1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Warren Weiss, Managing Partner at WestWave Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That was surprising to me when we started working on Fullcast. That tells me that there are many industry segments. Fullcast.io is selling to cutting-edge SaaS companies and finding white spaces. If you look at manufacturing and logistics and other industry segments that are not as advanced, there are a ton of workflow white spaces. Eventually, you introduce AI. There is just bread-and-butter workflow automation still wide open. 

Warren Weiss: It’s amazing. The more transparent the data on who’s doing what in your company and how customers buy, there’re more opportunities to understand both business processes to make things more efficient. 

Sramana Mitra: Any thoughts on opportunities that you have identified out there that you would look for a company to invest in?

Warren Weiss: There is this new concept known as data stitching or application stitching. We funded a company called Loops. They’re putting together data and application business processes to get new insights. For example, combining product management and engineering data with real customer service data and intersecting those two so you can understand what it is that the customers are asking for and what the responses have been. A lot of these applications reside in the cloud now.

There’s a whole new set of new ways to integrate data between applications in real-time as well as create next-generation analytics using AI. The whole data warehousing business is going to go through a transformation. With the kind of integration that’s available and the kind of ease of use and amount of data you can act on, everything is speeding up.

You can no longer sit around and argue about whose data is right before you make a decision. You really need to get accurate information and be fully transparent behind it. The whole analytics space is something we’re very excited about. These next generation SaaS applications where you can use multiple sets of information coming from many different transactional data sources is another place that’s upper exciting.

The whole shift left movement in security to be able to build an application from scratch using security properly is a big growth area as well. Of course, we’ve been waiting for what used to be industrial internet. The whole IoT connectivity space is starting to rapidly take off. It’s a very exciting space.

Companies used to think digital transformation in 10 to 20 year slots. If you don’t do a full digital transformation and become a digital-native company, you’re going to be out of business. COVID actually showed all the flaws of these companies that could have engaged digitally. That’s helping the startup world. You’ve got to innovate very fast now.

Sramana Mitra: The other great thing that has happened for startups selling to enterprises is that there are much bigger deals that are closing with no in-person interaction. With your background, you must appreciate that greatly.

Warren Weiss: We ask our Head of Sales, Chief Revenue Officer, and our marketing CMOs to document how the marketing and sales process has changed and to not go back just because we can see people in person. A lot of customers are enjoying that. They’re enjoying the fact that they can engage digitally. The SaaS applications need to be incredibly responsive to remote marketing and customer service. Many of the original Gen one SaaS are 20 years old now. There are new ways to build these applications that are much more engaging with much more rapid development cycles. 

Sramana Mitra: Great conversation. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Warren Weiss, Managing Partner at WestWave Capital
1 2 3 4 5