have to read the wave in order to surf. The wave is the customer. A go-to-market where you lead with a specific strategy is going to be a struggle because the better way of looking at it is, let’s look at our customers as the wave, understand what they want, and we deliver that. That allows us to catch the wave.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of writing checks, this process that you’re talking about involves a lot of experimentation. Founder-led growth is one thing. Finding that scalable path takes a lot of experimentation before entrepreneurs find that go-to-market scalability. Do you expect that exercise of experimentation to be finished before people come to you for funding?

Tea Hea Nahm: No. We feel like we’re very good at that experimentation. We invest primarily in companies that we believe have product-market fit but have not unlocked growth yet. Once you unlock growth, you’re this hot person at the party and everyone wants you.

Sramana Mitra: What is a VC’s role in this experimentation? You say you’re very good at helping your portfolio companies unlock growth. Help me understand what form does that take. In my experience, you have to go run all these campaigns to figure out which one is sticking. It’s a lot of weed work that VCs don’t tend to get involved in.

Tea Hea Nahm: First of all, we’re highly motivated because if they unlock growth, we tend to make money. If they don’t, we tend to lose money. One fund’s at 11x and one fund’s at 6x. We’re highly motivated to help companies unlock growth. We don’t get paid consulting fees. We only make money if the stock price goes up. We’re highly motivated to help companies unlock growth.

At the same time, we don’t want to be the SEM expert or the marketing automation expert. There are so many things that need to get done. We have consultants and others that we can suggest to the companies.

We’re helping this founder CEO go from founder-led growth to this simple and repeatable go-to-market process. We talk to them about this framework. We share the methodology with the CEO and the team. When you experiment, the most important thing is to have the right dashboard to analyze your experiments to know if you’re going in the right direction or not. Then we let them execute and advise them.

We introduce them to the right specialist. They may need a product-led growth specialist or they may need an SEM specialist. We allow the founder and CEO to understand the big picture, come up with the strategy, and they execute it together.

Sramana Mitra: What is your favorite vertical SaaS that you’ve invested in?

Tea Hea Nahm: Tekion. It’s an auto CRM company. We invested when it was pre-revenue. The founder is a brilliant guy. He was the CIO of Tesla. The company is doing amazingly well. It’s going to revolutionize auto sales.

Sramana Mitra: This is Silicon Valley-based?

Tea Hea Nahm: Silicon Valley and India-based.

Sramana Mitra: Is this a founder that you knew before?

Tea Hea Nahm: They came to us. A person on our team knew the founder well.

Sramana Mitra: The reason you got to do that deal is that the founder knew somebody on your team.

Tea Hea Nahm: When we invested, they had no revenue or product.

Sramana Mitra: It was a founder investment.

Tea Hea Nahm: Right. My biggest loss to date was in a company that was trying to do an auto CRM many years ago.

Sramana Mitra: It was a great conversation. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tea Hea Nahm, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Storm Ventures
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